RECORD COMPANY
Business And Legal Affairs: Senior Vice President • Vice President (business And Legal Affairs)
JOB OVERVIEW
This office handles business and legal affairs and oversees the daily operation of specifically assigned departments or the entire company. In her capacity as senior vice president of operations, Susan Genco is responsible for the day-to-day legal and business affairs for all the labels under the Capitol Records Group, which includes Capitol, Capitol Nashville, EMI Christian Music Group, EMI Canada, and Blue Note Angel. She is also the senior vice president of operations for Capitol, and oversees sound track, film, and television licensing, business development, including office services and Internet technology, and Capitol Records Studios.
PREREQUISITES
Besides having a law degree and experience in the music business, Susan Genco cites fairness and personal relationships as keys to her success. “I feel that both on a creative and business level, if you can come up with a way to structure something where everybody benefits, you'll have better long-term success and better long-term relationships with people. Also, imposing the same standards on yourself that you would impose on other people. If you expect someone to work really hard and produce, you have to do the same yourself.”
A DAY IN THE LIFE
“My day starts between 8 and 9 a.m.,” says Genco. She sorts through the massive number of internal e-mail communications and scheduled telephone calls to negotiate various deals. She participates in creative meetings to determine whether the company will release a particular sound track, or license music to a film or television program. “I sit in on the weekly marketing meetings where we develop the company strategy. We look at all of our current projects and decide how we've gotten where we've gotten, and where we are going to go.” Throughout the day she may be called upon to negotiate deals or offer input, both at a creative and business level.
POINTERS FOR THE JOB SEARCH
“The advice given to me was, you should take a job at a law firm; if you can get into their entertainment group or their music group, great. But if you can't, you should make sure you go to a firm that has one and then try and move over. Generally, the same is true for boutique law firms, the ones that handle just music or just entertainment. Record companies have small staffs and they don't want to spend a lot of time training. They would rather you go and get a couple of years of good corporate training, so that when you come to them you're able to hit the ground running.”
SUSAN GENCO, FORMER SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OPERATIONS, CAPITOL RECORDS; VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS AFFAIRS, WARNER BROTHERS RECORDS
CAREER TIPS
“Don't be discouraged. I was living in New York and quit my job and moved to Boston to go to law school. I was incurring all this debt—law school isn't cheap—and when I got there, people were very pessimistic about my ability to get a job in the music business. I was crushed, but over the years I've spoken to a lot of people and everyone who has really wanted to get into music has eventually gotten a job. You should just persevere and really stick to it. If you're enthusiastic, you will find something that you really like.”
“Find out as much as you can about a position or different opportunities. Talk to as many people as you can, read as much as you can, discover if your skills and personality are well suited for a particular position.”
“You should be up to speed in terms of new media and how that is changing the industry. Stay abreast of what's going on in the industry before you're even apart of it. The more you know about your future job or the industry that you want to work in, the more likely you are to find something that you'll be happy with.”
Susan Genco grew up in Buffalo, New York, greatly influenced by the music she heard on the local college radio station. Later, as an economics major at Wellesley College in Boston, she indulged her love of music by working as a deejay at the campus radio station, and hiring bands for campus concerts. After graduation, she took a bank job, but quickly found that she missed being involved with music. “I knew that I wanted to be in music. I had always been involved in music, behind the scenes. I unfortunately never had enough talent to do anything else.” On the advice of co-workers, she decided to go to law school as a way of gaining entry to the music business.
Following graduation from Harvard Law School, Genco supplemented her skills with classes in entertainment law at Boston College School of Law. While there, she begged an internship at Rounder Records to get record label experience, ending up in the promotions department. “It had nothing to do with business affairs, it was just to get inside a record company and see how it worked.” Her summer breaks in New York were split between an internship at a law firm and one in publicity, and later in business affairs, at Arista Records. After graduating in 1993, Arista hired her as director of business affairs, later promoting her to vice president.
In 1999, Genco decided a move to Los Angeles was in order. She took a job at EMI Records as senior vice president of business affairs for the Capitol Records Group. When she began working there, she discovered that the deputy president of Capitol Records was an acquaintance from her days at Arista. The previous working relationship led to her other duties as senior vice president of operations.
Genco departed Capitol Records in late 2001 to become senior vice president of business and legal affairs at Warner Brothers Records.
THE LEAST FAVORITE THING ABOUT THIS JOB:
“The hardest thing about this job is that it is sometimes very hard to switch gears. When I need to be focused on something that takes a lot of concentrated time, whether it's sitting and trying to find a song that would fit a movie, or it's negotiating and drafting a complicated agreement, those things take a concentrated chunk of time. Due to the diverse nature of my job, it's hard to find those chunks of time. It's more like getting 15 minutes or a half hour here and there. That's the hardest thing; the best thing and the hardest thing is switching gears so quickly during the day.”
THE BEST THING ABOUT THIS JOB:
“The diversity and the variety. I do such a wide variety of things and that keeps things very, very interesting. The job uses all of my resources and it challenges me. I can see more than one side when I'm thinking about a deal; I can evaluate it on a strategic business level and also on a creative level.”
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