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*****
Because they *were* going to be different, in all the artistic ways that mattered to the fans, while secretly sharing the same financial infrastructure and negotiating power in all the corporate ways that didn't show on camera.
Above it all would sit Meyers Music Group. Invisible to the paparazzi or the gossip papers, but quietly present in every boardroom where the terms of the industry were set in stone.
What Sony, Universal, and Warner would build by 2005 and 2010 through the agonizing accumulation of a century's worth of bloody acquisition—Marvin intended to have already built by the time they finished drawing their blueprints.
Except his empire would be larger. And it would be built without buying anyone else's expensive mistakes.
The three studios running at a multi-million dollar loss right now were not a problem. They formed a foundational structure. And physical structures, unlike quarterly profits, could be pointed in a specific direction like a weapon.
He already knew which direction he was firing them.
So, here he stood in New York City for more than just finishing a ghost film.
The *Sixth Sense* soundtrack had been the simplest part of the East Coast trip.
He was not going to replicate the suspenseful score from the original timeline. That wasn't how he worked. Beyond that, the original score, while excellent, lacked the emotional immersion required for his standards.
The demonic *Night Stalkers* material was already built in his mind. It lived, screaming in a way that most commissioned film music spent its entire production schedule trying to become.
The architecture of the horror was right. The suffocating emotional register of the demonic music sat close enough to the film's tone that minor adjustments were all it required.
He made surgical tempo calibrations in heavy string movements. He adjusted transitional piano passages, giving them the breath needed to accommodate the agonizing pacing of Shyamalan's edits. He tweaked moments where the arrangement pushed the volume, but the cinematic scene needed the audio to recede into a whisper.
It was precise, surgical work. It looked effortlessly brilliant to the observing sound engineers, simply because he understood what was needed before touching a single fader on the mixing board.
In the normal Hollywood process, a film score didn't exist until the final edit was locked. You composed to the moving picture.
You mapped your music against the cut.
Unfinished things moved. Every composer understood this frustrating constraint—you waited, worked in rough sketches, and held vague approaches loosely until the picture explicitly told you what it needed.
Marvin did not need to wait for the editors.
The finished film existed inside his head with the completeness of something already seen. He knew every cut, every suffocating silence, every place where Night's camera held on Willis's tragic face for a beat longer than the audience expected.
He knew every place where the ghosts appeared, knowing the music needed to do something specific underneath, or the scare wouldn't land.
He had the reel in his head. He had always had the reel. The grueling editing process was merely a formality that applied to everyone else on earth.
The executive meeting with Daniel Voss was the last formal obligation of Marvin's morning, and the primary reason he remained in New York rather than returning to LA to check on Maratone.
Daniel Voss was a precise man. Not in the anxious way of middle managers who used precision to mask their incompetence. He was precise in the way of a veteran who had made peace with the fact that most problems were solvable, provided you were willing to be specific about their mechanics.
Voss was a sought-after former executive at a European branch of Sony Music. He was quietly responsible for breaking three international acts. He was known in the corridors of the industry as *"the guy who fixes failing labels."* He never stayed at a label long enough to become public-facing. His reputation stood: *"Voss doesn't sign artists. He builds environments where artists beg to sign themselves."*
He would run Maratone's East Coast operations the way a brilliant engineer ran a nuclear system: by understanding where the pressure tolerances were, knowing when to apply pressure and where to allow slack, and never confusing frantic activity with measurable progress.
He was a label maker rather than a true musician, in stark contrast to Max.
Marvin had headhunted him through a global process of elimination that took longer than his schedule preferred. The result justified the search.
Voss implicitly understood his young boss's plans. More importantly, he understood the reasoning behind them. When chaotic circumstances required interpretation—when a crisis arose that the master plans hadn't accounted for—Voss made instant decisions consistent with Marvin's intent, rather than blindly following the letter of the law.
The private meeting in the soundproof office ran forty minutes, not a second longer. They covered everything necessary without wasting a breath. Marvin left the room with the deep satisfaction of an architect who has built something massive, and returned months later to find it standing perfectly in the shape it was designed.
Max Martin's subsequent update proved to be the more creative part of the afternoon.
What Max was doing—hidden beneath the surface of whichever screaming operational problem currently held his attention—was moving rapidly on multiple tracks simultaneously. He kept each from crashing into the others, a more demanding skill than it appeared.
Track One: Maratone's and Wolf Cousins' development.
The studio compounds were young enough that everything about them was being established for the first time. Internal corporate workflows, financial relationships with elite session musicians and mastering engineers, and the vital creative culture that a recording environment develops in its sensitive early years, carrying forward essentially forever.
Max shaped this culture deliberately. It was the right approach; recording cultures that form accidentally tend to calcify in whatever toxic shape they land in. An accidental, toxic culture was rarely the right one for what Marvin needed his music labels to become.
Track Two: The Search.
Marvin had given Max a set of names. It was not a physical list that could be stolen or referenced by corporate spies. It was a set of names communicated in hushed conversation, some with geographical context attached, and some without. The simple instruction was: *Find them.*
Most of the names on Marvin's mental list were not findable yet in any commercial sense. They were unsigned, undiscovered, performing in sticky dive bars, or recording on cheap tape decks in childhood bedrooms. Or they were still sitting in middle school in obscure cities the industry wouldn't look at for several years.
Max looked for them anyway.
He was building the early, vital contacts. Identifying managers, stage parents, school teachers, and local industry figures who existed in close proximity to these future megastars. He was establishing a friendly presence in spaces where the recording industry's attention had not yet arrived.
When the time came to finally strike, the groundwork would be laid. This was how you secured the most valuable people on earth long before the bidding wars started.
Track Three: *My Heart Will Go On.*
This was currently the most commercially active asset in the portfolio, requiring a different kind of attention than the quiet development work. The song was moving like a hurricane. Radio relationships had been built correctly.
The global promotional infrastructure sat in place. And the publishing position—which Marvin had structured with a care that seemed, to people who didn't understand his reasoning, like paranoia for a song that hadn't proved itself—was now looking like the foresight of an uncomfortable precision.
Max understood this and managed the chaotic release period accordingly. He did not overexpose the track on MTV. He refused to burn radio goodwill before the moment it would do its most valuable work. He let the anticipation build the way it built best: slowly, and without appearing managed by a corporation.
Track Four: Catalog Hunting.
Marvin grasped something the late-90s music industry underestimated: catalog ownership held infinitely more value than the temporary glamour of hit singles.
The 90s industry remained obsessed with chasing the next chart-topping sensation. They neglected the long-term value hidden inside aging labels, forgotten publishing rights, regional distribution networks, and struggling independent catalogs bleeding money during the transition toward the digital age. Older executives viewed catalogs as dead weight unless the artists remained commercially active. Marvin viewed them as oil fields waiting for consolidation.
So while Max built talent pipelines and recording culture, another division of Wolf Cousins began hunting acquisitions.
Small labels drowning in debt. Boutique R&B imprints whose founders had burned through cash during the CD boom. Regional rock labels with valuable distribution rights but collapsing management structures. Tiny publishing companies holding partial songwriting ownership over tracks that still generated radio royalties years later. Marvin wanted all of them examined.
The process remained discreet.
Lawyers from Zenith Trust studied balance sheets, royalty structures, licensing agreements, physical distribution obligations, and publishing splits. Acquiring an entire struggling label often made more useful than purchasing individual catalogs.
Ownership meant inheriting the masters, dormant contracts, future royalty percentages, regional relationships, warehouse infrastructure, and hidden licensing rights that the original owners no longer valued.
The late-90s landscape made this strategy effective.
The major labels—Sony, Warner, Universal, and EMI—were powerful, but bloated. Their attention remained fixed on blockbuster releases, radio warfare, MTV rotation, and expensive bidding battles. Beneath them existed hundreds of vulnerable smaller labels surviving month-to-month despite controlling valuable intellectual property.
Marvin understood a future truth the rest of the industry had not grasped:
In the coming decades, ownership of masters and publishing rights would become one of the most powerful forms of entertainment wealth on earth.
Every forgotten soul track, regional rock anthem, niche Christmas song, background movie license, television syndication agreement, sampled drum pattern, and future streaming replay would continue generating money indefinitely.
Hits faded.
Ownership endured forever.
While the industry focused on celebrities, red carpets, and first-week sales, Marvin assembled something dangerous beneath the surface: a growing ocean of intellectual property that would print money long after individual stars rose and fell.
Track Five: The Backstreet Boys.
They served as the most revealing example of how the larger plan worked. They were not yet what they were going to be. The pop machinery that would make their faces unavoidable had not fully engaged. They got decent airplay and the right kind of attention in Europe, but they remained in the slow process of building the cultural mass required to reach escape velocity.
Max was patient with this development. Marvin had explained early on why patience here was not a passive choice, but an active, lethal one.
You did not push a new pop act into overexposure before the infrastructure was ready to convert that exposure into permanent loyalty. Exposure without loyalty was just cheap noise. Loyalty was the only thing that compounded over decades.
With Max present in New York holding the operational controls, completing *The Sixth Sense* score consumed little of what Marvin considered real energy.
He worked with the session engineers, handed off legalities, and made his adjustments with the efficiency of a teacher correcting a child's homework, rather than a composer creating from the ground up.
The machine ran flawlessly. The output would be exactly what it needed to be.
This left him standing in a concrete city he found interesting, with something rare and comfortable: unstructured time.
Marvin walked out of the Maratone building and onto the bustling streets of New York in early July. For a moment, he felt the heavy texture of the sprawling city in a humid season. It wore well.
He had time. An unusual amount of it. It was the kind of empty time that only opened when machines ran flawlessly, the people operating them were trusted, and nothing was on fire requiring his presence.
He was not good at doing nothing.
He was not built for leisure in the conventional human sense, nor for the passive consumption of an environment without extracting something useful from it.
But New York City did not require passivity. It rewarded attention, and Marvin had an unusual quantity of that to offer.
What he wanted from the city was what he wanted from any environment he moved through: *Information*.
Not the sanitized information from meetings or corporate briefings. He wanted the unmediated, bleeding kind that existed in the gritty texture of how things worked.
He wanted to know what was happening in the streets, the underground studios, the smaller venues, and the dark places where the industry's next iteration was assembling itself, without anyone announcing it.
The global music business in New York was organized around bloated structures that would not survive the coming decade intact. The legacy labels were slow, certain of their own size. The physical distribution infrastructure remained expensive, controlled by the same few entities that had controlled it for thirty years.
The idea that any of this was temporary—that the multi-billion-dollar architecture of how music reached listeners was about to be rebuilt from the ground up by a digital technology the industry did not take seriously—was not a mainstream position.
It was the fringe position of a small number of people, ignored with the cheerful confidence of institutions that had not yet found a financial reason to question their own permanence.
*****
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