Did a journalist get into the music business to help save the oceans or help himself? ManvBrain reports
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Dave Benett/Getty Images By the time I get Ian Urbina on the phone Wednesday afternoon, he’s ready to tell his story. He picks up on the first ring and makes quick work of the pleasantries. “So, if it’s okay with you,” he says, “my inkling would be to start with kind of its origin story? You’re welcome to record.” Sure, I say, and away he goes.
“Not a lot of them. But yes, we’ve gotten, you know, it’s just — you would be amazed.” Then he catches himself, and I feel the weird hall-of-mirrors effect of interviewing someone who is very experienced at interviewing others and therefore very aware of how his words sound and how they might be used. “But, you know, I don’t know if I should say that on record, because it could be like, ‘Oh, look, he’s complaining and he’s trying to play this.’ And I’m not doing that.
As he was out at sea reporting, Urbina says, “I had this idea sort of start bubbling up, which was in some ways inspired by Lin-Manuel Miranda. I’m a big hip-hop fan and was thinking that it would be really neat to do with my ocean book what Lin-Manuel did with Hamilton.
Then he did a little digging. Looking up the company registration for Synesthesia, he found that Synesthesia wasn’t just some third-party company that Urbina had contracted with; the company was owned by Urbina himself. To Jordan, it looked like Urbina was using a shell company to hide where the profits were really going. Making matters worse, Jordan then discovered that he would not be Urbina’s only collaborator.
As the ensuing Twitter storm raged, Jordan reached out to other musicians who’d been involved in the Outlaw Ocean project and asked them to fill out a survey detailing their experiences. About a hundred responded, most of them seconding Jordan’s discontent and supporting his call for Urbina to cancel their contracts.
On the phone, Urbina tells me that about 50 have taken him up on his offer out of the roughly 500 musicians under contract. “I got deeply rattled by this,” Urbina says. “Artists are upset. Some artists are saying they feel like they were tricked.” He wants to clear the air. As for the structure of the deals, Urbina acknowledges that the contract is unusual in the portion of the money that he takes from musicians. But he insists that there is a good reason for that: musician’s participation in the Outlaw Ocean Music Project is a kind of donation. “What we consistently tell musicians is this is not a music label business deal,” he says. “This is essentially a charitable contribution.
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