I watched the entirety of "The Defiant Ones". I was left feeling as though Dr. Dre was a talented visionary and Jimmy Iovine was one of those cats who just happened to be in the right place at the right time his entire life.
I really don't have much appreciation for "producers". Truth be told, with the level of fame attained by Fleetwood Mac, it was a bit of a no-brainer that Stevie Nicks solo career was going to be huge, at least for the first album.
Producers like Jimmy Iovine and Rick Rubin are overrated.
Haven't seen the doc but I'm guessing it gives a simplistic view of Iovine. Stevie Nick is just a blip on his resume. You need to go back to his beginnings to see how extraordinary his career has been. He engineered some of the best sounding hit albums of the '70s. He has been involved with companies and sold them, bought them back at a fraction, sold them high again, went somewhere else, built it up, sold for 10 times original value, etc. More than a few times the value of a company he sold went down because the new owners did not have the vision. He bought back at a bargain and soon the company was can industry leader. His career running Interscope is unlike nearly any other music executive as far as major accomplishments over a long period.
Iovine and Rubin are practically polar opposites. Rubin's approach is to put the artist in a comfortable setting and capture what comes out of them as they do their thing, and never with the end buyer in mind. Iovine, as a record producer, was always about giving the listener what they want rather than telling them to like something different. His records sounded like they did because of him. He wasn't a non-technical guy who was lucky to be around hitmakers. To use the Stevie Nicks example, Bella Donna sounded like it did in huge part because of Iovine, as did all the records he produced even when he stopped engineering.
I do find his statements about streaming companies amusing and faulty, though. The problem with Spotify et al isn't that they haven't found a way to monetize streaming. The problem is that artists get such microscopic returns from such services (publishers can sell whole catalogs for a flat fee, which the artist sees none of, only getting pennies of royalties) that they have no incentive to support them and it has created an adversarial relationship, which never works if there's no money involved. Artists must manage themselves, tour small with few expenses, sell their own merch and CDs at shows and have websites capable of being full fledged commerce sites for their product. The streaming companies, for the most part for most artists, are not career aids. Most would say "Please
don't stream my music. Please buy it instead."
