The three main principals involved in the film, director Paris Barclay and producers Stephanie Allain and Jeanne Elfant Festa, opine about their careers and testify as to the making of the movie. All three are major hitters. Barclay is one of the most in-demand television directors, having worked on “ER,” “The West Wing,” “The Watcher” and many more. Allain was responsible for bringing “Boyz n the Hood” to the screen, and has even produced the Academy Awards. And Jeanne Elfant Festa is a principal at White Horse Pictures, where she has shepherded projects like “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week-The Touring Years,” “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” and “Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery.”

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-billy-preston-documentary/id1316200737?i=1000760441021

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/29495a14-9af2-4d81-9649-c88bc902ba83/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-the-billy-preston-documentary

Be different, me-too is everywhere. But different is a state of mind, that too often goes untaught in today’s society., which is one of the reasons why so much “classic” music was made by baby boomers. Life was not as hard, their parents were not solely focused on ensuring their children got a leg up in life, college was not considered to be a trade school, but a place to have different experiences and open your mind. For the last few decades, all the innovation has been in tech, where people have been unafraid to challenge/break the rules. In music, creators didn’t go to college at all. In tech, they dropped out because they got what they needed and saw opportunities to change the world elsewhere. And that was the mission, to change the world, which used to be the case in music.

Hone your chops. The basics never go out of style, they’re a jumping-off point. It’s the extraneous that pays dividends. That film or TV series you saw, that picnic you went to. I’m not saying to live a life of hedonism, just that if you’ve had no experiences, you’ve got nothing to say. The script has been flipped where people see everything as being about instant success and money, whereas today, when literally everybody can be famous for a brief while, it’s all about careers/staying power.

Be unafraid to state or do the unpopular. Sure, shock effect can work, but living in an era of constant shock, it has less impact. So the unpopular is less about the exterior than the interior. March to the beat of a different drummer. Chances are if you’re good at getting along, being part of the group, you’re not going to change the world. Our heroes, those who make a difference, are singular, with a vision. Whether it be Steve Jobs or even Elon Musk. I’d love to list a series of musical acts, but we haven’t had that spirit here since the internet became popular.

Use the tools, don’t be the tools. Use social media platforms, don’t become them. In other words, unless you’re making a living being an influencer, unless that’s your goal, don’t focus all your time and effort on that concentration. Then again, don’t avoid it.

Ignore the mores of the baby boomer generation, which is anti-tech. We are never going backwards. Social media is here to stay, whether it’s the same platforms or different ones. People have a need to connect.

Don’t count on the institution to solve your social problems. You can’t solve bullying by going to the principal, you’ve got to address it head-on yourself. And sometimes there’s no solution other than grinning and bearing it. But everything you’ve heard is true, life is long, bullies fade into the background and you can thrive, the bad experiences growing up only serve to toughen you up.

People don’t want you to be successful, because it makes them question their own success, i.e. how good, how important they are. Which is why you have bullies in business. Those in power will do their best to thwart you, because they don’t want to be challenged. Life is about putting yourself in the proper circles, gaining experience and seeing how to thrive.

Find out what your area of expertise is and focus there. You may think you want to be an athlete or musician, but there are many other avenues to pursue if you just realize what you’re good at. Everybody is unique, everybody has something to add, it’s just a matter of perspective, seeing that you have this advantage.

Question authority. Sure, some rules are valid, but many are outdated and others are there just to protect the infrastructure.

If it came easy, it’s not going to last. Success depends upon hard work.

Keep innovating or you die. You’ve got to disrupt yourself. You can’t be a prisoner of your customer/audience. Giving people what they want is a fool’s errand, at best it is for business, not art.

Take advice with a grain of salt. Too many either reject all advice or accept it. Bottom line, many have experience and wisdom that you can benefit from. But you must be able to parse fact from fiction. This is a skill.

There is no one major breakthrough, no moment that lifts you into the land of success, but many minor triumphs.

No one can reach everybody, don’t try to. This just means you’re blanding/dumbing your product down.

People want information.

People want someone/something to believe in. In the past, it was almost always artists, today it’s mostly corporations. Like Apple. Because these lauded corporations are all about creating excellence on the bleeding edge, delivering what you could not even think of yourself. Artists today are mini-corporations, whored out to the man making expedient business decisions.

Get in bed with sponsors at your peril. Their mission is different from yours. They detract from people’s belief in you. There’s plenty of money if you go your own way, if you’re great.

If you’re not great, give up or double-down to be better. And maximize the product. Unless you’re a lyricist as good as Bob Dylan, the person singing your songs should have a voice as good as one of the Beatles.

Don’t try to convince people you’re great, either they know it/accept it, or they don’t.

Your job is not being a star, your job is to create. Don’t be burdened by the constructs of the past. Craigslist killed newspapers by superseding the classifieds. The album was a result of technology, i.e. being able to put a certain amount of music on a piece of plastic. If you’re not looking forward, you’re burdened by the past.

This is all financial engineering.

The best explanation I’ve read is in the “Wall Street Journal”:

“Is Bill Ackman’s Deal for Universal Music Really Worth $63 Billion?”

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-500-nasdaq-04-07-2026/card/is-bill-ackman-s-deal-for-universal-music-really-worth-63-billion–WYWiZPspSu6UibG7trfl?mod=Searchresults&pos=1&page=1

You don’t need an MBA to understand all this, yet it still might be above your pay grade.

Ackman wants to sell Universal’s stake in Spotify, add debt to the company and list its stock in the U.S. All in the hope of raising the share price which has been languishing, he believes unfairly.

What is depressing Universal stock?

Primarily two things… AI and the fear that Spotify, et al, are running out of potential subscribers.

Now somehow, Netflix keeps adding subscribers, even though the Street thought it couldn’t and the stock cratered before it rebounded, and if you look at the number of people in the world…then again, only the low-hanging fruit can pay western prices. And Universal doesn’t control the pricing, so…

Analyze the numbers all you want, that’s not what I’m concerned with.

What does Bill Ackman know about music?

I won’t say absolutely nothing, but it’s far from his area of expertise.

Isn’t this how we got into this mess?

Edgar Bronfman, Jr. rolled up companies to form Universal, but then blew control to Vivendi and…

Now the company is publicly traded, but…

Kinda like Hipgnosis losing control of all those copyrights, them going to the bank.

Ackman doesn’t care about Taylor Swift, nobody on the Universal roster, he cares about MONEY! He wouldn’t be proposing this deal unless he thought it was profitable. It’s not like he’s got a hit act in his back pocket…

And then there was Guy Hands and EMI…

Now the difference between tech and record companies is that in tech, the founders learned their lesson, they maintained control after their companies went public. You’ve got Zuckerberg at Facebook, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google and…

Zuckerberg might have been plain wrong about the metaverse, dropping nearly a hundred billion wasted dollars into the effort, but no Wall Street titan would approve such an investment. But one thing Zuckerberg knows about tech…you evolve, reinvent, disrupt or you die.

It’s not quite the same thing in music, where what you’ve done in the past, the catalog, is an incredible driver of revenue, and oftentimes pure profit.

Actually, one could make a good case that Universal should stop investing in new music and just become a catalog house. One can look at the numbers that way.

But music is not about numbers, but feel. 

But everybody with ground floor experience, the founders are not in control at record labels. Oh, we’ve got a couple of post-indie people like John Janick, but he doesn’t call the big shots, he doesn’t steer the ocean liner.

Which is why innovation is all coming from the indie sphere. Which is why the majors woke up and invested in indie companies.

So is Ackman’s plan good for music?

Well, the film/TV industry thought that Netflix’s proposed purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery was bad for production…

Then again, Netflix is a newbie. And nimble.

There are no nimble newbies in the recorded music landscape, because financially it doesn’t add up, because the majors all have their catalogs.

If this deal goes through is it terminal?

No, but it’s a step in the wrong direction.

Music is an entrepreneurial business. Not only can production be cheap, but distribution is now too. And this is good for music, but potentially bad for Universal… I mean where is the innovation at major labels? They don’t take any major risks anymore, signing unknown talent in various genres and breaking it, they sign that which is already broken…

If you sell out to the man too much, it ultimately bites you in the ass.

Take that record deal, sell your publishing, if you think you got the better of money, you think money can write a hit song. It can’t, but money knows finance, and it’s not going to let you get the better side of a deal.

And now these same financiers are in control.

Look at Kyncl over at Warner, it seems his plan for growth is to continue to purchase new, mainly tech companies. Note that it’s not about signing/breaking new acts.

It’s a sad day for recorded music.

Then again, one can say the indies have already won. The hits are smaller than ever and the indie piece of the pie keeps growing and…

Financial engineering is never good for art. Remember that.

He’s got a right to perform…

But it’s one thing to do two shows at SoFi and quite another to headline the Wireless Festival in the U.K.

Yes, yes, Kanye admitted he was bipolar, he gave that as an explanation of his antisemitic behavior, I gave him credit for that, but that does not mean Kanye gets away with his past behavior scot-free…no, he’s on PROB ATION!

Now some might say Mr. West has not atoned enough. It’s one thing to give an explanation for bad behavior, quite another to donate time and money to the UJA and Jewish causes, which he has not done to my knowledge.

And if he’s starting anew, he’s establishing a track record, you don’t regain our trust overnight, you earn it over time.

And speaking of earning… Supposedly his two SoFi gigs grossed $33 million. Now obviously net is less, but there’s no way Kanye took home less than double digit millions, unless somehow he blew it on production.

So, he’s not experiencing that much pain from his faux pas.

Oh yes, he lost his deal with Adidas… But he hasn’t completely lost his earning power, like some #MeToo offenders in Hollywood.

You could say this is a testament to Kanye and his music, or in the alternative you could say his audience is brain dead and doesn’t care about not only his antisemitic remarks, but his other bad behavior.

Then again, with so many denizens of Hollywood expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments, with not a peep about the plight of the Iranians, I’d say antisemitism is at an all time high. Actually, in terms of incidents, that’s what the statistics say. And if for some reason you support Israel you’ve got to STFU, even if you’re a comedian, like Jerry Seinfeld.

So the worst offender here, after Kanye himself, is the promoter, Live Nation and Melvin Benn, the managing director of Festival Republic.

I don’t want to even address Mr. Benn, who didn’t read the room and just defended Kanye, as if he’d been whitewashed clean and deserved a total pass.

But Live Nation?? No one could see this coming?

Let’s be very clear, this was a business decision. It’s not about Kanye, but getting a headliner. How do we know this? Once Kanye was excised from the bill, they shut the whole festival down. No one was concerned with how this looked, never mind location in an area of antisemitic behavior. Is that how f*cking dumb these people are? And does money trump everything? Then again, there’s no heart and soul in the music, why should the promoter have any.

No one at Live Nation said “This is a bad look.”? That’s antisemitic unto itself. God, if they wanted to book Kanye, which they shouldn’t have, they’d have gotten in front of the story, made Mr. West available for interviews, had a publicity campaign saying he’d changed. But there was none of that.

Furthermore, not only was Kanye going to appear, he was going to perform all three nights (did they really think he’d take the stage on time?) And be paid $15 million for his effort.

Yup, Kanye’s paying the price for his bad behavior… Seems to me like he’s being rewarded for it. As if Steve Perry got back with Journey or Led Zeppelin returned to the road. He’s been gone for a long time folks, but now he’s back, better than ever!

Then again, behavior like this is why Live Nation is on trial in New York.

Whatever Michael Rapino believes, let’s be clear, if you’re working for the company you want to put up numbers, and you’ll bend the rules to do so.

Now we’ve got to give Rapino credit. He’s responsible for building a colossus. But so was John D. Rockefeller, and they broke up Standard Oil. Sometimes you can do your job too well. Rapino says yes instead of no, he expands his operation on a regular basis, he keeps the stock going up, and if Live Nation was a steel or food company, there would not be a huge backlash, but being directly involved with the consumer… It’s not like there was work to make Ticketmaster appear warm and fuzzy, all that was said was it was the acts’ fault, which it is…that’s why ticket prices are so high. Ticketmaster was paid to take the heat, but the heat is now burning the company.

As for Standard Oil… They had 90% of the market. Live Nation is nowhere close.

But there will be a verdict in the trial and we’ll go from there, but the culture…

They say the music business is run by Jews? Well, unless they’re self-hating, no Jew would buy Kanye for Wireless, or sit by while it is done and say nothing.

Maybe Live Nation needs some training here… Not only as to bending the rules in pursuit of the dollar, but ethics.

Then again, how ethical is our President?

But Europe and the EU are different.

My head is truly spinning. J.D. Vance is over in Hungary singing the praises of Orban, trying to get him elected? What next, a wholesale endorsement of Vladimir Putin?

Well, Trump’s gotten close to that.

But whichever side of the political fence you are on, one thing is for sure, Trump has ushered in a more coarse America where it’s everybody for themselves and if you’re a victim it’s your fault. And there’s this constant emphasis on the stock market…and Live Nation is a public company.

So it’s not only Live Nation, it’s the entire country.

But thank god, not the entire world. Those “backward” English and the EU…they’re more concerned with what’s fair than we are. And without rules of play, there can be no game.

I’m of the belief that Kanye’s got a right to work. But let him headline his own gigs. As for the promoter…maybe it should be someone new, an independent. If Live Nation/Ticketmaster is not a monopoly, there should be plenty of people who’ll step up to take Kanye on.

But other than the more haimish AEG?

And why the f*ck is it that Pepsi has more balls, can read the landscape better than Live Nation? They’re selling sugared water, Live Nation is selling culture. But somehow Live Nation is blind and Pepsi is not?

As for antisemitism… It’s a bad time to be a Jew. This is why Israel exists in the first place, as the last, safe haven. Does this mean Netanyahu is right, that the war is right? No. But one school of thought is Netanyahu is acting now because he knows support for Israel is waning in America, and it won’t be long before the country has to go it alone.

Meanwhile, we’re glorifying Kanye West. WTF?