AICPA

MP3tunes.com Rockin' CEO

She thought self-releasing 10 commercially successful albums was rewarding – and then the music site MP3tunes.com came knocking, and Emily Richards, CPA, became a musician turned-president. Read on to find out how she went from band room to boardroom.

By Fred Goodman

For 8 days each summer, Nevada’s Black Rock Desert is transformed into a community-gone-wild. As home to the Burning Man Festival, the site is filled with the 40,000 artists and “citizens” who comprise the experimental community and enliven it with their own radical, unique, and artistic expressions. There’s everything from flame-throwing monster trucks to a man dressed as a 10-foot-tall pink mushroom. And that’s the tame stuff. So who, exactly, would make the trek to the hot, dry, cell phone-reception-free desert? Well, Emily Richards, for one: As president of MP3tunes.com, attending and performing at Burning Man is just another day at the office. It’s not exactly the place you’d expect to find a corporate topper who spends 12-hour workdays pushing to make her company into one of the top music download and storage sites on the Internet. But then, Richards isn’t like most executives. She is a songwriter, pianist, and performer who has recorded and released 10 albums on her own Rillriver Records label. Oh, and she’s a CPA, too. She worked for years as an accountant at a global firm, but she’s best known as one of the most popular artists on the Internet; her songs have been downloaded nearly 3 million times. “So much of life is the luck of the draw,” says Richards. “When you’re presented with an opportunity, the question is how far can you run with it?”

Taking control

Richards’s first chance to enter into the music world was etched with rock star havoc: While attending the University of Utah as a music and dance major, Richards was severely injured in a car accident. “The doctors told me I’d need a year or two to heal and I couldn’t dance anymore. Even playing the piano wasn’t feasible.” Instead, she switched her major to accounting. “My father is a business consultant. He wanted me to be a music major, but I had [his] example and felt I could do it.” After passing her CPA exam, Richards took a job in the Salt Lake City office of PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she quickly rose through the ranks to become a manager. Before long, she was working with some of the office’s key clients, including Adrian Swire, whose high-profile Swire Pacific includes Cathay Pacific Airways and Coca-Cola bottlers in the Pacific and in the Midwest, U.S., equity investment giant Bain Capital of Boston, and a privately held oil company “with lots of subsidiaries” that valued its secrecy – and that she still declines to name. “It was a tremendous learning experience,” she says of her days in the office. “I spent 5 years in Salt Lake City, working 70 to 80 hours a week and traveling all over. We had such a small office. I never worked so hard. It was great.”

But music was in her blood and Richards didn’t abandon it. “I’d come home at night and write songs.” When Salt Lake City’s Cinemark Theaters movie chain held a country songwriting competition, she entered on a lark – and won. First prize ended up being her golden ticket: She won the opportunity to record an album in a Nashville studio with a Grammy-winning producer and to appear as an opening act for country music superstar Martina McBride. “I was very excited, but I couldn’t have known at the time what a great opportunity this would be,” she recalls. Reinvigorated as a musician, she returned to Price Waterhouse in Salt Lake City to discover she had a new fan club: Her co-workers were incredibly encouraging and insisted she continue to make music and live the dream. Among them was one particularly helpful office supervisor, Scott Nielsen, who Richards says became a mentor to her. “Scott was a baseball player and had pitched for the New York Yankees,” she says. “He would still play and then work the busy season at PricewaterhouseCoopers from January through April. They had experience with flexible schedules.”

Go west, young woman

Jamming her music while cramming together tax returns made more sense in a city with a bigger music industry, so Richards packed up and headed west, to Los Angeles. There, she scored a 3-day work week and extended time off for summer tours, at PricewaterhouseCoopers. She also used her music and business skills to form Rillriver Records, her own label, to record and market her music. “I wanted to maintain my independence,” she says. “I was given many opportunities [to work with the major record companies] and it was never quite right. They’d say, ‘You need to be sexy’ or ‘You need to dumb down.’ There was always some compromise I wasn’t comfortable with. It’s not that I’m against the record industry, but I liked having more freedom.” When MP3s and other downloading technology created a revolution for music on the Internet, Richards got in on the ground floor. Music and technology entrepreneur Michael Robertson approached her to post some of her music for downloading on his upstart site, MP3.com. “I had no idea what it was about,” she admits. But she was a wildly popular artist with the site’s users: Within a year, her songs had been downloaded 700,000 times, eventually reaching nearly 3 million. By splitting time between PricewaterhouseCoopers and her music, Richards was able to record 10 albums and make 4 North American tours by 2003. The following year, though, would prove life-changing. In coordination with Rock the Vote, a national organization that registers young voters, she embarked on a 9-month tour that she calls personally profound. It opened her up to “beautiful parts of the human side of this country,” something she felt she missed in the business world. “I felt I could make better use of my experience by educating people, talking with people in public accounting, and stirring up their moral compass,” she explains. But the most dramatic change in Richards’s life was the tragic death of her 19-year-old sister, Annie, who was killed by a drunk driver in Utah. “She was my favorite person,” Richards says. As a memorial, she co-founded AWAKE Community, an artists’ collective that seeks to inspire positive progress in the world through concerts, workshops, and business presentations in a variety of areas that concern Richards, including drunk driving, corporate ethics, and sustainable energy. “I needed to use music for more than entertainment.”

When you least expect it…

If Richards’s road as a performer and activist seemed laid out, it soon took another turn. While performing a Fort Lauderdale concert in support of biodiesel fuel, Richards received a call from MP3.com founder Robertson. Having sold his company to Universal Music, the world’s largest record company, Robertson was ready to start MP3tunes.com as another music website. This time, he wanted Richards to be the president. The skills she garnered as a CPA, where she learned intimately the intricacies of running a business, blended with her personal knowledge of the issues faced by artists, made her the obvious choice. “It blew my mind,” she says. “It was a hard decision because I thought I was going down another path. But I’ve always thought art is where new thought forms. And that certainly makes technology an art form. I’ve been given a rare opportunity to see both sides of the music business, as a CPA and a musician. There are things the two sides don’t understand about each other, and I’m often the bridge.”

So the 12-hour days Richards routinely puts in as president of the San Diego-based MP3tunes.com has forced her to put her music career on hold, right? Wrong. “I don’t go to the movies, I don’t own a television,” she says. “My entertainment is writing songs – so I have time to do both. I’ve written 3 albums in the year-and-a-half since taking the job.” The sense of mission that punctuates her music career is also in ample evidence in her dedication to MP3tunes.com business plan, which gives musicians a site to have their work downloaded. “I’m at a place where I can help other musicians and further open music. People have to hear your music in order to become a fan. This is all about creating fans.” In the final analysis, Richards’s greatest satisfaction has come from creating her own unique and exciting career. “When I got hurt in college and switched to accounting,” she recalls, “people said, ‘You’ll never be able to combine that with your love of music.’ They said I’d have to give up playing.” She pauses, a big grin creeping across her face. “I guess I proved them wrong.”