INTO THE MULTI-ETHNIC, MULTI-MEDIA FUTURE

By Victor Cruz-Lugo

Emilio Estefan and Sean “Diddy” Combs are looking far ahead with the launch of their new record label.

hen Bad Boy Latino, the new record label created by music moguls Emilio Estefan and Sean “Diddy” Combs, launched their first artist Sept. 8, the most innovative aspect of the event had little to do with the music the label proffered.
Folks attending the event had seen it before: another formidably talented, potentially mega crossover star, groomed by Estefan. After Estefan’s wife Gloria, there was Ricky Martin, Jon Secada, J-Lo and Shakira. Now Emilio was putting his production muscle and brand cache behind ChristianDaniel, a 22-year-old Puerto Rican with drop dead good looks, a finely tuned alto voice, and a temperament best suited for one thing: international pop stardom.
What they hadn’t seen before, however, was such a high-profile atypically cross-ethnic business partnership, a partnership keenly focused on using the latest technology to tap emerging markets. Estefan, a Cuban American, with Diddy, an African American, as accomplice, was now operating outside of music mega-company Sony, (now Sony/BMG)—a firm with which Estefan had shared many successes, but whose very size now threatened the intimacy of his relationships with his artists.
“It’s about timing,” says Estefan, who at the time doubted his ability to continue functioning the way he likes under the Sony/BMG merger. “At that time I got a call from Diddy.”
Estefan was approached by Diddy about forming a new label, an offshoot of Diddy’s Bad Boy Records. Estefan liked the idea of teaming up on Bad Boy Latino, and agreed. “With the merger [of Sony with BMG], I knew I was going to lose the attention of the artist,” he says.
While politicians have spoken for years of the need for blacks and Latinos to come together, here were two high performing entrepreneurs who were actually doing it.
Sean “Diddy” Combs is a product of Harlem who began as a rapper and grew into a producer, clothing designer and philanthropist. He had expressed a desire to get into the Latin music market more than a year earlier, but the partnership with Emilio Estefan was key.
“The Latino market in the U.S. is such a beautiful, diverse, and powerful market and I am blessed to have a partner like Emilio,” Diddy said in a statement. “He is an amazing example of how creativity, combined with hard work and a belief in one’s self, can spark an entire cultural movement.”
The new record label’s sponsorship alliance with Sprint reveals Estefan and Diddy’s forward thinking strategy. Sprint was the first phone firm to make live streaming video available via cell phone, and the first company to make Hispanic-orientated content available for cell phone users, says director of multicultural marketing Isaac Mizrahi.
Estefan says he and Diddy can afford to forge ahead with the artist and label launch, despite treacherous times in the recording industry, precisely because of the partnership with Sprint, which is footing an undisclosed portion of the bill for the ChristianDaniel record launch and promotion.
For years, recording industry sales have flagged with the advent of file-sharing technologies and Internet sites like Limewire and Kazaa, which allow people to download copyrighted material, sidestepping distributors and retail outlets. Since 2000, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents major record labels, has been filing lawsuits for illegal replication of copyrighted songs against Napster, other file-sharing Internet websites, and sometimes even the end users. Napster argued that because they don’t actually provide the copyrighted material, just the servers that make the file-sharing of high-quality digital recordings available, they weren’t liable. But U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel disagreed, paving the way for a new era wherein record companies are gaining the upper hand over the file-sharing websites.
“The only way to recoup our losses and promote new artists is to be able to use the new technology, the Internet and cell phones, to our benefit,” Estefan says. “We ignored technology and it came back and bit us. That’s why we’re making deals with companies like Sprint now.”
Sprint is providing sponsorship for the promotion of the self-titled ChristianDaniel CD. In its bid to gain a solid foothold on the Hispanic market, Sprint has also accepted a similar role in helping promote the tour of Mexican rockers Maná. (The particulars of the deal, says Mizrahi, is proprietary information). And they have joined Bad Boy Latino in an innovative marketing strategy by offering exclusive content, including a ChristianDaniel video, through their Sprint Power Vision Network.
Estefan envisions a fascinating multi-media world in the future, in which record companies have caught up with the demands of technology and have retaken control of their copyrighted material. In that world, the coveted 18-34 Hispanic demographic will be downloading content, at a price, from their cell phones or computers, while the recording industry continues to keep a close eye on future technological advances.