Fortune Archives: Motown in a funk

Few companies can say that their name is synonymous with an entire musical genre, but Motown Records can: The “Motown sound” honed by The Temptations, The Supremes and Smokey Robinson in the 1960s was proof of concept for the big idea of the record label’s creator, as Fortune explained in 1997: “Founder Berry Gordy started the company in Detroit with an $800 loan and a conviction that black music and high style could be forged into a sound that would be popular with whites. He was right, of course.” 

Motown’s artists remained a dominant force on the radio airwaves from the 1960s to the 1980s. But by 1997 when George Jackson—“a Harvard-educated film producer from Harlem”—was named president and CEO, Motown’s glory days amounted to “a dusty jukebox of faded hits and nostalgic memories,” Roy S. Johnson wrote. The label had not found a new Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, or Michael Jackson for the 1990s, and it had not turned a profit that decade.

George Jackson’s marching orders were clear: Dig Motown out of the hole that Jackson’s predecessor, the hip hop and R&B impresario Andre Harrell, had dug even deeper during his extravagant, ill-fated 22-month tenure running the label. Harrell was famous for having created his own influential music label, New York’s Uptown Records, which had nurtured the talents of stars such as Mary J. Blige and Heavy D. 

Harrell also kicked off the corporate career of the subject of a Fortune feature we published this week: the rapper and entrepreneur Sean Combs (known by stage names including Diddy and Puff Daddy). Combs now sits in a Brooklyn jail cell, awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy, and transportation to engage in prostitution—quite a comedown for the entertainment mogul whose dozens of ventures made him a billionaire. 

In her illuminating exploration of how this polarizing figure became a “one-man economy,” Adrienne Samuels Gibbs recounts how Harrell plucked the young party promoter “off the nightclub floor” to put him in charge of Uptown’s A&R department—which he proceeded to tear through like a “hurricane.” 

Both stories tell of the demise of an icon of Black American music. Johnson, a Fortune editor-at-large, explained just how painful the collapse of Motown would have been for Black Americans, quoting Clarence Avant, a Motown chairman emeritus: “White people can afford to lose Pan Am, Montgomery Ward, or Woolworth’s. There are a million other white-run institutions. Blacks cannot afford to lose even one.”

Motown Records is still in operation, under Interscope Capitol Labels Group, a division of Universal Music. Combs’ fate remains unclear.