MS Retailer August 15, 2007 - Vol.24 No.8 - Music & Sound Retailer

FiVE miNUTEs WiTH...neIl altneu, vICe PresIDentoF sales & marKetInG,PIoneer eleCtronICs’Pro auDIo & vIDeo DIvIsIonBy Brian BerkPioneer electronics probablyneeds little if any introduction.of course, the company is wellknown for its home entertainment,car audio and video, andnavigation products. But in Mi,Pioneer means dJ products.neil altneu, Pioneer’s VP ofsales and marketing of its pro audioand video division, certainlydidn’t start his career in the dJfield, as you’ll soon find out. Buthe always loved the industry. Wecalled altneu for his thoughts onthe industry.The Music & Sound Retailer:Please tell us about yourbackground. How long haveyou been in the industry, atPioneer, etc?Neil Altneu: it’s quite interesting.Before i got into the industry,i was actually selling seikowatches. i actually introducedthe lorus watch to the unitedstates back in 1982. that wasseiko’s answer to timex. it wasa low-end, high-quality watch.But when you’re selling watches,you’re on the periphery of theelectronics and jewelry industries.and a little in the health andbeauty aids industry also becausethose watches are found in drugstores as well. i always likedelectronics and i answered thissmall ad in the New York Timesback in 1987. Pioneer was lookingto hire a sales manager. i gotthe job and in 1988 we finalizedeverything. We set up an officein Fort lee, n.J. i asked him,“Where are the accounts?” Hehanded me the Yellow Pages andsaid, “Here, have fun.” that’s howit got started. What was interestingwas the first people whoembraced laser karaoke weredJs. i hooked up with a companycalled star dJs, a major companyin new Jersey. the president ofthe company was John Murphy.John went under the stage nameof Johnny James. He had about30 dJs working for him. He had adJ school. He told us we were bigin the industry and could makedJ products. in 1994, we introducedour first dJ player, whichwas a cdJ 500G. the “G” meantPioneer’s DVJ1000it’s cdG capable. that means it’sa cd that has video graphics onit. the graphics are words. thedJ player was capable of decodinga cdG disc as well as playingregular cds. We kind of turnedthe market upside-down withit. about six months later, weintroduced the dJM500 mixer. itwas a four-channel mixer. We gotthe idea to put the mixer togetherwith a couple of players and sellit as a system. once we did that,the whole line lit up like a christmastree. it was phenomenal. Wecouldn’t keep them in stock. Wechanged the whole market bytelling dJs it’s oK to use cds andwe’ve got the equipment that willallow you to do your performancein front of an audience. the lineevolved into other players.M&SR: While guitars anddrum sets see gradual changesas time goes by, DJ productshave changed drastically.People who stopped DJingin the mid-‘90s for examplewouldn’t know how to usetoday’s DJ equipment.Altneu: that’s a good point.today’s equipment is betterand uses a lot more technologyin the equipment. one of thethings that is constantly changingin the industry is the typeof memory format being used.if you look at vinyl, it’s a formof memory. You went from ananalog type of memory to digital.all of the memory now, with theexception of vinyl, is digital. cdsare digital, dVds are digital,Flash memory is digital, harddrive bass is digital. But the onething you have to understand isthey’ve taken the art form—andit’s become an art form—the dJtoday is what a rock star was 20years ago. they’ve taken theirpresentation and made it an analogpresentation. in other words,they’re using analog techniquesto manipulate digital memory.after the cdJ700 came out,which is basically a miniatureversion of a cdJ500, we decidedto come out with a player thatdoes scratch, because that’s whatthey wanted. so we developed thecdJ1000. that was probably themost successful launch we had.the initial response was we weretaking the art form out, but thatwasn’t what we were doing. Wewere creating a larger palate forthe artist to work off of. that’sexactly what happened. the enduser started to figure out thingsthat weren’t in the manual. theywere doing things we didn’t even30 auGust 2007