Music

Ex-Smashing Pumpkins drummer has gone from troubled heroin user to tech CEO

by Mark Teo

September 2, 2014

While the Smashing Pumpkins will exist forever—in one form or another—the band was at its best with its classic lineup: Billy Corgan and James Iha on guitars, D’Arcy Wretzky on bass, and Jimmy Chamberlin keeping time. But while Corgan’s still tinkering with the band’s legacy, other members have moved on to surprisingly places. Case in point: Chamberlin, who, after leaving the band in 2009, went on to launch his own… tech startup?

Yep, you read that correctly. Since 2012, he’s headed up LiveOne, a social media company that, according to Chamberlin’s LinkedIn, “has developed a unique social viewing platform called CrowdSurfing that elevates the live online entertainment experience for users to a new level by immersing them in an audience of friends and fellow fans from around the world.” Translation? He’s developed an app that allows viewers to interact while livestreaming events.

The goal, it seems, is to bring event streams closer to the live experience. And to inject money into a flailing music industry: his company has landed clients as diverse as Red Bull and the Toronto Maple Leafs, and like so many music start-ups, he’s hoping that LiveOne can help sustain musicians with some of that sweet, sweet brand money. Because if albums—physical or otherwise—can’t be counted on as a revenue stream, something has to step up in its place.

In an interview with Pando Daily, he explained his philosophy on the ever-changing music biz.

I think music is always reflective of the culture that consumes it. And if the culture becomes more disposable, when music delivery is more disposable, when 90 percent of a young person’s life is in the cloud, it becomes less about product and more about experiences.

Chamberlin also drew comparisons to the tech scene and the music scene of the ’90s. The LiveOne team also features Groupon founder Andrew Mason and CFO Jason Child, and he compared their dynamic to one of an upstart band. “[I] just got swept up in the dynamics of that team,” he said. “It was dynamic and creative in the way the music scene was in the ’90s. If this were 1992, we’d probably be in a band together. Through the years I found that there’s tons of similarities. It really does attract the same kind of mindset.”

Chamberlin’s rise in the tech world may come as a surprise, as he’s often painted as the Smashing Pumpkins’ most troubled member: From the Gish era to his eventual firing from the band in 1996, he was in and out of rehab. After touring keyboardist Eric Melvoin died of a heroin overdose, Chamberlin was also charged with possession of drugs. And even after his latest departure from the band, Corgan took a potshot at the drummer. “Jimmy is a destructive human being, and people who are destructive break things,” he told Rolling Stone in 2010. “I don’t see me reaching the highest levels of my creativity if I’m unhealthy and if I have unhealthy people around me.”

Yet Corgan seems to have gotten this one wrong. Chamberlin’s now sober, and if LiveOne’s any indication, more productive than ever. Hopefully he’s as talented an entrepreneur as he was a drummer. [H/T A Journal of Musical Things]