Jimmy Iovine has been one of the most influential people in the music industry over the past 35 years, not just in terms of the records he's produced but the products he's helped invent. Find out how he went from Brooklyn beginnings to billionaire.

Jimmy Iovine was born in Brooklyn in 1953 and raised in an Italian working-class family. His father was a longshoreman at the city's docks, working unloading cargo, and his mother was a secretary.

After flunking out of college in 1971 at the age of 19, his cousin found him menial jobs working in recording studios sweeping floors and making coffee. He proceeded to lose his first three jobs in studios and was looking at a career similar to his father. Fortunately, everything was about to change.

Iovine was given a last-chance job at Record Plant Studios in New York under the tutelage of a fledgling record producer called Roy Cicala who had worked with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, David Bowie and many more. Cicala liked the loveable rogue that Iovine was becoming and took him under his wing. Jimmy became a sound engineer at the studios and a permanent fixture in the early 1970s.

On Easter Sunday in 1974, the staff at Record Plant Studios asked Iovine to come into work and man the phones just as he was about to have Easter dinner with his family. Against his family’s wishes, he went into work. When he arrived, he saw that John Lennon was in the studio with Cicala recording tracks for his new solo album. Cicala was testing Iovine’s dedication and he was asked to man the mixing desk at these recording sessions.

In 1974 and 1975, Iovine worked as a sound engineer on Bruce Springsteen’s classic Born To Run album, which went on to sell eight million copies worldwide. Talking to the New York Times about the experience, Iovine said: “My life changed because Bruce Springsteen got on a mic in front of me.”

Although Iovine had learned a great deal from Cicala at the Record Plant, he began to carve out his own budding career as a record producer. His first major breakthrough as a producer was on the Patti Smith album Easter, which included the Top 40 hit Because The Night. The single reached 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and scaled as high as number five in the UK charts.

To further his producing career, Iovine moved out to LA. Although he was now in his mid-20s, this was the first time he’d lived in a house. Growing up in New York, Iovine had only lived in apartments. He began making a name for himself by producing albums for the likes of Tom Petty, the Pretenders, Dire Straits and Stevie Nicks, to name just a few.

Iovine became one of the biggest-selling record producers in the world in the late 1970s and for most of the 1980s. One of his biggest sellers came in 1988 when he produced the U2 album Rattle and Hum. The album has sold over 14 million copies to date. U2 lead singer Bono once said that Jimmy’s “brutal honesty” is why he's so important to an artist when making a record.

As the 1980s came to an end, Iovine had become disenchanted with producing records and began to seek out a new challenge. He was now much older than the artists he was producing and was no longer the innovator he once was in the studio. A conversation with the music industry mogul David Geffen set him on a very different path to becoming a successful businessman.

In 1989 Iovine formed Interscope Records, which went on to become the most notorious and most successful record companies of the 1990s and beyond. Iovine joined forces with billionaire businessman Ted Field in a $20 million joint venture with Warner Music Group’s Atlantic Records. Iovine served as CEO and Chairman of Interscope right up until May 2014.

Although Interscope had early mainstream success with Latin artist Rico Suave, Iovine’s life changed forever when he was introduced to Dr Dre and Marion ‘Suge’ Knight, Dre's business partner at the time, in 1991. Dre and Suge played Iovine Dre's The Chronic album. Iovine encouraged Dre and Knight to form their own record label, the infamous Death Row Records, so they could own their own masters. This was a model that Jimmy replicated numerous times with other artists over the next decade, giving artists more creative and financial control. 

The Chronic sold over six million copies and influenced a generation of hip-hop artists. The partnership between Dre and Iovine went on to move the needle of popular culture several times over the next 20 years.

Most people assumed that Interscope was a hip-hop label. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Jimmy wanted to make Interscope the “new Atlantic Records” by signing artists from a wide spectrum of music genres. To go along with Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg and Tupac, Iovine went on to sign an eclectic selection of artists such as Marilyn Manson (pictured), Nine Inch Nails and Blackstreet.

As gangster rap began penetrating mainstream America via the likes of Dre and Snoop, Interscope was taking serious flack and coming under the microscope from the media and even the CIA and US government, which were concerned that it was glorifying gun violence.

Time Warner, the owners of Warner Music, were under mounting pressure from the media and government. They decided to sell their 50% stake in Interscope back to Ted Field and Jimmy Iovine for a reported $115 million in 1995. Iovine and Field then flipped the shares by selling the 50% stake in Interscope to MCA Inc., which is now called Universal Music, for $200 million in 1996.

Iovine famously discovered Eminem, via a recommendation from Dr Dre, on a rap freestyle battle VHS tape in 1997. Eminem went on to sign a deal with Dr Dre’s Aftermath Records and a distribution deal with Interscope. Jimmy also financed Eminem’s movie 8 Mile. His second album, The Marshall Mathers LP, became the fastest-selling rap album of all time, moving 1.78 million copies in the first week alone. The album went on to sell a gargantuan 35 million copies worldwide.

In 1999, Interscope merged with Geffen Records to form Interscope Geffen A&M Records. MCA changed its name to Universal Records. In 2000, Universal became the first record company to break the $1 billion (£750 million) in earnings mark and held a 28.3% market share of all the records produced during that time. Other artists on the label at the time included Limp Bizkit, Enrique Iglesias and Madonna.

Strolling along the sands of his beachfront California mansion in 2006, Jimmy visited his friend and neighbour Dr Dre, who informed him of a recent offer to put his name to a new brand of sneakers. Iovine, who was looking for a way out of the record industry due to the ongoing online piracy issues, was famously quoted as saying: “Forget sneakers, how about speakers”.

While the likes of Bose were creating headphones that were quiet enough to use on an airplane, Iovine wanted to market party headphones that would also become a fashion accessory. Jimmy and Dre formed the Beats by Dre headphone brand back in 2008 and set on their path to dominating the market.

The Taiwanese smartphone company HTC purchased a 50.1% stake in Beats Electronics in 2011 for a reported $309 million (£232.8m). This gave HTC the exclusive rights to use the Beats-branded audio systems in its phones. Over the course of the next few years, HTC would sell half of its shares back to Beats.

By 2011, Beats by Dre were taking the world by storm. Iovine used his access to the most famous music artists to ensure they all wore Beats headphones in public, making them an essential fashion accessory in the urban market. The NPD Group reported that the headphone giants had a massive 64% share of the headphones industry for products costing $100 and upwards.

Iovine conjured up one of the best marketing concepts of modern times by giving out Beats headphones to competitors at the 2012 Olympics in London. The USA basketball team were all sporting Beats headphones in US flag colours even though it was not an official sponsor of the event. Although Beats was eventually banned from the Olympics, marketing strategies like this saw the Beats brand reach a valuation of $1 billion (£750 million) by the close of 2013.

In a deal that was almost upturned because Dr Dre accidentally and prematurely announced it to the world on Twitter, Apple purchased Beats Electronics from Iovine, Dre and the company’s other shareholders for a reported $3.3 billion (£2.49bn) in May 2014. The deal was immortalised in 2018 TV series The Defiant Ones, which detailed the relationship between Dre and Iovine.

As part of the deal, Iovine went to work for Apple and was an instrumental part of the formation of Apple Music. Although Iovine’s exact role was undisclosed, his job was to find ways to create a paid streaming service that would offer a sensible way for artists to get paid royalties and a new way for people to absorb musical content online. He stood down as CEO of Interscope Records.

Over the course of the past few years, Apple Music has gained over 56 million subscribers as it tried to win market share from leader Spotify. In August 2018, Iovine stepped back into a 'consulting' role, while a number of other executives from the Beats acquisition have either left or stepped back from their roles too, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

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In The Defiant Ones, Iovine offered advice to budding entrepreneurs. He described his own route to success as “using fear as a tailwind” to propel yourself forward at all times. He said that nothing lasts forever and that remaining still creates stagnancy. He didn’t want to be the last one to close the door after record industry sales had collapsed. But, with a reported net worth of $970 million (£730.7m), the now 65-year-old music industry mogul has certainly cashed in on the huge changes in the worlds of both music and technology.

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