Jens-Markus Wegener

Jens-Markus Wegener is a German electronic musician and a key figure in the German music market since the 1980s. He was the founder of companies such as Public Propaganda, Europe’s largest and most successful promotion agency in the mid ‘90s, the publishing company AMV (also see AMV Alster Musikverlag), the distributor PP Sales Forces, among others. As a freelance promoter for SPV and the PIAS label he was also responsible for establishing the term Electronic Body Music as a musical genre. Through his publishing company and personal efforts he paved the way for bands like Deine Lakaien and Project Pitchfork and through his promotion agency he has been able to break careers for some of some of Germany’s and Europe’s most popular artists, among them Die Fantastischen Vier, Faithless or Unheilig. During the season 1997/1998 51 of 100 chart entries in Germany had been pushed via club promotion by Public Propaganda. In the early ‘80s, Wegener was active as an electronic musician and founded P.A.P. (Programming Art Productions), a small independent tape label. Musically, his own key project was Art P (formally Art Programming) together with Frank Grotelüschen but he also contributed to other electronic projects like Die Synthetische Republik. Wegener soon made a name for himself in the German underground electronic movement and was called “grand father of Bremen’s electronic scene” (see tape compilation “Berlincassette 2-85”). Though Art P continued to make music up until 1989, “No Message” from 1985 was their second and last album release. Around 1984, Wegener was a student at Hannover University which led to a connection to the successful independent label SPV. Since 1985, Wegener was promoting mostly Belgian bands. Among them were the already successful Front 242 and similar groups, which all had their strongest commercial market in Germany (and not in Belgium). Meanwhile residing in Hamburg, he founded Public Propaganda in 1987 and was taking over promotion for such groups, organized nation-wide interview tours and more. In 1987/1988 he worked out a marketing concept for SPV to promote a new trend / genre for these groups. Together with his team he decided to focus on the term Electronic Body Music (EBM). Though the term first appeared on the inner sleeve of Front 242’s album “No Comment” in late 1984/early 1985 it wasn’t used as or considered as a genre name yet. It was Wegener who took it up and established it as a genre. In that concept, which was strongly pushed to German media to promote the SPV compilation “This is Electronic Body Music”, the origins of the music were clearly explained. For example by naming early predecessors and pre-EBM groups such as D.A.F. and Die Krupps. At that time, other names like “Agreppo” were used too but it was EBM that actually made it. Sometimes the term itself is also credited to Kraftwerk from an interview in 1978, but according to Wegener the Kraftwerk reference wasn’t known at that time neither to him nor Front 242. His promotion network was so successful that it was Public Propaganda who first made Front 242 break the charts in Germany with the track “Never Stop”, peaking at 37 in 1989. In an early version of the track the band even sampled Wegener by saying "Front 242" in German language (front-zwei-vier-zwei) via telephone for the beginning of the track. However, it was replaced later by a female speaker. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Jens-Markus Wegener put more focus on publishing which led to the founding of AMV with his brother Kay-Oliver Wegener. Their company was key to the success of groups like Deine Lakeien and Project Pitchfork. The latter one was a band that was regularly attending a New Wave evening at Kir discothek in Hamburg, who Wegener did the booking for at that time. After receiving their first demos, he was fixing a first record deal for them via Hypnobeat. Throughout the 1990s, Wegener was involved in the breaking of bands like Die Fantastischen Vier (whose first hit „Die da“ was promoted by Public Propaganda), Faithless, Jazzanova, Linkin Park or later in the 2000s, Unheilig. Wegener currently lives in Berlin and still works as a publisher.