Ted Cohen is an unlikely rock star.
The 56-year-old computer fanatic has a high-pitched giggle and thinning gray hair. Instead of slinging a guitar over his shoulder, Cohen carries a backpack filled with nine cellphones, three iPods, two portable video players and enough wires, cables and tape to mummify Mariah Carey. At 5 feet 8 and 240 pounds, he will never be mistaken for one of the crooning waifs on MTV.
But among music executives, Cohen is something of an American Idol. As senior vice president of digital development at EMI Group, home of Coldplay and the Rolling Stones, Cohen has been in on the ground floor of dozens of online music ventures, including Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store. And he's one of the most sought-after speakers on the recording industry's endless conference-and-gala circuit.
During a recent Santa Monica symposium, so many people wanted a moment of Cohen's time that he resorted to holding back-to-back meetings in a hallway, where petitioners stood in line to win a brief audience with him.
"Ted is very high-profile," said Mitch Bainwol, chief executive of the Recording Industry Assn. of America. "He's part ambassador and part evangelist." Cohen's celebrity is surprising, even to him. For decades, technologists were relegated to the lower levels of the music business. Then, in the late 1990s, when peer-to-peer computer networks such as Napster Inc. made music easy to steal, techies became outright pariahs.
But now, after half a decade of fighting high-tech change, the recording industry is rushing to embrace it. As consumers spend billions of dollars downloading songs and ring tones online and via cellphones, music executives have become desperate to convince Wall Street that they understand the Internet marketplace.
Suddenly, Cohen and other tech-savvy executives capable of translating between Silicon Valley and Tin Pan Alley are essential. The once-spurned geeks are becoming some of the music world's most respected leaders, and as they ascend, they are changing the industry's culture.
"What Ted is working on is embedded in everything we do as a company now," said David Munns, CEO of EMI Recorded Music North America.
Such change was on display last month when Cohen joined a panel on innovations in music distribution. One by one, speakers from the nation's largest music, computer and peer-to-peer corporations launched into serious forecasts of the industry's bleak future. Cohen managed to keep quiet for almost three minutes before the dire predictions proved too much.
