On the afternoon of July 6, 1993, Adam Klein was arrested as he stepped off a plane at the Johannesburg airport. He was charged with fraud, theft, and forgery. A former studentradical and labor leader, Klein had come back to his native South Africa in 1992, after roughly 16 years of politicalexile in the United States, to run Boumat, a building supplies company that had almost $400 million in annual sales. Following the charges, he and Boumat parted ways.
Prosecutors accusedKlein of directing two consulting firms to inflate their bills to Boumat and pay the difference into his own account. Klein also allegedly forged a letter from the company’s CFO verifying the deal. In Klein’s bail application, he acknowledged signing the CFO’s name on the letter but said the extra pay was part of his compensation. Other Boumat officials denied that the overbilling and signature were approved. In 1996, Klein pleaded guilty to contravening South Africa’s so-called Exchange Control regulations. All other charges were dropped.
Old challenges to Klein’s veracity are relevant again because since 2014, his Abaculi Media has owned CMJ Music Marathon, the New York City music festival and industry conference that has taken place for each of the last 35 years, but has been looking questionable for a 36th. For all of CMJ’s faults, the event held an important and perhaps irreplaceable role in the culture of music discovery. But it’s increasingly difficult to see how the fest that boosted Arcade Fire, Alabama Shakes, Savages, and many other bands early on in their careers can live on in its familiar form. Booking agents have told Pitchfork, Stereogum, and Billboard that if CMJ were happening in 2016, they didn’t know about it. The dates for last year’s installment, October 13 to 17, have come and gone.
Yet Klein told Pitchfork in late August, “CMJ will absolutely happen this year.” In a statement the next day that made no mention of the Music Marathon, he said, “We’ll share more about our 2016 and 2017 program soon.” In recent phone interviews with Pitchfork, Klein also reiterated he would share plans “soon.” Beyond that, though, he has declined multiple opportunities to support his statements with concrete specifics about how an undertaking usually involving hundreds of acts might clandestinely be hitting tens of stages across the city within the next two months. “I don’t know what assurances I can give you other than that this is my job, and my business, and my investment, and my sense of focus,” he said when pressed for details. Left to take Klein at his word, the matter became his credibility, which—upon digging further into his professional track record over the last 20-some years—increasingly raised questions.
Though Klein’s South African-tinged accent can be mellifluous, he tends to speak in the windy argot of a business school lecturer: “We’ve been taking the company through a transformation of everything, from its business size, business model, a way to make this sustainable, but also to update it and bring it into connection with a mobile environment, a community, a network, all the other elements that add to the community of people for whom CMJ is so critical and so important.”
After I brought up employee departures and bounced-back emails to CMJ staff addresses, Klein declined to say how many people currently work for CMJ. (He also would not provide CMJ’s business address, though he said it has an office on Broad Street in lower Manhattan. “As soon as I feel ready to share our plan, I’ll be delighted to,” he said.) Asked directly if CMJ employees were getting paid on time, Klein said, “I'm not discussing any aspects of the business, at this stage. We’re in a transformation. That’s all I can say.”
Adam Klein, CEO,says there will be exciting announcements to come regarding the future of CMJ. Stay tuned! #CMJ2015pic.twitter.com/4CXiAJaoKi
— CMJ (@CMJ) October 13, 2015
Meanwhile, Klein finds his businesses in the midst of various lawsuits. There’s a May 2013 complaint by John Scher and his Metropolitan Talent company, over an ill-fated deal to buy CMJ from its co-founders, Bobby Haber and Joanne Abbot Green—in 2015, a judge permitted Scher to add Klein’s Abaculi as a co-defendant. (Haber, who with Green launched a new music festival and conference, Mondo.NYC, in September, declined to comment.) There’s a more recent legal battle with Boston-based Remote Facilities Consulting Services, stemming from Abaculi’s alleged failure to pay more than $400,000 it owed the company for its work helping to broadcast a 2014 Mexican sporting event. (Mary Sandorse, a lawyer for RFCS, declined to comment.) A suit by a consulting firm called General Vertex is also ongoing against CMJ and Abaculi. (General Vertex owner Victor Ney declined to comment.) Klein’s lawyers denied the allegations.
Paul Campbell, a British entrepreneur and former journalist who runs Amazing Media, told Billboard in September that his company was once considering buying CMJ and hired Klein as a consultant to evaluate whether it should complete the purchase. After the consulting relationship was over, Klein, of course, ended up taking over CMJ himself. (He has said CMJ approached him about the acquisition.)
In a field often fueled by passion if not profits, Campbell observed something in Klein he found striking. “In all the time I spent with Adam, I never had the sense that he was much into music,” Campbell told me. “It was odd to be with someone with such a long music industry background who did not really seem remotely interested in it.” (Klein, who is now in his mid-60s, responded that he played drums in a rock band during high school, as well as ROTC corps: “I’ve been in music bands since I was about 12.”)
At one point, Campbell went on, he considered hiring Klein to run Amazing Media’s North American operations. “When we found out about some of the darker stuff in his background, that became impossible,” Campbell said, adding that Klein never mentioned anything of the sort. (“Well you see, that’s bullshit,” Klein told me in response. “Because that didn’t come up.”)
One of those potential red flags followed Klein from eMusic, where he served as president and CEO from 2010 to 2013. (Full disclosure: I worked on a freelance basis for eMusic, mostly after Klein stepped down.) A June 2012 lawsuit claimed that Klein sexually harassed a female employee. The case was settled a few months later. Asked why he settled, Klein told me: “I didn’t. The insurance company settled it.” Asked if he denied the lawsuit’s allegations, Klein said, “One just doesn’t talk about it because you are legally bound not to.”
At eMusic, Klein oversaw multiplerounds of job cuts, departing after a merger with a digital books company. “Adam Klein talked a really good game,” said Scott Taylor, a former senior-level engineer with eMusic who now works for the New York Times. “He was woefully not equipped to do it.” (Klein’s response: “I was responsible for the strategic direction of the company and the strategic purpose of the investors, and I think I fulfilled my obligations there.” Klein also said that, “depending on how you measure it,” eMusic “was a great success because the alternative was bankruptcy.”)
Before he led eMusic—and after he’d held high-level executive roles at prominent U.S. companies like Hasbro, Ask Jeeves, and MTV—Klein was, from 2004 to 2006, the executive vice president of strategy and business development for EMI’s music division. “I was a very proud player in making some of the transformations there,” Klein told me, adding, “I think we did incredibly well.”
Digital music pioneer Ted Cohen worked at EMI from 2000 until less than six weeks before Klein’s departure, most recently as the senior vice president of digital development and distribution. "You talk to him and he's just so charming, but there's no there there,” Cohen recently told me. (Asked about Cohen’s comments, Klein said, “I was responsible for him being let go from the company.” The Los Angeles Times reported that Cohen left to start his consulting practice, TAG Strategic, which he still runs.)
Another source of concern regarding Klein, Campbell told me, pertained to what happened in South Africa after Klein became the head of Boumat. On February 1, 1996, Klein was fined 100,000 rand (then about $27,397) in Johannesburg Regional Court. ”It was a foreign exchange transaction,” he explained. “Which is not recognized by the U.S. as an issue at all, because what I was doing was transferring funds from what I was earning in South Africa to America, and didn't complete the forms properly. It was an administrative screw-up.”
Klein told me he was fined only “several hundred dollars” for this mistake. I noted the 100,000 rand penalty. “Well, by the time everything was sorted through, and by the time the whole thing had been resolved, I didn't pay what was—that was the starting point of the court, and we settled the whole thing in a completely, completely amicable fashion.”
To Klein, the charges weren’t just overblown and irrelevant to U.S. authorities; they were also “very, very politically loaded.” He claimed that people other than Peter Glendining, the former Boumat CFO, had political motives for pushing the case against him. Glendining denied this, saying, “The person that drove the whole thing was me, and it was because I was so incensed [with Klein’s behavior].”
David Gevisser, who preceded Klein as Boumat CEO and died in 2009, wrote of Klein’s hiring, in his memoir: “As is now well known, this was a disaster.” Asked about Gevisser’s words, Klein replied, “He was protecting what I discovered as major corruption.” (Gevisser’s son, Mark Gevisser, a journalist and author, told me his father “was a man of unimpeachable integrity… the record speaks for itself.”)
“If you look at the legal stuff as opposed to colloquial language, it was an administrative misdemeanor,” Klein told me. “Which is strictly a South African issue because it had to do with an amount that one was allowed to take out of South African foreign exchange, and at that stage there was a limit of $1,000 U.S. dollars a year on everybody. I had special permission to take more money out because I had a family obligation in the States and it was incorrectly completed at one stage.”
This “family obligation” probably relates to another topic that Campbell, whose Amazing Media considered buying CMJ, told me he felt Klein had failed to disclose, though Klein disagreed. Klein had been involved in a legal fight in Massachusetts over child support. The subject of that litigation, Keaton Kustler, was born shortly after Klein joined Boumat. Now 24, Kustler declined to comment for this article, but her website says she’s in the music business herself as an artist manager. In 2011, Kustler tagged eMusic in a tweet implying that her father was Klein and that he was “a deadbeat.” In late October, Kustler tweeted, using the Kermit-sipping-tea meme, “So how’s CMJ this year?”
Asked about Kustler’s tweets, Klein said, “Let’s just say the courts dealt with her and her mother and their capacity to tell the truth.” Upon the suggestion that this was his comment, he added: “I make no comment about these things. She's an independent young woman and I just respect her space.”
Dara Khan, Keaton’s mother, spoke of Klein to me with a trace of pity. “I never thought anybody would ever care,” she said about her case. “In all of the people I think he hurt, he has to have hurt himself the most.”
In Klein’s view, the details of his past were already out in the open and have been thoroughly scrutinized. “I'm very comfortable about what is known about me, what I've achieved, what I've done, and I get on with my life,” he said. “I'm very proud of many of the people I've been associated with. You don't get those positions by misrepresenting yourself.”
Paul Campbell wondered if Klein’s insistence that a 2016 Music Marathon is still in the cards might not be a way of keeping up appearances. “Looking back on our dealings with Adam, I feel almost sorry for him,” Campbell said. “I think he has an image of himself as a leading media executive, buttressed by the apartment on Central Park West and the beach house in Cape Cod.”
From time to time, Klein will play the role of the leading media executive publicly, serving as a music industry source for business-focused outlets. In one such appearance from 2011—a video interview for the Financial Times—Klein discussed subscription streaming services like Spotify. “There are a bunch of services out there that are trying, stream for 10 bucks or 10 pounds, all-you-can-eat,” he said. “There are very, very few people who want all-you-can-eat. It’s just such a broad offer that it’s sort of meaningless.” Fast forward five years, and Spotify has more than 40 million paid subscribers, Apple Music has 17 million, and the U.S. record industry has subscription streaming services to thank for a year of sharp revenue growth.
Klein was hardly the only music-biz observer to underestimate the demand for streaming. And CMJ isn’t the first beleaguered business to undergo a wrenching turnaround. But music lovers who appreciate what CMJ Music Marathon meant to the cultural ecosystem will have to hope, this time, Klein’s rhetoric more closely matches reality—not only from a certain perspective, but in “colloquial language,” too.