Charles Koppelman, a longtime music executive who worked with Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Tracy Chapman, Wilson Phillips and Vanilla Ice, among many other artists, and later the companies of Martha Stewart and the fashion designer Steve Madden steered through periods of turbulence , died on Friday at his home in Roslyn Harbor, NY, on Long Island. He turned 82.
His son, Brian, said the cause was cancer.
For decades, Mr. Koppelman has been a player in the upper echelons of the music industry, acting alternately as a dealmaker and superstar matchmaker. Rarely pictured without a Cuban cigar and a jovial grin, he reveled in the excitement of making big deals and the lifestyle that came with being a top executive in music’s high-flying 1980s and 1990s.
“I really love what I do,” Mr. Koppelman, while taking a drag from a Cohiba Esplendido, told Cigar Aficionado magazine in 1993 when he was chairman and CEO of EMI Records Group North America.
His career took him from the songwriting booths of New York in the early 1960s to CBS Records in the 1970s, where he ran the music publishing and artist and repertoire divisions and worked with artists such as Billy Joel, Janis Ian and Journey. Later, the Entertainment Company, which he helped found, contracted numerous songwriters and was involved in making hit records such as “Here You Come Again” (1977) by Mrs. Parton and “Guilty” (1980), Mrs. Streisand’s duet with Barry. Gibb of the Bee Gees.
In the 1980s, Mr. Koppelman and two associates, the financier Stephen Swid and the music director Martin Bandier, executed one of the most lucrative music transactions of the period. In 1986, they bought CBS’s publishing company — which managed the copyrights for about 250,000 songs, including evergreens like “Over the Rainbow” and “New York, New York” — for $125 million. Barely two years later, in early 1989, they sold it to Thorn-EMI, the parent company of the British label EMI, for $337 million, the highest price ever paid in music publishing up to that time.
In the years following that deal, Mr. Koppelman, as EMI’s top manager of music recordings in the United States, oversaw hugely successful records, such as the 1990 debut album by Wilson Phillips, the pop trio composed of daughters of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas.
“He’s like King Midas,” Wilson Phillips’ Carnie Wilson said of Mr. Koppelman in New York magazine in 1992. “Everything he touches turns to gold.”
Charles Arthur Koppelman was born on March 30, 1940 in Brooklyn and grew up in Laurelton, Queens. His father, Irving Koppelman, worked at a printing press, and his mother, Ruth (Lerman) Koppelman, was an assistant to the principal of Far Rockaway High School, which Charles attended.
A sports enthusiast, Charles grew up intending to become a physical education teacher. But while enrolled at Adelphi University, he and two classmates formed a vocal group called the Ivy Three. In 1960 they had a hit with “Yogi”, a new track that mixed the story of a yoga master – “a weirdo who stood on his head” – with slogans from the cartoon character Yogi Bear. It went to number 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.
Mr. Koppelman was mentioned as one of the songwriters, and although he uttered lyrics like “I’m a Yogi, baby,” he always noted that musically he was the least skilled of the group.
“Actually, I really can’t sing,” he told The New York Times in 1980.
The Ivy Three never had another hit and Mr. Koppelman served with the Coast Guard for a while. But the success of “Yogi” led him and Don Rubin, another member of the Ivy Three, to mogul Don Kirshner. His company Aldon Music was one of the top songwriting shops in New York at the time, employing a large group of hit writers such as Neil Sedaka and the teams of Carole King-Gerry Goffin and Jeff Barry-Ellie Greenwich.
Outnumbered by those writers, Mr. Koppelman found himself on the management side of the business and was drawn to the music publishing business: handling the work of songwriters and maximizing revenue from those copyrights.
In a story Mr. Koppelman loved to tell, he was at a music industry event early in his career when he saw a group of executives, plainly dressed and nervously chain-smoking cigarettes—record company men, he was told. In another part of the room sat the music publishers, dressed in fine suits and happily enjoying cigars.
“I want to be involved in that,” Mr. Koppelman concluded, as Brian Koppelman, a film and television producer who is one of the creators of the show “Billions,” told me in an interview.
In 1965, Mr. Koppelman and Mr. Rubin started a manufacturing company, Koppelman & Rubin Associates. They signed the Lovin’ Spoonful (“Do You Believe in Magic”) and collaborated with songwriters such as Tim Hardin, whose song “If I Were a Carpenter” became a Top 10 hit for Bobby Darin in 1966, in a version that became produced by Mr. Koppelman and Mr. Rubin.
After the pair sold their company, Mr. Koppelman started working at CBS. In 1975, he founded the Entertainment Company with real estate developer Samuel LeFrak and Mr. Bandier. Mr. Koppelman developed a close relationship with Mrs. Streisand and served as an executive producer on a series of her albums in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In 1986, after Mr. Koppelman and Mr. Bandier left their partnership with Mr. LeFrak, they teamed up with Mr. Swid – an investor in furniture companies, Spin magazine and the “21” Club – to buy CBS Songs, the music publishing company, to buy. division of CBS Inc. Their new company, SBK Entertainment World, takes its name from the initials of the three men.
After selling SBK to EMI, the music industry and Wall Street tweeted whether CBS sold its publishing holdings for too little or if EMI paid too much. Mr. Koppelman and Mr. Bandier joined EMI and the company also founded SBK Records as a joint venture.
In 1985, when Brian Koppelman was a student at Tufts University, he saw Tracy Chapman perform at a coffee house and encouraged his father to sign her on as a songwriter. He did, and Mrs. Chapman’s debut album, released by Elektra Records in 1988, went to No. 1 and established her as a major talent.
SBK quickly put themselves on the pop map with Wilson Phillips and Technotronic (“Pump Up the Jam”). It also had a huge hit in 1990 with Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby”, which became the first rap song to reach No. 1 on the Hot 100 across all genres.
While Vanilla Ice quickly became a laughingstock when the gritty backstory in his official SBK biography was revealed to be fictional, Brian Koppelman said his father never regretted releasing “Ice Ice Baby” and knew from the moment he heard that the song would be a hit.
In addition to his son, Mr. Koppelman is survived by his wife, Gerri Kyhill Koppelman; two daughters, Jennifer Koppelman Hutt and Stacy Koppelman Fritz; a sister, Roz Katz; and seven grandchildren.
Mr. Koppelman left EMI in 1997 and came to specialize in working with troubled brands. He was the chairman of Steve Madden Ltd. from 2000 to 2004, a period in which Mr. Madden was convicted and convicted of securities fraud. In 2004, the year Mrs. Stewart was convicted of obstructing a federal investigation into her stock dealings, Mr. Koppelman joined the board of directors of her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. He served as chairman of the company from 2005 to 2011.
In the mid-2000s, he also worked as a financial advisor to Michael Jackson for some time. In later years, Mr. Koppelman’s company, CAK Entertainment, negotiated brand deals for celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Nicki Minaj, and Adam Levine, and served as advisor to Prince’s estate.
In interviews Mr. Koppelman was often asked to explain his success, and his standard answer was that it was a combination of smarts, luck and hard work.
“Was I lucky my son went to Tufts and heard Tracy Chapman?” he asked in an interview with New York magazine. “Was I lucky enough that the man came in and gave me the Lovin’ Spoonful? You bet I was. But I am also a workaholic.”
