Jordy Freed of Sony
Having interviewed everyone from Wynton Marsalis and Herbie Hancock to Kamasi Washington and Christian McBride I can tell you two of the cornerstones of being a great jazz musician are the abilities to collaborate and improvise.
A high school saxophonist who wanted to be a jazz musician, Jordy Freed, Head of Brand, Business Development & Strategy for Sony’s Personal Entertainment Business, is using those valuable jazz life lessons to build a music industry dream team – that includes Olivia Rodrigo, SZA, Peso Pluma, Miguel, Post Malone, NYU and The Grammys – to help further Sony’s story.
I spoke at length with the very impressive Freed about his ability to talk to musicians and his business strategy going forward. “That’s why we’re doing NYU and Grammys because it is actually a good segue into kind of how we’re looking at the future, we need to be working with everyone,” he told me.
Steve Baltin: Do you play an instrument?
Jordy Freed: I used to play. That’s how I got into this whole thing, I’m going to tell you something that’s going to blow your mind and I know you’ll know who it is. So, when I was a teenager, you know who my mentor was over email and I’m close to his sister and know his kids and all that, Michael Brecker. I was a saxophonist. So, I grew up outside of Philly, like suburban Philly, and I got into jazz. I’ll give you the 30 second to one minute story leading up to Blue Note. I was really into jazz as a kid, played a lot, listened a lot, went to college, wanted to work in the business, became a jazz publicist, went to work for Blue Note, figured out that I liked marketing even more than jazz, worked at Gray for a minute, went back to Blue Note, built a business within Blue Note, did a deal with Sony and then I wound up at Sony. That’s the 45-second synopsis of my professional life.
Baltin: What was the business you built within Blue Note?
Freed: Blue Note I realized was a brand that had a lot of value in terms of the lifestyle, the experience. I realized a lot of people who were going to Blue Note didn’t know who was playing. It was just, “I’m going to go to the Blue Note and hang.” You had a large portion of folks that didn’t know who was playing, they trusted the Blue Note brand and it’s an experience So, I went from a brand marketing standpoint to line it up with companies outside of music. I did a deal with Intel, I did a deal with NHK to capture 4K content or 8K content back in 2016. I did a deal with 12 or 13 countries within the EU through the UN delegation, and then I did a deal with Sony. It was supposed to be brand marketing, but it actually turned into a business because we were doing transactions. So, we had money coming in from these partners. They were strategic partnerships. There was revenue against it. I built a travel business within Blue Note. I had a VR startup that did fail. This was back in 2016, and Sony was the big partner that I had when I got Sony Hall opened in 2018 in Times Square.
Baltin: I knew you played because I deal with so many musicians. Very few brands understand them. But you obviously connect with the musicians. So, you clearly came from that background.
Freed: Yeah, 100 percent. It all started playing. I was really serious as a kid. I just knew that there were things I wanted. First of all, I was a jazz instrumentalist. That is a sacred path, but I’m not strong enough for that path as an individual. So, I was like, “Okay, I’m probably going to learn business.” That’s when I made the switch back when I was 18.
Baltin: It’s funny though, because you still probably approach everything you do businesswise with that mentality.
Freed: It’s all about creativity, being able to see things a little bit differently. You look at how I came up, very non-traditional path based on the trajectory. But when I was a kid, I never thought I wanted to work in business. And then I realized as I grew and got to this kind of role, there’s more creativity in business than you could possibly imagine. And for someone who used to play jazz and improvise, the two are very correlated. So, you have to be able to think on the spot, you have to be able to look at problems differently. There’s this weird symbiotic element to business and improvisation to an extent. The improvisation is deviating from traditional playbook for brands where things are done that don’t work. Nine times out of 10 brands, if we’re really starting to get into the business side, brands are very about their brand. And they don’t realize the value of talent partners and desires of talent partners that can contribute to actually developing your brand. If you try and push your message, it’s not going to be understood necessarily. But if you think of it in a very different and esoteric way, which is very similar to improvisation in that regard, you might see better results. So, like Miguel, we launched our new brand campaign for the music with him last summer. And the creative was not your traditional brand launch creative. Frankly, if you watched the creative, you might not even tell that it was a Sony audio brand spot. That was intentional. Because the focus was less about the values of Sony audio, etc. It was more about the broader statement we wanted to make in the act itself by letting an artist say, “This is something I wanted to do.” In his case, he wanted to scale a building. Our whole brand campaign is empowering these artists. That’s what our tech is supposed to be. It’s about music creation, music consumption. Artists have artistic desires. That’s what our brand is about. We literally let it happen. That’s a very unconventional approach for a brand. To your point, Steve, that’s why these types of situations come up with talent where we say, “Hey, let’s break the mold a little bit.”
Baltin: How do you balance the two worlds of music and business?
Freed: It’s just a different language. And it’s very hard to find folks that can speak those multiple languages to be able to walk into a boardroom, talk the way you need to talk to push an idea through within a corporate or business strategy setting, and then go talk to artists and translate that in a way that can be understood that isn’t corporate speak. It doesn’t really happen. That’s why I have a lot of fun in this job, because you get to live in both worlds, honestly.
Baltin: Who’s your dream artist to team with? And are there moments you’ve had you view as building blocks to successful deals?
Freed: Kendrick’s always been very high on my list. Kendrick’s super high on my list. That’s my personal list. The way I’ve approached all these artists’ collaboration and I’d say to answer your question about the building blocks there isn’t one particular moment. I’d say it’s when you step back and look at the past 18 months, from SZA to Miguel to Olivia, to Pesa Pluma, to Post Malone, those five. The aggregate of those and how the creative’s gotten better, how one artist sees, “Hey, you’ve worked with so -and -so. I love the creative, so I want to work with you.” Or it’s the aggregate of being able to build that block because it didn’t exist before. We didn’t really do that at scale in this way. And it’s setting up what we’re doing next. But each of those artists, there’s probably one trend. Do you notice a trend between SZA, Peso, Miguel, Post and Olivia? There’s actually one thing that I view is a common thread among all of them that I’m not sure many other people notice. We as a brand, or any brand, can go out and get some big commercial artist that is a one-hit wonder at that point in time, or is just good at fronting, etc. The key trend that I see is every one of those artists and the way we kind of view it is, there’s significant artistic integrity in each of those artists, but there’s also strong commercial success too. So, we’re looking, and I’m always looking for, where is the balance between art and the commerce? And there has to be the right mix of both. But like every one of those, I hold those artists with high artistic integrity without sacrificing commercial success. So, I look at someone like Kendrick. Guys won the Pulitzer. But he’s playing Super Bowl halftime. That is the epitome of strong artistic integrity with significant commercial impact in being part of the culture. I am really looking for artists that can balance both.
Baltin: As a brand, how do you balance the needs of your different audiences?
Freed: Again, we need to work with everyone. So, we look at the spectrum; we have consumer and creator. So that’s consumer audio, professional audio. Consumer audio is like these you buy them on Amazon, they’re through us or Best Buy or whatever and they’re leading market share globally, etc. Then you have pro. Sony has tons of history with pro audio, NDR7506 with the blue stripe, pretty iconic, the C-800G, $15,000 microphone of choice for Rihanna and Drake and Dr. Dre and everything in between, audio formats, etc. That’s been kind of the lay of the land for years, and you have the pros that have been pro-audio. But over the past five or 10 years, let’s all be honest, creating music is a lot easier for folks. You can do it anywhere, you could do it on a mobile device, etc. You have a lot of people who consider themselves creators, but they’re also ordinary people that are going about their lives and they’re creating on the go, they’re creating in basements, they’re using consumer gear to dabble in splice in GarageBand or BandLab or Upload SoundCloud. And some of those people break through and they become big artists, but you have this mass market. I actually think it’s a significant opportunity to engage that next generation. You have people in the middle or maybe even more serious from those prosumers that are going to music school to study and will become the next leaders and then you have the folks that are the quote-unquote hitmakers now. So, we are basically executing a strategy against a creator triangle with two E-partners at the top; you have the Recording Academy, the Grammys, we’re going to be the official Pro Audio partner. We’re engaging all the chapters around the country to look at the next generation of tech that we have, like virtual mixing, etc. Not just hardware, it’s also solutions. So that’s one piece. Then in the middle, you’ll have the Sony Audio Institute for Music Business and Technology at NYU Steinhardt. First brand to basically create an institute for the next generation around what we do. This is not just a put a name on it situation. We’re integrating with in curriculum. We’re going to be teaching students how to use a lot of our tech. We’re going to be bringing pros in to work with these students. We’re going to have faculty work with us. We’re going to be doing R &D and product planning research. We’re going to be doing joint R &D between our R &D teams, the Music and Audio Research Lab at NYU and our Tokyo R &D engineers, all within Sony Audio Institute, university level. How do these interconnect? How do they work together for different purposes. There’s one word for that. Beyond just business partnerships or corporate strategy, the single word for that is community. That’s all we really care about is community. We’re trying to build community among different creators at different stages, different walks of life, different areas of expertise and there’s something for all of them at different stages and we are trying to unite that community because believe it or not it’s really fragmented. The hitmakers that are Grammy winners or Grammy nominees or chapter members aren’t engaging with the DIYers and the DIYers aren’t working with the students. They should all be connected in some way. There’s technology that unites them. And we want to bring this broader community together. That is what we are trying to do. So that’s where we’re heading and that’s the strategy.
Baltin: What is the role of Sony in all this?
Freed: It’s about creating the infrastructure from our side to bring in the right folks and be the connector. At the end of the day, we’re not creators. Sony is not a creator, but if we can connect creators and be at the center of connecting creators, that is where we want to be. It’s just about being the glue, being the center at connecting folks, and then getting out of the way. We want the magic to happen between the creators. We are not the focus, we are just the conduit. That’s our role in all of this because we are not the people on the front lines creating. We just want those folks to have access to the resources to do it. And I can’t tell you a single other company doing this from a brand level right now. There are no strings attached but the hope is there’s work with creators and then creating with creators. We’re actually trying to create with creators. We want to develop what’s needed for those creators to create before it exists. So if we’re working with a 25-year-old and they’re trying to do something through the creative process that doesn’t exist, we have engineers for that. We actually want to build what the creators need before it exists. So, a lot of this brand loyalty is one thing to say, “Hey, use this, use that, or I’ll support you.” It’s another thing when you’re actually listening and you’re working with creators and they say, “Hey, how do I do this? I’m trying to do this.” We’re trying to innovate. We’re trying to co-create. No one else is co-creating with creators right now. We have the opportunity based on our tech, our resources, R &D, etc. to co-create. And that’s how we’re going to get brand loyalty.
