MJEOL

Feature [b]Tommy Mottola Faces The Music[/b] From the March 3, 2003 issue of New York Magazine. Why was Tommy Mottola—the industry’s most flamboyant mogul, and one of its most powerful—pushed out of Sony’s beleaguered music division and replaced with NBC head Andy Lack? The real story behind Sony’s musical chairs. By Phoebe Eaton Buried under nineteen inches of snow and duct-taped into submission by terror warnings, New York was in a glum mood for the Grammys, back in town—APPLAUD NOW—for the first time since 1998. The Madison Square Garden festivities would be televised on CBS in prime time, punctuated with performances by such Sony money-spinners and award nominees as Bruce Springsteen, Ashanti, and the Dixie Chicks. But this year’s Sony party, held at the barnlike Hammerstein Ballroom nearby, stood to be conspicuously downscaled from the red-carpet extravaganzas of the not-so-distant past. Sony’s Grammy soirée had been second only to Clive Davis’s big-shot-heavy bacchanal. But no more. Maybe because nobody expected to run into the party’s recently deposed host, Sony’s pinky-ringed music man, Tommy Mottola. On January 9, Sony had faxed around a press release: The chairman and chief executive of Sony Music, Tommy Mottola (or Thomas D. Mottola, as he preferred to be known in the newspapers) would be leaving to launch a new venture. He’d been thinking about making a change for some time, it said, and while it’s true he had a couple years to go on his contract, Sony had suddenly, graciously agreed to spring him. Ever the diplomat, Sony America’s avuncular head, Sir Howard Stringer, saluted the outgoing Mottola as “an icon,” but there was no disguising the fact that the best-known and most flamboyant executive in the music business was out in a force play.