I walked in and it was Ted in one corner, Jimmy sitting on top of the couch-not how normal people sit on the couch- John McClain, Tom, Michael Papale, Marc Benesch and David Cohen, all in the room. But most importantly, my wife, Frances -who was my fiancée at the time-was working in management with Ron Laffitte, and they recommended me for the job. I already knew Tom Whalley from when I worked in the mailroom at Warner Bros. “The story is,” he recalled in a 2017 HITS interview, “I was working at WEA, and Interscope wanted someone in marketing and sales who understood the WEA system, because they were distributed through Atlantic.

He started the gig six months after Interscope’s launch. Three years later, Berman landed at the label he’s called home ever since. native made a brief return to WB before joining WEA Distribution’s marketing department in 1988. After attending UCLA and Cal State Northridge, the L.A.

Records, where his uncle Lenny Waronker was President. Berman’s been there since the beginning, pulling the levers and pushing the buttons from behind the scenes, playing a central role in keeping the Interscope machine firing on all cylinders.Ī third-generation music exec, Berman is the grandson of indie legend Si Waronker, co-founder of Liberty Records, and his first gig, as a teen, was working in the mailroom at Warner Bros. But Berman’s perch in the label’s official pecking order doesn’t begin to describe his value to the company, which is having a top-of-the-heap renaissance under Janick, hitting an all-time high in marketshare in 2020 with a 10+.

They’re not big on job titles at Interscope, though, for what it’s worth, Steve Berman is officially Vice Chairman, meaning he’s second in command to Chairman/CEO John Janick.

His Seed by Steve Berman