The story
Concrete: Early years
Concrete Marketing was founded by Bob Chiappardi and Walter O'Brien in 1984. Chiappardi was working in the mail room of Arista Records in New York whilst managing a few bands from Long Island and O'Brien was the founder of Relativity/Combat Records. The company name was chosen by plucking a name blindly from the Yellow Pages. Concrete's first client was RCA's Grim Reaper. It was during the group's first tour that Chiappardi and O'Brien decided to start working as a marketing company, realizing that there were few people out there to properly service the metal community.
During the 1984 New Music Seminar, they distributed around 200 flyers
advertising Concrete and its services and by the end of the first day
they had been approached by Rick Dobbis, then vice president of marketing at
Chrysalis Records, and were hired to work the first full-length
Armoured Saint record.
In 1990, Chiappardi and O’Brien amicably split as business partners
with Chiappardi taking the helm of Concrete Marketing and several
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other companies they had created, whilst Walter O’Brien took Concrete
Management, the management company that looked after Pantera, White Zombie and Prong.
Foundations and the Hard Music Soundscan Chart
Before producing Foundations, the first exclusively heavy metal trade publication, Concrete were contributing to Friday Morning Quarterback (FMQB). By the time they had worked the first Metallica record and the second Anthrax record and were beginning to amass a lot of metal clients, they decided it was time to begin their own newsletter, and so the first issue of Foundations was distributed in January 1988.
It was a bi-weekly publication that provided release information, tour itineraries and a breakdown of all of Concrete's current projects, the idea behind it being that it should mimic the underground fanzines that were rife within the scene. It also featured the Concrete/Soundscan Hard Music chart. This chart was also syndicated not only in US regional publications such as Radioactive, Good Times and The Aquarian, but also in worldwide publications like Entertainment Weekly, Metal Hammer and Guitar World, reaching a combined readership of somewhere in the region of three million.
From Wikipedia’s article on Concrete Marketing, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4