Miles Copeland

Music, power, politics, and the stories behind the stories.

This is my one and only official website. I have spent more than fifty years working in the music and entertainment business, usually at the point where talent, ambition, money, timing, ego, and blind luck collide. I managed The Police and Sting, founded I.R.S. Records, helped build careers and audiences for artists including R.E.M., the Go-Go’s, the Bangles, Squeeze, the Cramps, the Buzzcocks, Fine Young Cannibals, Concrete Blonde, and many others, and learned that the people who change an industry are rarely the ones waiting politely for permission.

My route into music was not conventional. I was born in wartime London, grew up between Washington and the Middle East, studied history, political science, and economics, and promoted my first concert in Beirut. My father’s career in the OSS and early CIA, my mother’s wartime intelligence service and later work in archaeology, and my own years in Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon gave me an early education in power, culture, propaganda, personalities, and the difference between what institutions say they are doing and what they are actually doing.

In London I helped form and develop Wishbone Ash, built a progressive-rock business, lost much of it in the spectacular financial education known as Startrucking ’75, and started again just as punk and new wave were tearing up the old rules. I financed The Police’s first American tour, pushed the group beyond the routes the industry considered sensible, and used that success to create I.R.S. Records—an independent-minded label that became a home for artists the mainstream had not yet learned how to understand.

The career kept expanding: artist management, records, touring, music publishing, television, film, songwriter retreats, international collaborations, and Arab and world music. The collaboration between Sting and Cheb Mami on “Desert Rose,” and the Jaguar campaign built around it, remains one of my favorite examples of culture and commerce strengthening each other instead of pretending they are enemies. In 2021 I published Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: My Life in the Music Business, a title that admits the failures are often at least as instructive as the victories.

Here I write and speak about the music business as it is, as it was, and as people like to pretend it was. I also write about politics, media, the Middle East, intelligence, history, business, and public power. I believe in free enterprise, facts, institutional competence, democracy, and the right to criticize one’s own side. I have very little use for party-line thinking, ideological purity, or commentators who begin with the answer and then go looking for evidence.

Super fans are welcome. So are super enemies. The only requirement is that the argument be more interesting than the slogan.