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"  Rivers and streams have Robert Kennedy Jr. Wolves have Ashley Judd. And the music business has Julie Greenwald, a crusader fighting a pitched battle to save it from extinction. It&amp;#039;s a gloomy afternoon in midtown Manhattan, and Greenwald, 39, who in February was promoted from president to COO of Atlantic Records, sits behind her vast, modernist desk jolting her between-meeting slump with a latte. Although she&amp;#039;s the most powerful woman in the industry, her swank corner office lacks the typical framed photos of an executive in grinning armlocks with famous musicians. One wall is lined with black-and-white portraits of her two children, 10-year-old Lulu and five-year-old Eli. Hot pink sticky notes decorated with abstract kid art are Scotch-taped to her telephone. Two Damien Hirst butterfly paintings hang above a row of cushy couches. And just past the door is a work by artist Michael Scoggins\u2014a giant sheet of loose-leaf paper designed to look like a high school homework assignment, filled from top to bottom with a single repeated sentence: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m still a good person. I&amp;#039;m still a good person. I&amp;#039;m still a good person.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s Greenwald&amp;#039;s reference to the fact that, unlike the environment or wolves, the industry she&amp;#039;s sworn to protect isn&amp;#039;t particularly cherished or beloved by, well, anyone\u2014fans, music critics, the artists themselves. &amp;quot;Everybody beats down on the music business,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;If a record doesn&amp;#039;t work, it&amp;#039;s my fault. The industry is declining, and it&amp;#039;s my fault. So I put that up as my daily affirmation.&amp;quot; A little beat-down is okay, though\u2014Greenwald doesn&amp;#039;t mind playing the underdog. Petite and thin-framed, with her unruly auburn hair tucked into a knot, Greenwald is dressed down in a vintage ripped Cheap Trick T-shirt, skintight jeans, and Lanvin pumps. She has a street-tough New York accent and a rapid-fire speech pattern sprinkled with yos and dopes, a holdover from her &amp;#039;90s stint as an up-and-coming executive at the independent hip-hop label Def Jam. Although she&amp;#039;s not a household name herself, Greenwald has spent her 17-year career as consigliere to some of the giants of contemporary music. Jay-Z, with whom she worked at Def Jam in the &amp;#039;90s, once gave her the two-way-pager code name Cool Jules. Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 trades Vegas gaming stories with her. Toni Braxton, recently signed to Atlantic after a four-year hiatus from recording, previews tracks for Greenwald in Los Angeles. And Sean &amp;quot;Diddy&amp;quot; Combs, whose Bad Boy Entertainment is under Atlantic&amp;#039;s umbrella, puts her in a league with legendary music executives like Clive Davis and Atlantic founder Ahmet Ertegun. &amp;quot;You gotta understand, she grew up on tour buses with LL Cool J and Public Enemy and Run-DMC,&amp;quot; Diddy says. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s one of the reasons why hip-hop is where it&amp;#039;s at today. She&amp;#039;s probably the coolest white Jewish girl in history.&amp;quot;  A dynamic break from the fat-cat suits of the past, Greenwald is shrewd and hardworking, but has a mischievous, earthy streak; she prefers to play the nurturer rather than the dictator. However, she&amp;#039;s going to need her daily affirmation today\u2014she has to meet with label staffers whose contracts are up for renewal and break the news that they won&amp;#039;t be getting raises. Beyond the overall economic recession, the music business is in its tenth year of a downward slide, thanks to illegal filesharing, the changeover to digital distribution, an audience shift from albums to singles, and the shuttering of chain and independent record stores nationwide. In 1999, the industry generated nearly $15 billion in revenue; last year, it barely cracked $10 billion. &amp;quot;I keep telling everybody, I would love to give raises but I can&amp;#039;t,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m looking at this climate. I&amp;#039;m like, `Do you not read the newspaper? Have you not seen what&amp;#039;s happening in the marketplace?&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  Still, Atlantic has more bright spots than most labels. As one of the most storied companies in rock history\u2014founded by Erte-gun in 1947, it&amp;#039;s been home to Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Led Zeppelin, and the Rolling Stones\u2014it had nevertheless foundered by the early 2000s, bogged down by a bloated staff, excessive spending habits, and an unwieldy roster. Greenwald took over in 2004 with a machete in hand. She hatcheted the ranks, halved the number of musicians on the label from 200 to less than 100, and instituted a climate of cost-cutting and lean corporate living. She lives by a mantra: Bring down T&amp;amp;amp;E (meaning stop wasting money on frivolous garbage). She&amp;#039;s ended vanity spending like billboards on the Sunset Strip. She flies economy instead of first class and hurtles around New York City on the subway rather than enlisting a car service. &amp;quot;There were sightings of me on the subway, and e-mails would fly around the company,&amp;quot; Greenwald says. &amp;quot;You gotta walk the walk. I&amp;#039;m 207 people. I want to keep 207 people. So if I can bring down my T&amp;amp;amp;E, your T&amp;amp;amp;E, it helps our bottom line. I keep bodies.&amp;quot;  Greenwald&amp;#039;s econo mentality has paid off: Atlantic, which languished at No. 13 in market share for total units sold in 2004, finished off last year at No. 1. Recent hits include the Twilight soundtrack, country newbie Zac Brown, hard rockers Shinedown, and pop-rapper Flo Rida, who set an industry record this spring when his cover of Dead or Alive&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Right Round&amp;quot; was downloaded 636,000 times its first week of release. Greenwald is the queen of recalibrated expectations. She thinks musicians and executives alike need to relearn what constitutes a hit these days. &amp;quot;How we&amp;#039;re going to define success is going to be different, because every day the climate changes so much,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;We can&amp;#039;t look at what happened five years ago and say, `It&amp;#039;s all about selling 10 million albums.&amp;#039; Nobody&amp;#039;s selling 10 million albums anymore. If I&amp;#039;m selling T-shirts on you, and we&amp;#039;re growing your tour business, and we&amp;#039;ve got you to 200,000 albums, and we sold a few million singles, hell yeah I&amp;#039;m going to high-five you and say that was supersuccessful.&amp;quot;  Greenwald&amp;#039;s philosophy runs through all levels of the company, from Lyor Cohen, her famed boss at the Warner Music Group, Atlantic&amp;#039;s parent company, down through the entry level. And yet, the Atlantic team does occasionally run into industry types whose heads are stuck in the ancient past of, say, 2006. At 5 p.m. it&amp;#039;s meeting time: A dozen department heads, aged in their mid-twenties to mid-forties, file into her office and drape themselves on couches and window ledges. The subject of the meeting is an up-and-coming performer named Paolo Nutini, a 22-year-old Scottish singer-songwriter who&amp;#039;s on the verge of releasing his second Atlantic album, Sunny Side Up. Nutini&amp;#039;s 2006 debut, These Streets, was one of Greenwald&amp;#039;s hell-yeah high-fivers: It garnered airplay on VH1 and a radio format known as Hot AC (Adult Contemporary), earned Nutini big-league festival gigs and an opening slot for the Rolling Stones, and eventually sold 2 million copies worldwide. But no one in Greenwald&amp;#039;s office is taking that same level of success for granted this time around. The album is a marketing challenge for Greenwald and her staff: It&amp;#039;s sensitive, introspective, and not as pop-minded as his last album. With wide-ranging influences from folk to ska to blue-eyed soul, it evokes comparisons to Van Morrison&amp;#039;s landmark 1968 album, Astral Weeks, which, as one staff member quips, &amp;quot;took 39 years to sell.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a creeper,&amp;quot; says Dave Saslow, head of video promotion. A creeper means he had to listen to it many times before it sank in; short-attention-span listeners, bombarded with media, might not give it the same chance.  The guest of honor at today&amp;#039;s meeting is Michael Luba, one of Nutini&amp;#039;s managers. A scruffy, thirtyish guy with a blond beard and a shoulder bag, Luba is here today to coordinate Nutini&amp;#039;s promotional campaign and, on a broader level, get the company pumped about the record. He points out prestige bookings on this year&amp;#039;s Coachella festival in California and at a beautiful nineteenth-century London music hall. But, staffers remind him, in the United States at least, press and radio have been slow to get behind the record.  Luba presents plans for an upcoming U.S. tour that will include a stop at Webster Hall, a notable music venue in New York City. Greenwald has been listening intently, flipping through her diary, not saying a word. &amp;quot;Let me ask you a question,&amp;quot; she suddenly says. The room goes motionless.  &amp;quot;To fill out a Webster Hall, because it&amp;#039;s not going to be on a Hot AC station here\u2014how do we fill out 1,300 people?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I think we can kill it in New York,&amp;quot; he says, forcibly grinning. &amp;quot;I think we&amp;#039;re going to do great on this whole run.&amp;quot;  Greenwald fixes him with a direct look. &amp;quot;Listen, he&amp;#039;s been out of the marketplace for a minute,&amp;quot; she says, like a math teacher explaining a fundamental principle. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re in a full-blown recession. The album is coming out with not a lot of monstrous press. Last time we had VH1, we had Hot AC\u2014we&amp;#039;re not going to have that. I like shows that sell out. Then we&amp;#039;re not all scrambling to try to pack a house.&amp;quot;  She suggests that Luba bump down the venue to the smaller Fillmore East, which will be easier to fill. But Luba won&amp;#039;t cave. &amp;quot;To be honest,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;this run was, we felt, very conservative. If you put 1,000 people in Webster Hall, it&amp;#039;s a mob scene\u2014&amp;quot;  Greenwald turns to Livia Tortella, executive VP of marketing, for help. &amp;quot;Who was it that I saw there, when there was space?&amp;quot; she says. She makes space sound like a dirty word, gesturing to the empty air around her.  Tortella takes her boss&amp;#039;s back. &amp;quot;I think what Julie&amp;#039;s saying is, we&amp;#039;re seeing a lot of acts come back and things are really different and harder. We&amp;#039;re seeing it every day.&amp;quot; Luba talks about Nutini&amp;#039;s ticket sales in Europe and in the U.S. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m stressing about a lot of shit,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Selling 1,000 tickets in New York is not one of them.&amp;quot;  Greenwald leans across the desk toward Luba. Her tone is still friendly, but she pounds her fist into her hand. &amp;quot;Honey, I sit with so many managers who tell me how fantastic it&amp;#039;s going to be, and then they call me freaking out.&amp;quot; Luba looks dazed, his face drained, a mask of defeat.  Growing up in a small town in New York&amp;#039;s Catskill Mountains, Greenwald never dreamed of gleaming executive offices and backstage passes. She liked music: She listened to AM radio with her family in the car, and in college went through an alternative phase, digging 10,000 Maniacs, New Order, Depeche Mode, and the Cure. But Greenwald was never a record geek. What really defined her upbringing was community service. Her parents were entrepreneurs who owned pharmacies in upstate New York. &amp;quot;[My father] always taught me to be independent.&amp;quot; Her mother, she adds, &amp;quot;was the Jew of all Jews&amp;quot;\u2014raising four daughters, working, cooking, giving her time to local charities. &amp;quot;I had the ultimate role model. I grew up with a sense of, `I need to give back.&amp;#039; My dad was the town supervisor\u2014he and my mom used to do a giant Easter egg hunt. I&amp;#039;d make candy bags. At Thanksgiving, we&amp;#039;d deliver turkeys. That&amp;#039;s just what you did.&amp;quot;  In 1991, after graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans with a BA in political science and English, she joined Teach for America and taught elementary school in New Orleans. Her goal was to become an education lobbyist. But when her first school year ended, she went home to New York for the summer and landed a job as an assistant to Lyor Cohen, who then ran Rush Management and soon moved her over to the promotions department at Def Jam Recordings. Started by producer Rick Rubin and impresario Russell Simmons in the mid-&amp;#039;80s, Def Jam was the premier independent hip-hop label in the country, home to Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, and Public Enemy. By &amp;#039;92, Cohen was Simmons&amp;#039; partner and a renowned character in the hip-hop world. &amp;quot;He was this tall Israeli with jet-black curly hair,&amp;quot; she remembers. &amp;quot;He had this weird accent. He talks kind of like Herman Munster.&amp;quot; Cohen, for his part, was wildly taken with Greenwald. &amp;quot;Extraordinarily diligent,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Serious. Thorough. Nice. Positive.&amp;quot; When the summer ended, &amp;quot;I probably tried to tackle her to stay.&amp;quot; Greenwald decided to adjust her career plans.  At Def Jam, hip-hop was a cause, and the label a grassroots organization; it was here that Greenwald honed her scrappy, outsider attitude. Cohen put her in charge of different departments at the company. &amp;quot;We were so small,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I worked radio, I made videos, did photo-shoot budgets, finance, marketing. It was the best hands-on training in the world, man.&amp;quot; Her tasks also included managing the quixotic characters who created the music. &amp;quot;Flavor Flav [of Public Enemy] used to purposefully lose me in airports,&amp;quot; she says.  By the mid-&amp;#039;90s, thanks to hits like Warren G&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Regulate&amp;quot; and LL Cool J&amp;#039;s Mr. Smith, hip-hop was exploding. Def Jam had next-generation rappers such as Jay-Z and DMX. And when the industry refused to embrace some of Def Jam&amp;#039;s hard-core acts, Greenwald learned simply to go around it. DMX refused to clean up his explicit single &amp;quot;Get at Me Dog,&amp;quot; so Greenwald brainstormed a tour with Onyx and Def Squad that she called &amp;quot;Survival of the Illest.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We didn&amp;#039;t go pop\u2014we said, `We&amp;#039;re bringing the streets back.&amp;#039; We came up with a campaign that let you know that we were dealing with the streets, with the danger, which was what made hip-hop so exciting. We put them on a promo tour that went around the country and tore it up. And the guy ended up selling 4 or 5 million records.&amp;quot; In 1999, Cohen and Simmons sold the label to Universal, creating a new, merged major label called Island Def Jam, with Greenwald as executive VP and president of its subsidiary label Island Records. There she branched effortlessly into rock and pop, working with bands like Bon Jovi. &amp;quot;I like making people stretch,&amp;quot; Cohen says. &amp;quot;Every time I threw something more challenging at her, she was more psyched and more successful.&amp;quot;  Cohen became head of recorded music at the Warner Music Group, Atlantic&amp;#039;s parent company, in 2004, and brought Greenwald up with him. Fixing Atlantic amid the industry&amp;#039;s worst downturn in the company&amp;#039;s history has been her biggest challenge yet. Her first job was to fire more than 150 people. &amp;quot;I came over eight months pregnant,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I ran around the company and had a month to interview as many people as possible, because I knew the date of my C-section. I was looking for people who weren&amp;#039;t married to the old Atlantic. Because I was like, `I am nothing of that. I am this new thing that grew up under this crazy man named Lyor Cohen, and I am a different type of animal.&amp;#039; I really needed people who were going to follow me.&amp;quot;  PICK UP THE JULY ISSUE OF ELLE FOR THE FULL STORY ON JULIE GREENWALD "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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