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noramoya · 7 years

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"THIRTH YEARS AGO , TODAY - ON AUGUST 31 , 1987 - MICHAEL JACKSON DEBUTED ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED ÁLBUNS IN THE HISTORY OF POP MUSIC : BAD , THE FOLLOW -UP TO 1982's THRILLER , WHICH HAD ALREADY BEEN CERTIFIED 20 X PLATINUM BY THE RIAA UPON ITS SUCCESSOR'S RELEASE, WELL ON ITS WAY TO BECOMING THE BEST-SELLING ALBUM OF ALL TIMES . " " Undaunted, Jackson and producer Quincy Jones attempted to outdo themselves with Bad, setting their sales goals even higher the next time around. "I heard was that [Michael] was carrying around -- I can’t remember if it was a quarter and a nickel or three dimes -- but he was carrying around 30 cents in his pocket because he wanted to sell [that many million copies of Bad]," says Geoff Mayfield, retail editor at Billboard in 1987. Jackson would fall well short of that goal -- Bad had topped out at 6-times platinum in the U.S. by the time the album's promo cycle finally ended at the close of the '80s, and was finally certified diamond (for 10 million equivalent album units) by the RIAA earlier this year. But despite the lesser sales, Bad did achieve a feat that not only did Thriller not accomplish, but that no album in history ever had before: It spawned five No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. Each of the set's first five singles -- Siedah Garrett ballad duet "I Just Can't Stop Loving You," storming title track "Bad," strutting love song "The Way You Make Me Feel," anthemic power ballad "Man in the Mirror" and rock-infused backstage drama "Dirty Diana" -- made it all the way to the Hot 100's apex, breaking the previous record of four No. 1 hits off the same album, initially set in 1978 by the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. For more than two decades, Bad reigned as the lone album to notch five Hot 100-toppers, until Katy Perry finally tied the achievement in 2011 with her fifth No. 1 off sophomore album Teenage Dream. So how did an album that largely failed to live up to commercial expectation manage to do something no blockbuster album had managed before? A lot of the answer can be found through the album's surrounding context -- in terms of Michael Jackson's career, in terms of the pop landscape in the late '80s and in terms of the Billboard charts of the time. Though Thriller managed "only" two Hot 100 No. 1s of its own -- "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" -- it raised the bar for how long an album's shelf life could last. "It’s one of those few records I can think of with three meaningful Christmas seasons," says Mayfield. "When I was at Billboard [in 1984] it was the third Christmas season for Thriller, and it was still one of the records that retailers cited as a traffic builder for them, and that’s unusual." The album also set new standards for the number of hit singles that could be pulled from the same record, with seven of its nine tracks becoming top 10 hits on the Hot 100 -- a then-record. "Having seven top 10 hits [on Thriller] was important," says Larry Stessel, senior VP/marketing for Jackson's Sony-owned label Epic in the '80s. "Because you had all of those songs that were being played on 98 percent of the radio stations in the country, whether it was some lesser singles... as long as they’re in the top 10 or top five, they’re going to have a tremendous impact." After Thriller, albums that previously would've only spun off three or four singles were now increasingly likely to have five, six, even seven songs pulled as A-sides before the artist would move on to a next album. Tellingly, Def Leppard's Diamond-selling Pyromania set, released just a couple months after Thriller in 1983, saw only four songs released as singles, but by the time of 1987 follow-up Hysteria, that LP spawned seven singles -- with the fourth and fifth single in the U.S. ("Pour Some Sugar on Me" and "Love Bites") becoming the set's biggest Hot 100 hits, reaching Nos. 2 and 1, respectively. "'We should do a rock version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller,'" Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen recalled to Billboard of producer Mutt Lange's goals for Hysteria. Also contributing to these albums' extended lifespans was the rise of MTV. Albums like Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. (1984) and Janet Jackson's Control (1986) were able to generate at least five top 10 hits each (seven for Born) in large part because many of their singles were accompanied by captivating music videos that were endlessly promoted on what had become the world's most influential musical outlet. And Michael Jackson, who had helped the channel go truly global with videos for Thriller's "Beat It," "Billie Jean" and the title track, was the station's unquestioned male lead. "They were so hungry for Michael Jackson videos that we could’ve put out Michael singing 'Happy Birthday' and they would’ve played it," Stessel recalls. And when Bad was finally ready for release in 1987, a half-decade after Thriller had permanently changed the parameters for pop album scaling, it was given one of the great promotional pushes in record industry history. Walter Yetnikoff, then-CEO of CBS and Sony Music, was behind Jackson fully. At the time, Columbia Records (a CBS division) had mega-selling acts Springsteen, Pink Floyd and Billy Joel on its roster, but it was clear which artist was Yetnikoff's top priority. "As much as Walter loved those [other] acts, Michael was the king at the company,” says one former Sony executive. “The push behind Jackson kept Columbia from getting to No. 1 with their records. They over-aggressively promoted Michael Jackson, because that was what Walter wanted.” (Journey's Frontiers album on Columbia stalled at No. 2 for nine weeks in 1983, stuck behind Thriller.) The Bad album -- whose progress was kept as a secret even to Jackson's label, Epic Records, until shortly before it was delivered -- was first introduced to a who's who of radio and retail bigwigs at a private dinner at the pop star's house in Encino, California. "The first thing I thought was... we have to make Michael real to the industry again," says Jim Caparro, then-head of sales at Epic. "To make him real again I came up with this wild notion that we should bring all the accounts and big radio people to Michael’s house and have him debut the album to them." “Sony brought in Wolfgang Puck, he was the chef at the house,” recalls Bruce Ogilvie, now the CEO of Alliance Entertainment and the then-owner of the Abbey Road One-Stop distributor, about the summit. “They had all the Sony senior people there and [manager] Frank DiLeo was there, and so was Janet Jackson. They didn’t spare any expense. They picked everyone up in limousines to bring us there. It floated around the party that Michael Jackson was sleeping upstairs in the oxygen chamber but would come down later.” Bad was brought to the general public via a half-hour special, Michael Jackson: The Magic Returns, which debuted on CBS primetime the night before the album was released. The centerpiece of the special was the "Bad" music video, an 18-minute short film helmed by legendary director Martin Scorsese and co-starring a pre-fame Wesley Snipes. "It was on from 8-8:30 [on CBS] and it was the No. 5 show of the week," says Stessel, who wrote, produced and directed the program (along with Don Wilson), which also featured a short catch-up film summarizing Michael's career to that point. "It was a tremendous coup... we shipped 4.2 million copies [of the album], and we sold half of it the first week." All of this set the scene for a singles rollout that built on the momentum of Thriller and attempted to take it to new heights. "The album of your career is always going to put you on a higher plateau than you were before," Mayfield says. "And I would say that Thriller did some of the heavy lifting for Bad just by making his tent larger than it ever could have been prior to that album." Not wanting to mess with the successful formula of the latter, the release strategy for Bad closely mirrored that of its predecessor. "I Just Can't Stop Loving You," with Siedah Garrett -- the more traditional pop duet without a music video -- was pulled as a single first (as the Paul McCartney collab "The Girl Is Mine" was from Thriller), followed by two more obvious modern pop knockouts with elaborate visuals to match in "Bad" and "The Way You Make Me Feel" (just like "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" an album earlier). "Everything was about, 'Let’s just do everything the Thriller way,'" Stessel recalls. "

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topinforma · 7 years

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New Post has been published on Mortgage News

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L.A. office market has best quarter since the financial crisis as entertainment and tech firms keep expanding

To get a sense for how well the Los Angeles office market is doing, there probably isn’t a better barometer than Jerry Snyder.

The veteran developer has been in the industry since 1949 and built thousands of houses and apartments, along with shopping centers and offices, when he thinks the market is right. Among his past standout office developments are the Water Garden in Santa Monica and Wilshire Courtyard in the Mid-Wilshire district.

What is he up to these days? Not one, not two, but three separate office projects.

“Offices. That’s all I’m doing now,” said Snyder, whose new developments are worth a combined $500 million.

Two are being completed in Hollywood. The third is a 12-story tower being planned for a site behind his SAG-AFTRA Plaza on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile district.

Snyder’s bullish take on the market is reflected in the impressive amount of office space that was absorbed during the fourth quarter in the Los Angeles region, something that bodes well for the local commercial real estate market in 2017.

Big office leases by such companies as Warner Music Group, City National Bank and Kite Pharma helped soak up 2.1 million square feet in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, the most in a quarter since 2000, brokerage CBRE Group Inc. said.

Absorption measures the change in occupied space when offices are leased or vacated and is considered a key measure of the real estate industry.

The disappearance of so much empty space suggests that landlords will hold the upper hand in the months ahead when it comes to negotiating leases with tenants in choice neighborhoods, said Petra Durnin, director of research and analysis at CBRE.

“When L.A. has a quarter as strong as the fourth quarter was, the following quarters are typically very robust in rent growth and occupancy,” she said.

The office markets in other big cities are slowing down, she said, but Los Angeles was slower to recover from the recession and is still on the upswing as local businesses expand or are formed.

This office development by Los Angeles developer J.H. Snyder Co. is intended to be a creative office campus for the entertainment industry.

J.H. Snyder Co.

This office development by Los Angeles developer J.H. Snyder Co. is intended to be a creative office campus for the entertainment industry.

This office development by Los Angeles developer J.H. Snyder Co. is intended to be a creative office campus for the entertainment industry. (J.H. Snyder Co.)

“We’re still in growth mode,” she said. “The only challenge is that it has been a long recovery, so investors and occupiers are preparing for the end of the cycle. But 2017 will be a strong year for both leasing and sales.”

Entertainment, L.A.’s most famous export, has been thriving and driving the office market for months, industry observers say.

Web-based services Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are competing with established studios to create new shows. Video-sharing website YouTube, Internet media company BuzzFeed and mobile phone application Snapchat are also creating programming such as news and entertainment for their platforms.

Their preferred haunts as they are expand are Hollywood, Playa Vista, Venice and Santa Monica.

The melding of Silicon Valley and Hollywood is playing out in L.A., said real estate broker Tony Morales of JLL.

“Bay Area tech companies are trying to get a media component,” Morales said. “Tech with content is a unique hybrid here.”

Among Snyder’s new tenants in Hollywood will be film production company Broad Green Pictures and post-production sound company Formosa Group.

“Tenant interest has really picked up since the first of the year,” Snyder said. “I think people were kind of waiting to see what would happen with the election.”

Santa Monica, the preferred Southern California outpost of tech since the Internet revolution began, benefited royally from the trend last quarter and accounted for a fourth of all the absorption in greater Los Angeles, CBRE said.

It’s also one of the most expensive markets, with landlords asking for $5.61 a square foot per month, up from $5.43 last quarter and $5.41 a year ago.

The greater Los Angels office vacancy fell to 13.3%, down a percentage point from last quarter and down nearly 2 percentage points from a year ago. Average asking rents were $2.94 a square foot per month, up a nickel from a year ago.

The most active markets for leases and rent increases were in western Los Angeles County, including El Segundo, Culver City and Playa Vista. Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena were comparatively flat and the western San Fernando Valley, formerly home to some large mortgage banking operations, was weak by comparison.

Vacancy in downtown Los Angeles, where a torrent of mixed-used projects are under construction, was unchanged from the third quarter at 16.8% but down from 17.6% in the fourth quarter a year ago. Asking rents rose 3 cents from the previous quarter to $3.33 a square foot.

Although 2017 looks strong, Morales predicts a lull in leasing in 2018 and 2019 because that period will mark a decade since the financial crisis and resulting recession slowed the market to a crawl. Big leases commonly turn over after 10 years and put tenants back on the market, so fewer leases than average will turn over.

Still, developers hoping to catch the wave continue to build. There are 2.2 million square feet of office space under construction in greater Los Angeles, CBRE said, down about 250,000 square feet from last quarter. The most active district for development is Hollywood, where nearly 600,000 square feet are being built.

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