How I Identify Heroes & Villains in the Music Business
Or in publishing, movies, visual arts, and other creative idioms
Today I’m just sharing a chart. But it’s a very useful chart.
It comes in response to requests from young musicians seeking advice on building their careers. They want to know who they can trust in the music business.
That’s not an easy question to answer.
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But if you look closely enough, you really can identify the heroes and villains. Below is a checklist I use to tell the difference.
These rules aren’t absolute. You will find exceptions—but not many.
By the way, you can easily adapt these guidelines to other creative fields. That’s because the same scams and abuses are now happening in publishing, visual arts, filmmaking, and other fields.
Feel free to share this with others:
Here’s a text summary.
You can identify the heroes in the music business by these signs:
They respect creative people as sources of value.
When they talk about music they call it music.
They nurture artists.
They invest in talent.
Their dream is to make the best possible music.
They live in cities with great music.
When they brag, they talk about the songs.
They are visionaries.
Here are warning signs that you’re dealing with villains in the music business:
They treat creative people as an expense.
When they talk about music they call it content.
They manage intellectual property (IP).
They invest in data centers (or distribution).
Their dream is to have the lowest costs.
They live in cities with great tech.
When they brag, they talk about profits.
They are administrators.
That’s all for now. I’ll be back with more soon.
This model really works across the board, and especially regarding the movies. In that 'industry,' when I started to hear movies constantly referred to as product or content, I got a bad feeling in my stomach. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who really didn't give a shit about movies (they really had no serious interest), they just thought it would be cool to work in that business. Most of these people would have been as happy selling and marketing Frisbees, for all I know. They could rarely sit through screenings, and were always 'multi-tasking' when watching a 'new product' on DVD. I loved asking them about a movie, what they thought of a certain scene, and drew mainly blank faces. It became painful to work with these people, because day in and day out, they just didn't care. No wonder the film industry that became a business is now even a shadow of those origins.
This is applicable in so many areas I had to bookmark the article.
Reminds me of the James Bond dispute between Barbara Broccoli and Amazon. Broccoli was (reportedly) visibly irked when someone at Amazon called Bond films "content".