NEW YORK, NY.- Rob Stone, who as a founder of the music magazine The Fader and the brand-strategy firm Cornerstone Agency bridged the sounds of the streets and the corporate suites, giving early exposure to rappers such as Kanye West and Drake while brokering lucrative endorsements at a time when corporate America was still resistant to hip-hop, died June 24 in Mount Kisco, New York. He was 55.
His longtime professional partner, Jon Cohen, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was lung cancer.
Early in his music business career, first at SBK Records and later at Arista, Stone was charged with finding exposure and radio airplay for new artists. He began to establish himself as a hip-hop insider, working with performers includoing the Notorious B.I.G. and Craig Mack, as well as with Sean Combs, whose label, Bad Boy Records, had entered into a joint venture with Arista.
Before long, Stone decided to set out on his own, and in 1996 he started Cornerstone with Steve Rifkind, the founder of the hip-hop label Loud Records. Rifkind left the agency after a year and a half and was replaced by Cohen, who had also worked at SBK and had been Stone’s best friend since middle school on Long Island.
Stone and Cohen went on to create eye-opening campaigns for brands like Sprite, Converse and Johnnie Walker that leveraged their relationships with labels and with new artists, who in the early days were all too sensitive to charges of selling out.
In the early days, it was no easy feat to bring hip-hop artists to the attention of brand representatives at Fortune 500 companies. “It’s crazy, because not many people realize that back then we had to fight and work our way up to earn respect,” Stone said in a 2015 interview with Forbes. “Hip-hop wasn’t invited. We had to kick the door down.”
Over the years, the agency scored a string of hits — sometimes literally. For a 2007 Nike campaign to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the company’s Air Force 1 sneaker, long a hip-hop staple, the agency brought West, Nas and KRS-One together to record “Classic (Better Than I’ve Ever Been),” which was released as a single and performed at an anniversary party televised on MTV2.
A remix by DJ Premier, which also featured Rakim, was nominated for a Grammy Award for best rap performance by a duo or group.
By that point, Stone and Cohen, who founded The Fader in 1999, were already a force in music journalism.
Their magazine, printed on heavy stock paper and brimming with sumptuous photos, unearthed the latest music and fashion bubbling up in hip-hop and alternative rock. The Fader, which its owners strove to keep independent from their marketing operations, has been credited with giving artists such as Drake, Nicki Minaj and West, now known as Ye, their first magazine covers.
In a period when the distinctions between rock and hip-hop were starting to break down, The Fader nudged along the growing cross-pollination among genres. The cover of a 1999 issue featured Reverend Run of Run-DMC, Zack de la Rocha from the fiery political rock band Rage Against the Machine and DJ Premier of the hip-hop duo Gang Starr.
“Zack and Premier met at that shoot and went on tour together after,” Stone told Forbes. “It showed people the reach hip-hop could have, and how much further there was to take the culture.”
The Fader’s influence was soon felt beyond its pages. It established a beachhead at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, with a festival-within-a-festival known as the Fader Fort. Housed in a huge tent covered with corporate logos, it hosted breakthrough performances by the likes of West, M.I.A. and Amy Winehouse.
“In its 10 years,” Ben Sisario wrote in The New York Times in 2011, the Fader Fort “has grown from a hotel chill-out to one of the biggest productions in town.”
All along, Cornerstone was trying to tap the spirit of young musicians grasping for stardom. In a notable campaign for Converse that began in 2011, the agency created Converse Rubber Tracks, a state-of-the-art recording studio built from scratch in a Brooklyn, New York, warehouse that local bands could use free of charge.
Stone told Fast Company magazine in 2017 that when he and Cohen were working to establish Cornerstone, “we didn’t understand the agency game” and never tried to play it.
“We don’t care what everybody else is doing,” he said, “and as long as we can deliver for our clients and have this connection to culture, that’s what’s paramount to everything we do.”
Robert Alan Stone was born July 12, 1968, in Brooklyn, the youngest of two children of Charles Hitzig Stone and Rita (Dolgin) Stone. His father was an entrepreneur in the trucking and warehouse business, and his mother worked as a sales director for an import company.
His family moved to Cedarhurst, New York, on Long Island, when he was a child. As a student at Lawrence High School, he was a soccer and basketball standout. He also fostered a growing love of rap music, taping shows by influential New York disc jockeys such as DJ Red Alert.
“I realized that hip-hop culture could move the world,” he told Forbes, “because it was moving me.”
Soon after graduating from Albany State University in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in business, he followed Cohen, who had recently taken a job at SBK Records, the label founded by industry heavyweight Charles Koppelman, financier Stephen Swid and Martin Bandier, another music executive, known for hits by Vanilla Ice, Wilson Phillips and Jesus Jones.
After jumping to Arista, Stone became close to Christopher Wallace, the young rapper from Brooklyn known as the Notorious B.I.G., and traveled around the country with him trying to break him into the mainstream. “We spent a lot of time in cars going to hip-hop mix shows at 2 in the morning, just me and him,” Stone said in a 2015 interview with Billboard.
Stone is survived by his mother; his wife, Lauren (Gonzales) Stone; his twin sons, Jett and Charlie; his daughter, Mika; and his sister, Michelle Stone.
Stone learned he had cancer last August but continued to work until the final weeks of his life, Cohen said. It was not his first brush with cancer; when he was 20, he survived Hodgkin’s disease. The experience, he told Forbes, “gave me a heightened sense of gratitude and belief.”
“When you’re consistently going into radiation,” he said, “there are no meetings or business decisions that are more important than surviving.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
