A New America by Tommy Mottola

Author:Tommy Mottola
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-09-28T15:37:59+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The Latin Explosion

There was this Latin Explosion thing between me and Ricky Martin, and Enrique Iglesias and Marc Anthony. And all of us were kind of making English albums. All of us grew up in the States, speaking English and Spanish—but mostly English. So it was kind of a funny thing that they called it the Latin Explosion. As if all these Latinos came over from a far land. It wasn’t like that. I was here from the day I was born.

—JENNIFER LOPEZ

A monumental opening in the music industry doesn’t come around often. You didn’t have to be the head of a global music corporation to know this: If you want to take full advantage of that opening you’d better be prepared to drive the needle to the edge of the speedometer. This was about to be livin’ la vida loca on steroids.

Ricky Martin had just bashed down a door that meant our company had to work double and triple time to get out new Latino artists with new rhythms and new sounds to a public that suddenly was indeed insatiable for more.

When I was a kid I’d seen how Elvis’ career was launched with a succession of hits. His songs came through the radio one after another. The public didn’t have time to get tired of an Elvis song because it was soon replaced by another hit that you loved and made you want to go back and listen to the ones that came before. We’d used that same approach in launching Mariah’s career in 1990. Before her first album had fully crested, we released a single from her next album so quickly that it seemed to be connected to her first.

The strategy boiled down to this: Hit the public so fast with what it loves that it doesn’t even know it’s getting hit. You need great music to pull it off. And we had it with Ricky Martin and “Livin’ la Vida Loca.” But not only that. When Ricky stamped Latin music on everyone’s mind, he put us in the position to launch several artists into the stratosphere with him.

Now, in case this all sounds like an easy recipe for success, I should just back up for a moment to give you a better sense of what the stakes and the challenges really were. Let me start by addressing some of the changes that had been taking place in the 1990s, particularly in my business, with respect to trends and technology affecting not only Latino artists but everybody in the industry. First of all, vinyl (despite its resurgence years later) had at that point all but gone the way of the dinosaur; CDs, mostly albums, were dominating in units sold. Production costs were skyrocketing, which meant labels had trouble recouping their investment on lesser-known artists, unless, that is, they were promoted in the most visible way possible, right out of the gate.

But a much bigger concern was the avalanche in the works that began innocently enough with

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