The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame will begin a new era on Jan. 1 with a new chairman, iHeartMedia President of entertainment enterprises John Sykes. He was selected by the board of directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation to take the reins after being nominated by current chairman Jann Wenner, the 73-year-old longtime editor of Rolling Stone magazine who announced this week that he will step down from the organization he co-founded in 1983.
Sykes, part of the original management team at MTV and VH1 before he joined iHeartMedia, becomes just the third chairman of the Rock Hall, following in the footsteps of founding chairman Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic Records, and Wenner, who stepped into the unpaid post after Ertegun died in 2006.
"When they told me I had the job, I fell out of my chair," Sykes said by phone Wednesday, the day his appointment was announced. "I did not see this coming. I was shocked and elated. This is an incredible way to connect with my first love, music."
Sykes, 64, takes over at an auspicious time for the institution that was created in 1983, held its first induction ceremony in 1986 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York and opened the physical museum in 1995 in Cleveland, where some 13 million people have visited since that opening.
Sykes said "the most important mandate" he's taking into the job is a reshaping of the board to better reflect the diversity of the general population, meaning he'll be actively recruiting more women and people of color. The organization has taken hits over time for catering to white male musicians, and by extension, music fans.
"Like any good institution," Sykes said, "we must constantly reinvent, otherwise we'll be left behind. We have to rebuild our board in a way that reflects and speaks to the artists that are now eligible for induction. That means more women and more people of color."
