Les Bider grew up in Chicago with aspirations of a Broadway career. After graduating from University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton Business School, he combined his love of songs and accounting acumen to land at Warner Bros. Music. During his stint there, he helped turn the company into the world's most powerful publishing concern through the merger with Chappell and Intersong Music Group ten years ago. Les has been CEO of Warner/Chappell Music since then, adding the title of Chairman a year later. In that time, the company's influence both domestically and globally has continued to grow and revenues have seen a ten-fold increase.

Bider is currently basking in the glow of a hot year in 96 with Donna Lewis, Jewel and the Wallflowers, all of which are expected to stay strong through 97. Add a "Batman and Robin" soundtrack to the mix, and a revitalized catalogue department in this, the centennial year of Ira Gershwin, and no wonder Les is singing, "Nice Work If You Can Get It," "S'Wonderful" and "Summertime" all year round while HITS' own song-plugger John Sutton-"Place" Smith struggles to stay in tune.

What changes have taken place at Warner/Chappell over the last year?
As the record business has not been growing at the kind of rate that it had before, we've been more cautious about the deals we're doing. When the opportunity arises to get something that we feel has the capability of selling around the world and provide different sources of revenue for us as publishers -- where there are mechanical royalties, but a high degree of performance royalties as well -- then we'll get into a bidding war.

When you listen to the Wallflowers album, you say, I'll get into a bidding war over this any day. This is the real deal. Jewel is the real deal. Shawn Colvin's the real deal. Fortunately, with the Wallflowers, we won the bidding war. The person who wins usually has paid too much, so the rest of the industry suffers because the attorneys involved tend to set the standard just a little bit higher for the next deal... meaning larger advances, shorter terms, thinner splits. I've been complaining about the larger advances for years and I think we've finally hit the limit because we can't give any thinner splits. We love music, but it is the music business.

But can you really afford not to bid for something like the Wallflowers?
Certainly we can always afford not to go for an act, because when you're the size of the major music publishers, no one act has a material impact on the bottom line. We're not in the business of putting ourselves out of business. Our problem as an industry is that when we find an act early on, that doesn't necessarily mean we can sign them to a publishing deal.

When Judy Stakee in our creative staff was onto Jewel 18 months before she had a hit, we still couldn't close the publishing because the lawyer saw the excitement in the rest of the industry and realized that all he had to do was wait a while and he could make a better deal. We are very happy with our deal with Jewel. If you take those two examples, Jewel and the Wallflowers, you're talking about albums that are going to be gigantic albums for the balance of 1997 and into 1998; they both have a lot of singles left. We just had a new single released by Jewel from the "Batman and Robin" soundtrack, a remix of a song on her current album.

Do these two artists suggest a trend to more adult, literate songwriters?
I think we've experienced enough of the one-hit wonders. When you're talking about the kind of artist that generates a bidding contest, you want someone that is four singles deep in an album, because you're going to need that to recoup.

It's no different today than in the 20s or 30s, when you wanted to sign a writer who was going to have a career as a writer. Whether you are signing George Gershwin or Jewel, it's the same issue. You'd want to sign Cole Porter just like you'd want to sign Jakob Dylan, because these are people who write above and beyond what the norm is today. These are the future superstars as evidenced by the sales levels that they're achieving and building steadily. We're not talking about something that's been a runaway hit. Jewel didn't hit the Top 10 until her 52nd week on the charts, and the Wallflowers took a long time to build. It's the same kind of thing we experienced with Sheryl Crow.

How has your relationship changed in working with a particular label in building an artist?
There's more of a strong working relationship between the music publishers and the record companies today than we have had in the last 20 years that I've been in the business. A good example of that would be on Donna Lewis, where Kenny MacPherson worked closely with Andrea Ganis on "I Love You Always Forever." That became a giant single, with the most spins of any song in the last ten years.

What has and hasn't changed in terms of maintaining market share?
I don't think that our business has a fair way of calculating market share among music publishers. Actually, I'm rather notorious in the UK for being anti-market share. I changed management in the UK in order to reduce our market share, but increase our profits, and we've been very successful at that. It surprised people, because we at Warner/Chappell had spent so many years being #1 in the UK. It seemed like we were taking a U-turn. What really happened was that I had looked at the financial performance in the UK and saw that in relation to market share, we weren't getting enough for the kind of money we were spending. It didn't make sense, so we've reversed that trend. And it's worked because we're far more profitable now.

How involved are you in the projects on a day-to-day basis?
The communications up and back are very open. With E-mail and faxes, there's an incredible amount of information you can toss around a company without getting stuck on people's desks. We communicate extremely well within Warner/Chappell because we don't have the middle level that certainly Chappell had years ago, and that some of the record companies have decided they're going to eliminate, as we just saw with EMI. The move they've made to streamline their operations, and reporting and communications, is somewhat similar to the way we've looked at it here. We flattened out our organization at Warner/Chappell back in 1987 and I attribute a lot of our success to that. The ability to give people autonomy, and let them do their thing, because they're eminently qualified to do it, is dependent on hiring qualified people. We have qualified people. It doesn't mean we don't have mid-management; we don't have superfluous management.

Aside from the Wallflowers and Jewel, who have been the other big recent success stories?
Sammy Hagar's new album is his highest-charting record as a solo artist. "Little White Lies" is a #1 rock track. Shawn Colvin looks like she's on the verge of becoming a major star. It's exciting to have your kids tell you that they were listening to "Bitch" on the radio, a Meredith Brooks/Shelly Piken song. I think we'll have a lot of success this year with Sugar Ray. We're getting the same feedback from Andrea Ganis and Val Azzoli at Atlantic as we got on Donna Lewis. I'm looking at a great record coming from Radiohead; the Charlatan's new record opened at #1 in the UK; Republica is doing really well; there's Robert Miles, Abra Moore.

You have such a huge catalogue. What are some of the most valuable jewels in the vault?
The biggest obviously is always George and Ira Gershwin. And now that we're in the Gershwin centennial, starting now with Ira and in a year-and-a-half with George, there will be a number of Gershwin-oriented projects coming out. Their compositions as a collective body of work clearly earn more than anything else we've got. Gershwin, Cole Porter are consistent money-makers... A song like "As Time Goes By" is constantly licensed, as are a vast number of standards, whether it's Sammy Cahn, Cy Coleman, Lerner and Loewe, Jimmy Van Heusen, Johnny Mercer.

You were talking about a new system of marketing your back catalogue.
We've identified our 50 largest catalogues and matched them with product managers. We're doing them in two blocks of 25 at a time, because we want to be able to do it correctly. In renewing the Led Zeppelin agreement, we realized that we didn't allocate product managers to back catalogue. We now know that we can better exploit their repertoire if we have a better relationship with them, and we would not lose back repertoire.

It is in our best interest to exploit our back catalogue, because we have better splits and we usually have longer retentions, which results in more money to us. We had a tremendous first and now second quarter, in synchronization licensing, which has made up for the stagnation in record mechanicals. Record mechanicals are flat, because record sales are flat. Why are our earnings up? We're getting income from somewhere else. It wasn't a market share issue, it was an exploitation issue. We went out and got more commercials because, frankly, we needed to.

And you're heavily involved in film soundtrack and TV.
Obviously, we have a huge "Batman and Robin" soundtrack out. We had a huge "Space Jam" soundtrack, which was the result of tremendous teamwork between all the Warner music and film entities together. The cooperation is at an all-time high, which is obviously a result of the music group reporting to the same people as the film group. We're all finally in the same ballpark where everybody can play by the same rules and work together as one team. We even finally got invited to the company screenings for the first time.

How early do you get involved in films?
Brad Rosenberg gets involved from day one with the film companies. He gets lots of scripts, he's in on the casting meetings and all the other creative meetings that film studios have, but our issue becomes the clearance and the fee. The argument always is, "We need it in the film, we need it yesterday, and we need it cheap." Instead of "Let's work together like we did in Sleepless in Seattle' or When Harry Met Sally,' where the songs worked in the films and you sold a lot of records, because you had the time to put together the right recording in the right packaging for the right film."

How are you looking to meet new technologies, such as the Internet?
All of us are involved in the problem of licensing, the problem of policing, the problem of where this is headed. The bottom line is nobody knows how to deal with someone uplinking from one territory that has a different royalty rate and structure than where you're downloading from... it creates trade problems. So if you happen to be based in a country which has no copyright laws, no protection, no rate structure, and you conduct commerce over the Internet and you sell in territories that have these structures, where is the exposure? Where is the liability? We've been working hard to get a bill that defines where the liability lies. This is going to have to be resolved in the legal community. We don't want to stop the progress of commerce, but we want to protect our rights. If you can have free access to what we've got, to our assets, then their value is diminished. One of our obligations is to protect the assets with which we're entrusted here.

What other legal issues are of prime concern to the publishing industry right now?
We've got a bunch of bills before the Congress. The largest issue currently is the Restaurant Bill, as far as what kind of performance royalties are to be paid in bars, taverns and grills, who want to be exempted. We're also trying to get term extension to have our life of copyright in the US fit that of the EU. They are life plus 60 [years]; we are life plus 50. We need to make then common in order to have a reciprocity.

Despite all the problems, the new technology is only going to afford you new opportunities.
Clearly, this is a wave of the future for music publishers. My fear is not for music publishers, because I don't think we will benefit from it. My fear is for record companies, which are put at risk of having their wonderful distribution systems invaded. The different levels of profits will dry up if you can simply load music into the computer and downlink it onto your home system.

We as an industry need to find ways to attract other buyers. The buying public for the music business is much bigger than whom we reach, because we've gone along with our placid marketing and promotion activities. We fight for space in the record stores instead of trying to bring people into record stores by creating a demand for music.

Let's talk about the international market. What changes for you when you leave US shores to deal with territories around the world?
The hard thing for English-speaking markets to realize is that, when they go into a country, that country's market share of local repertoire exceeds 50%, and the local repertoire doesn't sell anywhere else. You can say, if I get $1 worth of profit in one country or another, it doesn't matter. The difference is, if I can get it from repertoire that can cross borders, then that $1 becomes $2 next year. I can take it and be truly global, because music crosses borders so easily. Then I'd be really happy, because we've got a great deal of foreign repertoire.

In Spain, you had this little band called Los Del Rio, who had a song called "Macarena," which was a hit all over the world. Jackie Chung in Southeast Asia sells 5 million records. The local market is very important, and if you take what you have in France with Angelique Kidjo, or in Italy with Laura Pausini, it adds up.

Where would you like to see Warner/Chappell ten years from now?
I'd love to see the company five times the size with the same number of people, because technology has helped us in ways that we can't even think of today. Between Bill Gates and Andy Grove and all those geniuses north of here, they're going to invent things to make our job easier, and make it easier for kids to create music. You can make music today a whole lot easier than you could ten years ago. Ten years from now, will you need a record company, will you even need a publisher? You'll be making music at home and uplinking it on the Internet and even viewing a performance at home because they've got some kind of video screen. Andy Grove calls it the battle for the eyes. Who's gonna be watching, and where are they gonna watch?

Where would you like to see yourself ten years from now?
Probably here. I won't be an old man ten years from now. I won't be an old man 20 years from now. I love doing what I do. I love being involved with both catalogue artists of music I grew up with and I love hearing new music, because I think everyone who's successful in this business came because they love music. It's about the music.