During the 1990s, Michael “Goldie” Goldstone was the music exec whom everyone wanted to be. He began working at Chrysalis Records as a teenager, gradually found his way into A&R and his first signing — Texas guitar ace-turned-heartthrob Charlie Sexton — reached No. 15 on the Billboard 200 in 1986. But he soon immersed himself in the late-’80s alt-rock scene and signed the ill-fated Seattle quintet Mother Love Bone — whose singer, Andrew Wood, died of a heroin overdose in 1990, weeks before the release of the band’s debut. Yet that group morphed into Pearl Jam (which has sold 32.5 million albums in the United States, according to Nielsen Music), and during the next 18 years — at Epic, DreamWorks and Sire — Goldstone signed Rage Against the Machine (11.7 million copies), Buckcherry (3 million), Regina Spektor (1.5 million) and Tegan & Sara (963,000), and A&R’d the 1992 Singles soundtrack (1.7 million).
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But the married father of two (he declines to give his age) grew tired of the major-label game and in 2008 started Mom + Pop with Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch of Q Prime Management; Goldstone and co-president Thaddeus Rudd now own the company. The New York-based label is at 50-plus releases and 10 employees, and in December scored its first-ever Grammy nod when Australian indie darling Courtney Barnett was nominated for best new artist. And with new music on the way from Lucius, Polica, Bayonne and electronic artist Flume, 2016 is shaping up to be the label’s biggest year to date.
You picked just about the worst year to start a record company: 2008. What made you want to do that to yourself?
(Laughs.) It’s funny — maybe a year after we started, [Columbia Records chairman/CEO] Rob Stringer said, “What an amazing time to start a label; what a horrible time to start a label.” A lot of it was driven by scale. I remember somebody at Warners saying, “We don’t really consider Tegan & Sara selling 200,000 records a success.” Shortly thereafter, [indie Epitaph Records founder] Brett Gurewitz playfully said, “Those people can’t be happy with the numbers that you’re selling, but I’d be thrilled.” I just wanted to be in a situation that gave me more control.
How did things change once you went indie?
The first deal I brought in was an artist named Joshua Radin, who had sold “only 90,000 records” on Columbia. I remember feeling a little timid walking into Cliff’s office with this two-page proposal that I’d pretty much written up myself — which I felt was commensurate with the major-label deals I had been doing — thinking I’m going to get thrown out for being so generous. But Cliff pulled out a Sharpie, marking this and marking that, and handed it back to me, saying, “It’s not generous enough to the artist.”
You have been a top A&R guy for so long, what do you think artists like about you?
I’d like to believe that my longevity has been based on a level of transparency and of trying to respect the fact that artists have one career. I learned some valuable lessons in terms of what my value to a record company, especially a big record company, could be: If there’s an imaginary fence and you’re sitting ever so slightly on the artist side of that fence, you’ll be of greater value to the label.
Why is that?
Because then the artists trust that you will protect them, and they believe you when you say, “This or that is the right thing to do.” It’s a nuance that played out with a number of artists earlier in my career. And yes, there would be frustrating moments telling [Epic executives] Dave Glew or Richard Griffiths that “We need to scrap 100,000 CDs because the color is wrong,” or whatever. But that was of great value in terms of the artists’ overall relationship with the company.
A lot of major and bigger indie labels were courting Courtney Barnett. What made her decide on Mom + Pop?
One of the most fulfilling aspects of being able to run your own label is simply that it’s your label. Marathon Artists [in the United States] had signed Courtney worldwide and were seeking a U.S. licensor. It was extremely competitive and, to be frank, we were a little late. But Thaddeus and I spent a couple of days with the Marathon people and, by not having to ask anyone else what we could or couldn’t do, we were able to adjust the proposal in real time.
How big is your A&R department?
Three of us oversee it, but “A&R department” is a little bit of an antiquated term when you’re running a small company — it really doesn’t matter who is bringing in these artists. So whether it’s Thaddeus with Flume or [A&R vice president] Julia [Willinger] with Jagwar Ma and Hinds or Suzanna [Slavin, who Goldstone describes as his “right arm”] with Mutual Benefit, when you’re in a small company, it doesn’t really matter whose acts are making it rain because we’re all going to participate in the success.
You don’t do 360 deals. Do you make enough money from streaming and sales to be sustainable?
I believe it’s more than sustainable. Masters have incredible value, almost like a publishing catalog, and if we continue to find records that people want to sync, stream, download or consume, we’ll continue to run a strong business.
You had early mainstream success with Charlie Sexton, but your career afterward was completely different. What changed?
I’d had a meeting with Perry Farrell when I was looking to sign Jane’s Addiction. That might have been the first time I ever sat down with somebody who had such a vision of how the relationship between labels and artists could be in terms of creative control, artwork, how to make records and deliver them. It was completely antithetical to the way I had approached the job before, and that prepared me for the meetings I had with Mother Love Bone and later Pearl Jam and Rage Against the Machine — artists who wanted to change the paradigm of the relationship with the label. It changed everything for me.
Mother Love Bone was signed to PolyGram. Why didn’t the label pick up the option for Pearl Jam?
There was no Pearl Jam yet. The band really wanted a fresh start and [PolyGram] were really gracious about it. So we all dusted ourselves off and started over, and … you’ve got to believe there’s some kind of higher force when the first singer that they stumbled onto was some security guard in San Diego named Eddie Vedder.