, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones — died Sunday night at age 87. He would have turned 88 on August 11.
At the 1984 Grammy Awards, Jackson called Yetnikoff up to the podium, saying he was “the best record company president in the world.” Streisand, too, scored her biggest-selling album under Yetnikoff’s watch, with 1980’s “Guilty,” a collaboration with the Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb. Yetnikoff also helped launch the careers of new artists such as Cyndi Lauper , “Weird Al” Yankovic and Gloria Estefan.
Jackson’s estate released a statement Tuesday, saying: “Walter Yetnikoff was a giant in the music industry at a time when it was more fun, more outrageous and complex and extremely less corporate than today, and he was a man for the times. It is difficult today to imagine the level of cultural apartheid at the music channels in 1983 when MTV refused to play Michael Jackson’s short film ‘Billie Jean.
Yetnikoff joined CBS Records in 1961 as an in-house attorney, following in the footsteps of fellow lawyer and friend Clive Davis, serving as general counsel of CBS Records’ legal department. He was instrumental, together with Harvey Schein, in forming CBS/Sony, a Japanese joint venture which became highly profitable under Akio Morita and Norio Ohga and helped to plant the seeds for Sony’s eventual acquisition of CBS in 1988.
Yetnikoff went on to start Velvel Records with his own money, and then unsuccessfully shopped a Miles Davis biopic. He also helped run Commotion Records, a label that specialized in indie-movie soundtracks.
What a sentence!
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