Business
The Guru
By Chris Cannon published Nov 1, 2008
On first encounter, Terry McBride comes across like a car salesman who pushes the rust-proof undercoating, or a cult leader who just can’t believe it when people find his Kool-Aid too sweet. “I know you’re all here physically, but I also know you’re not here mentally,” he tells an audience of 60. “I’m going to use a bit of a trick to bring you mentally withinside the room.” I brace myself, thankful I left my chequebook at home.
It’s a sunny Wednesday in May, and McBride—founder of Nettwerk Music Group and manager of an artist roster that includes Sarah McLachlan, Avril Lavigne, and the Barenaked Ladies—is out to dazzle his audience. At Nett-werk’s live venue and retail space near Granville Island, he hovers over a slide show, unresplendent in striped shirt and blue jeans, sandals with socks, a military-style haircut, and wrists wrapped in strings of beads.
“ Is this picture possible?” he asks as he clicks on the first slide, a graphic similar to M.C. Escher’s staircase drawings. He takes a vote. Several hands go up in the affirmative, one in the negative. They are all correct, according to McBride, who smiles like he just blew everyone’s mind.
“ These dots don’t exist,” he says, clicking on the next slide, which may or may be a picture of dots. “But they exist in your mind because you’re making them there.” The intro goes on for 20 minutes, each slide introduced with such verbal hypnotica as “Not one single one is not exactly straight” and “How many feet does this elephant have?” When the illusion of Jesus appears in a Rorschach print, I prepare for a moral intervention and promises of eternal virgins.
McBride is demonstrating the subjectivity of perspective and the illusory nature of things we take for granted—the underpinning of his philosophy of the music business. “It’s all about perception,” he claims, “and how the different parts of the business see other parts of the business. And how they see it is how they run it.” His message is actually straightforward: the music business is stuck in a century-old paradigm in which different parties own different slices of the pie—record labels own masters; publishing houses own publishing rights; and artists, if they’re lucky, own their image. But McBride believes technology has so altered our behaviour patterns that we must rethink everything we know about the artist/fan relationship. “I’m gonna talk about the past, the current, and what I think is the future,” he says. “And what I think is the future is what I think today. Chances are, I’ll think differently tomorrow.”
Though an extended conversation with McBride is likely to give grammarians a headache, it’s also likely to be inspiring and memorable. It’s not as if he can’t be articulate and even downright brilliant at times—he’s well-educated and especially clever—but his brain seems to operate faster than his mouth can manage the information. He likes to use odd words and phrases such as “withinside” and “all of the suddenly”; his “specific” sounds like “pacific”; and when he talks about the future, he clearly has no regard for temporal physics. But how can one not be enthralled by a man who broaches a topic with the sentence, “Music for me is not a pair of pants”?
