Telarc International to cut 26 jobs and stop producing its own recordings
http://blog.cleveland.com/business/2009/02/telarc_international_will_cut.htmlPosted by Frank Bentayou/Plain Dealer Reporter February 24, 2009 18:05PM
Categories: Real Time News, Technology
BEACHWOOD -- Telarc International, the award-winning Beachwood recording company, will cut half its 52 employees and stop producing its own recordings, the outgoing president said Tuesday.
Robert Woods, Telarc's founder and president, said he will leave in March. That's when Concord Music Group of Beverly Hills, Calif., which bought the label in 2005, changes the company's course to one of outsourcing music production.
Woods said some workers already have received their termination notices. Others, like him, will leave in March, and the rest will be gone by mid-year. The company will shrink to 26 employees.
Woods and his wife, Elaine Martone, plan to set up a production operation managing classical music artists and producing their recordings. Their first music label client will be Telarc, he said, though the company will eventually court other labels, too.
Michael Bishop, Telarc's former chief recording engineer, is doing something similar. With partners, he launched Five/Four Productions to do high-quality audio recordings for CDs and a range of other music media, including downloadable audio, cinema sound tracks, multimedia experiences and video performances.
For now, both production companies will keep offices and work space at Telarc's headquarters in Commerce Park.
Woods' replacement as Telarc president will be Dave Love. Love has been in charge of HeadsUp, a label Telarc bought in 2000.
Concord's plan is to turn the company's three divisions -- Telarc, HeadsUp and Concord -- into record labels whose products it would market and distribute. Historically, Telarc planned, recorded and produced all the music that went on its CDs. In the future, the company will rely on outsourced production to do those tasks and deliver master tapes to the record company.
For the most part, CDs probably will continue to be manufactured and packaged at a Sony facility in Terre Haute, Ind.
Telarc's three labels have released recordings that, with some overlap, encompassed a range of musical genres:
-- Telarc began in the early 1970s as a classical music label. Its first commercial release was called "Direct from Cleveland" and was of former conductor Loren Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra. It later branched out into jazz and blues as well.
-- HeadsUp includes smooth jazz, blues and what musicians calls "straight-ahead jazz," sometimes more challenging music.
-- The Concord label releases jazz recordings and also what Bishop called "some pop, especially legacy artists like Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney." All the labels, he said, share the approach of music for adults.
Over the years, Telarc and its other labels have won numerous Grammys, the top awards in the recorded music industry. Telarc won two Grammys this year and three last year.
Woods and Bishop said they leave Telarc with some sadness, but both value their involvement with what Bishop called "the extremely high-quality production values" they instilled in every project during their almost four decades there.
But, Woods, noted, the record industry is changing.
"The handwriting has been on the wall for some time," he said. " . . . We had the last production team standing."
