Live by the hit, die by the hit. That’s why you don’t want to be a pop star. Used to be it was a reasonable trade. Everybody in the world knew your name and you could tour forever on even one hit. Not anymore. Now you can have a hit and not be able to […]

Don’t confuse consumption with reach. In other words, today’s metrics, which are really yesterday’s metrics, don’t give an accurate picture of what is happening in the landscape, they don’t indicate how big an act is, rather how many times one person listened to one song. Think about that. In the pre-internet days of scarcity it […]

I don’t really care. I’m burned out on these gigantic catalog sales. But maybe this is important, maybe this isn’t just a banking deal, maybe Sony has insight that is not being acknowledged. Bear with me here. The bottom line is we are not minting new superstars. So the value of old superstars goes up! […]

You can only rip off the public so many times before there is a backlash. Wasn’t that one of the drivers of Napster, overpriced CDs with only one good track? People felt entitled to steal, they were sticking it to the man. And as Howard Stern famously learned in therapy, everybody else doesn’t need to […]