Studio Monitor: Emerald Turns To Ad Vet Romeo For Marketing Muscle

THE EMERALD Entertainment Group, Nashville's leading recording and mastering studio complex, has just appointed Joe Romeo as the company's CEO, with former CEO Dale Moore stepping into the position of chairman of the board.
Romeo, who brings an extensive background in advertising to his position, will focus on sales and marketing of the Emerald properties, which include Emerald Sound Studios, Masterfonics Mastering, Emerald Sponsorship Division, the Breen Agency, Digital Audio Post, Emerald Broadcast, the Workstation, and the Parlor.
Moore says, "Joe is a perfect addition to Emerald. He brings great corporate contacts and a vast background in sales and marketing. Joe will also head up our corporate sponsorship division, which will work with artists, their management, and their labels to secure corporate dollars for endorsements, tours, and album projects. This should be a great service to our clients, helping them create income to offset rising touring costs and album production costs."
As chairman, Moore will continue to focus on Emerald's expansion, according to a statement from the studio complex.
Romeo says, "When I met Dale and realized that we had the exact same vision for Emerald, I was more than interested, I was excited. I knew we would be a powerful team with mutual objectives . . . Having a chairman with that vision was the paramount reason that I joined Emerald."
Romeo's credits include advertising campaigns for Levi's, Gatorade, and Skittles. In addition, he wrote music for an Energizer Bunny campaign, won a Clio Award for a Wheaties campaign, and was named adman of the year by Advertising Age magazine.
Romeo's appointment suggests that the already cutthroat recording studio industry-and the music industry as a whole-may be entering a new era of competition in which word-of-mouth may no longer suffice as a marketing currency.
With a consolidating pool of record labels cutting back their budgets, and sophisticated home studios accounting for a growing slice of the recording pie, top-flight studios find themselves forced to spend vast sums of money on consoles, recorders, processors, microphones, and acoustics, without being able to raise rates above 20-year-old levels.
It's a tough business in which only the savviest players thrive. Given Emerald's latest move, it appears that the Nashville institution is taking active steps to prepare itself for the future.
While Emerald's corporate offices have been buzzing with Romeo's arrival, the studios have kept doing what they do best: hosting recording projects by such nationally and internationally renowned artists as Patty Loveless, Kenny Rogers, Neal McCoy, and Pam Tillis.
IN THIS predominantly digital era, the recently developed analog 1-inch, 2-track format is hardly an industry standard. However, those who have experienced it-notably Bob Ludwig and Paul Stubblebine-swear by its sound.
The latest convert to the "wide track" format is Los Angeles-based mastering engineer Joe Gastwirt of Oceanview Digital Mastering, who used the medium to master the debut release by Seattle band Treason.
Gastwirt rented a converted Ampex ATR-102 from L.A. rental specialist Design FX and used Quantegy GP-9 tape for the project. He says, "The 1-inch, 2-track format on the Ampex machine would have been a challenge for any other analog tape, but it was a breeze for GP-9."
THE HIT FACTORY opened its doors to the industry on a gorgeous spring night in order to show off its latest acquisition: a Solid State Logic (SSL) Axiom-MT digital multitrack console in Studio 4 (Studio Monitor, Billboard, April 8).
Any visit to the historic New York facility is a thrill, if for no other reason than to gape in disbelief at the hundreds of gold and platinum awards that line its walls. (I am particularly pleased that one of my favorite albums of all time, Stevie Wonder's "Songs In The Key Of Life," gets its own wall for its role in helping establish the Hit Factory.)
Hosted by SSL and the Hit Factory, the reception was attended by Hit Factory VP Troy Germano; Solid State Logic U.S. president Rick Plushner; engineers Jonathan Appel, Ron Banks, Jimmy Douglas, Rich Tozzoli, Gerald Newman, and Jeffrey Lesser; and Electric Lady manager Mary Campbell.