"The Next New Thing in Music Will Not Come from New York, Los Angeles, or London"

Highlights from my conversation with The Ankler

My family tells me that I’m a recluse. They make jokes about it. If you listened to them, you might think I’m some hobbit living in a hobbit hole.

But it’s not true. So I push back.

“I’m not avoiding people,” I say. “I just like serenity and quiet.”

But they have a point. I haven’t done a live public event in several years. And I don’t do many video interviews—maybe only two or three since 2023.

But earlier this week, I participated in a live Substack conversation with Richard Rushfield of The Ankler. He’s one of the smartest journalists covering the film and entertainment scene.

We spoke for a full hour (video at the bottom).

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At one point, Richard asked me how private equity and other outside interests (financiers, Silicon Valley, etc.) are changing the entertainment business.

Here’s what I said (lightly edited):

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TED:

These businesses are no fools. I spent many years in Silicon Valley. I dealt with a lot of private equity people.

In my cohort at Stanford Business School I was put in a section of 60 students, and we shared all our classes together for two terms. Two of my classmates out of that 60 are now billionaires from private equity. One is Joe Lacob, who now owns the Golden State Warriors. The other is Tom Steyer, who ran for president recently.

These are two of the wealthiest people in the world—and I wonder why them, not me? [Laughs] Why didn't I make a billion? Here I am still peddling subscriptions.

But I know these kinds of people. They’re smart. They know what they're doing. And now people with these kinds of backgrounds are getting into entertainment.

They're treating it like a serious endeavor. But they're making a mistake.

And it's the mistake big businesses always make.

They want to turn everything into a repeatable formula—because that’s what businesses like to do. You find something that works. You're Mrs. Fields and you develop a successful cookie recipe—so you keep baking cookies. You're Colonel Sanders, and decide that your chicken tastes good. So you’re going to use these 18 herbs and spices again and again.

You find the formula—and then you just repeat it. In a way that’s the whole story of private equity.

Now these people are doing the same thing in entertainment. And that works for a while. But not forever—especially not in a creativity business.

They’ve tried every trick in the book to keep the formula alive. So they’ll say: “We're not going to do a sequel—now we'll do a prequel. Or we'll do a spin-off or we'll do the same story but in an alternative universe.”

They use every possible tweak to the formula. It’s the same reason why, when you go to the market, you find 42 different flavors of potato chips on the shelf.

But at a certain point, the market reaches exhaustion.

So they’ve been smart—but they're not as smart as they think they are. And they are going to hit a brick wall. It might have already happened.

You’ve seen the financial results at Disney—they just announced more layoffs. Netflix won't even release subscriber numbers anymore.

The world has changed.

But what hasn't changed yet is they don't have a new formula. They don't have a new strategy—but they need to get one. Or else people like you and me from the alternative media will eat their lunch….

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This is where my work as a music historian has helped me. That’s because I've studied periods when music was stagnating—and I’ve analyzed the situations that finally led to change.

They’re very interesting situations.

For example, in ancient Egypt, there was a little village called Deir el-Medina, where the personal love song was invented. The first expressive songs of human emotion and feeling were invented in this village in Egypt.

But it wasn’t the home of the pharaohs. It was where the artisans lived—and it was a multicultural community….People from various parts of the world came there to work, and spurred a creative blossoming. I’ve studied the same thing with the rise of troubadour music in the south of France or even the rise of rock in Liverpool, when the Beatles emerged.

These things don’t happen in the center. They happen at the fringes. So the creative ferment takes place in a port city like Liverpool—just like opera came out of Venice, another port city. Jazz came out of New Orleans, another port city.

Musical innovation tends to happen at crossroads and port cities. It’s spurred by outsiders not insiders. It rises from centers of multiculturalism and diversity—where different ideas come together.

The ruling class recognizes this, but it takes about 40 or 50 years. So fifty years elapse from Bob Dylan emerging as a rebel critic of the system, to becoming a Nobel Prize laureate. Almost fifty years elapse between Mick Jagger getting censored and becoming Sir Mick Jagger, an honored knight.

You eventually have this process of legitimization but the new style always starts on the outskirts—in the port cities and border cities.

I'm suggesting that this will happen again

RICHARD:

Where are our port cities now? Where would you be looking?

TED:

Because of the internet, every place is now a port city. Everybody in the world now has complete access to every other place in the world.

I think that the next new thing that will shake up the music world is going to come from outside of the traditional centers of power—which are New York, London, and Los Angeles

I think they will come from outside and maybe far outside. Maybe out of Africa. I tell people to look at what's happening in Indonesia. Or what's happening in China. Or in India. I fully expect that the next big thing is not coming from a studio boss in Hollywood or New York.

It will be a surprise, just like the Beatles were a surprise. Just like jazz was a surprise….

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You can watch our entire conversation here: