Time Warner Defends Rappers : Music: Protesters reappear at annual meeting. CEO Levin stands by record labels and the creative process.
NEW YORK — After a two-year hiatus, protests over Time Warner Inc.’s distribution of rap music reared again Thursday at the company’s annual meeting, prompting a “personal statement” to shareholders by Chairman and Chief Executive Gerald M. Levin regarding creative freedom.
After a presentation of the company’s strategy, Levin defended the record labels and the creative process, asking Michael Fuchs, the new head of Warner Music Group, and his No. 2, Doug Morris, to take the industry lead in “developing standards for distributing and labeling musical material” to warn users about lyrics that might be offensive.
Levin asserted that recording artists are not to blame for society’s ills. He added that his own son “teaches in Taft High School in the Bronx and uses rap music to reach children.”
Executives at the company had prepared for a month for the protests, which were relatively mild.
A handful of demonstrators representing the National Political Congress of Black Women picketed outside the meeting, complaining that lyrics of “gangsta rap” artists on the Interscope record label encourage violence among young people and demean women.
Reciting from a song by rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg, in which a gun is used to settle a lovers’ quarrel, the group’s chairwoman, C. Delores Tucker, asked shareholders during the meeting to stop financing “sexually explicit, pornographic” music.
“How long will Time Warner continue its silent conspiracy in the social genocide of an entire generation?” she asked.
The issue has re-emerged because of Time Warner’s recent purchase of another 25% of Interscope, doubling its holding to 50% and its investment to an estimated $100 million. Interscope publishes such artists as Dr. Dre and Tupac Amaru Shakur, as well as Snoop Doggy Dogg.
Time Warner and Levin were last caught in the cross-fire over rap in 1992 in a particularly public protest of the Ice-T song “Cop Killer,” in which the rapper was accused of glorifying the shooting of police officers. Ice-T pulled the song off the market and left the label soon after.
In his presentation to shareholders, Levin demonstrated Pathfinder, the company’s 6-month-old site on the World Wide Web, which the company said is the most popular service on the Internet, with 4 million requests per week. Pathfinder allows users to search Time Warner magazine titles such as Time, Life and Money.
Levin also announced a joint venture between its cable company and its publishing group to offer Internet and on-line services such as Pathfinder through its cable wires. Time Warner has about 11.5 million subscribers. The venture is similar to one recently announced by Tele-Communications Inc., the nation’s largest cable operator, which expects to charge about $30 a month for the service.
Transmitting data over cable lines is about 1,000 times faster than using phone wires, opening up what Tom Wolzien, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein & Co., estimates will be a $2.5-billion market within five years. Although cable modems that hook up to home computers now cost about $600 each, their price will come down as demand picks up.
At Thursday’s meeting, Levin also announced the sale of 15 cable systems for more than $260 million as part of a company program to accelerate efforts to pay down its $15-billion debt. That brings announced sales to $1.3 billion in the plan to reduce debt by $2 billion to $3 billion. The systems represent 144,000 subscribers but are not part of the company’s major clusters in New York and Florida.
