A&R ain’t for the faint of heart
“What the music business doesn’t like to shout about is how inefficient its R&D process is. The annual global spend on A&R is $2.8bn, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, and all that buys is the probability of failure: “Some labels estimate the ratio of commercial success to failure as 1 in 4; others consider the chances to be much lower — less than 1 in 10,” observes its 2017 report. Or as Mixmag magazine’s columnist The Secret DJ put it: ‘Major labels call themselves a business but are insanely unprofitable, utterly uncertain, totally rudderless and completely ignorant.’”
The three components of managerial human capital
“Our research on GE alumni…uncovered several other types of skills and experience that shape performance in one job and may influence performance in a new one…these other types fall under three headings: strategic human capital … industry human capital … and relationship human capital”
The anatomy of a direct listing: Spotify
“In the Spotify direct listing, no fixed number of shares was being sold to the public and no allocations were available at a set public offering price; rather, any prospective purchasers of shares could place orders with their broker of choice, at whatever price they believed was appropriate and that order would be part of the price-setting process on the NYSE. This open access feature and the ability of virtually all existing holders to sell their shares, and of any investor to buy their shares, created a powerful market-driven dynamic for the opening of trading.”
“The line from Hannibal when he was told that crossing the Alps was impossible: Aut inveniam viam aut faciam. I shall either find a way or make one. This is what high agency individuals do. This is how they respond to bad odds, to big doubts, or frustrating situations. The question for us then, is not whether Peter Thiel should have conspired, but how we can learn from that conspiracy. How we can exert our own levels of agency. Because the truth is our opinion on whether something should have happened is irrelevant. What matters is whether it did.”
“The arduous process of Martin’s work divorces art from its aesthetic. It reduces compositions of great prestige or high beauty to their very particles; it frees Martin up to think of art as pure matter. In this way, he comes closer to the artist than anyone has before, often becoming only the second person to think as intensely about the materiality of the object, about the chemical nature of its pigments or the physical properties of its canvas. The art he analyses derives its worth from unique, flashing inspiration. His own talent, if anything, has more in common with the forger.”