New Ifpi Deal Lets Berman Finish What He Started

Unfinished business is cited as the reason Jay Berman will remain the record industry's global spokesman. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) chairman/CEO has agreed to remain in the top post until the end of 2005.

Berman tells Billboard that despite his desire to return to the U.S., he wants to remain in the job he has now held for four years to finish the task he initially set out to do. "My children are in the States and I do want to go back to the States, but I don't think that I've finished the job I set out to do," he says. "There has been a major changeover in the [IFPI] staff, and it took me longer to get to the point where all the right pieces were in place, but they're now in place and it's operating."

Berman became the IFPI's first full-time chairman in 1998 and immediately set about overhauling the organization—a feat he believes is the greatest of his tenure. He says, "[The IFPI's] mission, the way it performs, the number of things it does—all of those would not be recognizable if you went back to when I first joined the organization."

Looking ahead, Berman wants to make the IFPI more efficient. "We are looking to do more with less," Berman comments. "We have to reflect the business that our companies are in, and that is a very difficult business environment at the moment."

Asked if he believes his members view the IFPI as a necessary evil, Berman retorts: "Maybe in some respects, but I'd like to think that given all the things that have been achieved, there is also a much more positive aspect to it. I don't believe any one company on a global basis can do the same things that we do for all the companies."

One such achievement is the IFPI's anti-piracy unit. "The anti-piracy unit was designed to deal with the fact that piracy has changed and continues to change," Berman notes. "The [organized-crime] elements involved in piracy are much more dangerous, and that's something that our guys have to confront and deal with."

And Berman warns that the music industry will probably always need the anti-piracy unit. "I don't think we'd ever be able to eliminate the anti-piracy unit. There is too much money involved in music piracy to be able to say it will be solved."

Other achievements include the reopening of the IFPI's Eastern European operations and the integration of Latin America into the IFPI. The latter gave rise to one of Berman's least valuable but most satisfying desk ornaments. He says, "I spent an enormous amount of time and political capital trying to achieve [the creation of] a collecting society in Mexico, and I have on my desk the first peso that was collected as a result of that."

Another significant part of his new contract will be finding and training his replacement. "In the not-too-distant future, one of the things I've been tasked with is to try to find a successor," he says. "I want to [be remembered] here [the way] [Recording Industry Assn. of America] member companies would remember me there: The day that I walked out of the door, they could have been just as confident [about my successor]."