80 years ago, the most important person in the music business was James Petrillo. It’s difficult to imagine the head of the musician’s union on the cover of Time magazine, but there he was.
Petrillo saw how technology was changing an industry and pushed for changes in the flow of credit and royalties. The story of how recorded music, movies and then streaming turned into a mess is illustrative as we think about AI and creativity. Multiply all of this by a very large number and you’ll get the idea…
The change in tech created new winners, and threatened the status quo for those that were already succeeding. The union already existed, the ability to track contributions and cash flows existed, and the issues seemed clear.
Petrillo said that musicians performing on records was a bit like asking the iceman to produce refrigerators. The fridge destroyed the market for home delivery of ice, but at least the iceman didn’t have to actively participate in his demise. He asserted that once people had a record player, there’d be no demand for live music. (History has shown that the opposite was largely true).
He called two union strikes. During the first, the record labels had no musicians to cut records–but vocalists weren’t part of the union. This opened the door for singers like Frank Sinatra to build careers, and it was the beginning of the end of the big band era.
The strikes ended with a royalty stream designed to compensate session musicians–but it was paid to the union, not to the musicians. Petrillo used the money as patronage, spending money to organize live concerts outside of the major cities, meaning that the musicians who played on the records didn’t get the money… part-time performers in smaller towns did. And so did the bureaucracy.
As millions of dollars flowed into various organizations (some more well-run than others) the paperwork and litigation expanded. As recently as ten years ago, tens of thousands of musicians found their royalty checks held up by a complex bottleneck of conflicting claims and battling organizations–something that’s still being ironed out.
Along the way, every country in the world (except China, North Korea and the US) became part of a treaty that pays musicians on recordings a royalty for broadcast music. The US opted out because of lobbying by the radio industry. This costs labels and musicians about $200 million a year.
One particular story makes it clear just how messy this all is. Lee Oskar is one of the greatest harmonica players of our time. Originally from Denmark, he joined Eric Burdon (from the Animals) and joined WAR, which had a ton of hits in the 1970s. His distinctive tone and approach were a foundational element of their music.
Years later, the musician Pitbull hired a little-known harmonica player to perform an intro on his song Timber. Paul Harrington was asked to play just like Lee Oskar…
That song has more than 1.5 billion views on YouTube and has sold a lot of copies.
When Harrington mentioned to a fellow musician that he’d only gotten a $1,000 buyout for his performance, his friend (who was also a lawyer) encouraged him to file a claim, because the royalty agreement supersedes a buyout…
That class-action lawsuit led to a change in the royalty accounting system. At around the same time, involving the very same song, Lee Oskar sued Sony. The lawsuit against Sony in the US was dismissed because of complications in the rat’s nest of co-owners and licenses, but was able to go ahead on the international rights to the song.
Sony settled, Oskar is now officially listed as a co-songwriter on Timber, and he gets paid every time the song is played on the radio. And of course, every agency, union and lawyer along the way gets paid too.
Because of James Petrillo.
April 19, 2026
“Wait a second.”
That’s difficult advice. In a world that moves faster with each cycle, where urgencies are prioritized and last-minute saves are celebrated, it’s not always welcome advice.
And so we’ve ended up concerned. Fretting. Worried. Looking for the next thing to drop everything for.
The book of concern is more than a conceptual hack. It’s an actual physical intervention, and it might be worth trying for a week.
Write down the emergency of this moment. The one that’s taking your gaze away from your strategy and the long-term work you set out to do. Write it down.
If it’s still important in two days, go ahead and focus on it.
What you’ll probably discover is that almost all of the concerns go away on their own. The ones that don’t are definitely worthy of your scarce attention.
It might be an issue with the neighbor, a competitor or a customer. It might be a fashion concern or a social challenge. (If the building is on fire, please go ahead and put it out). Anything else, write it down. Affixing our concern to paper keeps it safely in one place, and the record we create becomes a useful reminder for next time.
April 18, 2026
What do your supporters tell their friends?
That’s the unseen force behind every successful brand, movement or idea.
Most people don’t care about you. They’re not listening to you, not wondering what you’re up to, and certainly not taking the time to seek you out. All you have is a small circle, your supporters.
And yet, we spend most of our time treating people like customers, not supporters. We try to turn strangers into people who do business with us, taking the friends and supporters we’ve earned for granted.
Instead, with planning and focus, you can create the conditions where your efforts strike a chord. When your customers become fans, they spread the word. When your story is true, relevant, focused, and sticky, new fans arrive. Not because it matters to you, but because it matters to them.
The second circle is out of your direct control, and it’s tempting to ignore it. But the second circle unlocks the change you seek to make.
April 17, 2026
That’s the appeal of it, of course. There isn’t a definitive study. There can’t be.
Even if we created a forty-year-long, double-blind twin study, there’d be room for someone to ask “what about?…”
It doesn’t matter that the peer-reviewed and consistent results we have are clear to those who read them with an open mind.
The attraction of simple stories about complex phenomena is that we get to make them up and imbue them with whatever reassurance, solace or threat we choose. Human beings didn’t evolve to be rational decision makers. We’re creators and consumers of stories, seeking status and affiliation, and prioritizing short-term feelings over long-term evidence.
It’s nice when a story that’s precious to us is reinforced by evidence, but it’s rarely essential. Belief isn’t dependent on facts, that’s why we call it belief instead of facts.
It’s helpful to wonder who benefits from sharing a particular story with us, and what it costs us to believe it.
April 16, 2026
What does it mean for us to own something?
If we own a piece of land and the rain washes the topsoil downstream, do we go and get the topsoil back?
Do we own our reputation? We have influence over it, but some of it was gifted to us without our knowledge, and other parts are influenced by forces out of our control.
Do we own responsibility? Is it something we take or acquire or accept?
We can try to own our past, but the best we can do is influence our future.
Ownership is a shared understanding, a construct that can shift depending on where we stand. It’s not always up to us, but it often works better if we acknowledge it.
April 15, 2026
- Pricing is an exchange of value. This for that.
But price is also a story.
- When you have competition, your story doesn’t have to justify the absolute price, simply the difference between you and the next-best option.
- Price is based on value, not on the cost of production.
- Thanks to Baumol’s cost disease, productivity doesn’t always correlate with the price of labor.
- Luxury goods are worth more because they cost more. If you sell a luxury item, raise your price and then improve the story to make it a bargain.
- It’s better to explain your fair price once than to apologize for low quality over and over.
- Asking, “what’s your budget?” is lazy and selfish. Your job is to figure out what your client wants, what they’re afraid of, and what sort of story they are eager to buy.
- When everything else is equal, we always want the cheapest option. But everything else is rarely equal.
- When someone says, “that’s too expensive,” what they mean is that the story you’ve told them so far (and the reputation you’ve earned) doesn’t match the price you’re charging. You probably don’t need a lower price, but you might need to earn a better story.
- “It might not be for you,” is almost always part of “we make the best (for someone).”
- Bargains, sales and coupons are a sport and a narrative. They’re not just a discount, they create their own sort of value and expectation.
- Convenience is often underappreciated as a component of value.
- The customers you get because you are the cheapest are the first ones to leave when someone else is even cheaper.
- The problem with racing to the bottom is that you might win.
- The most resilient slogan you can earn is, “you’ll pay a bit more, but you’ll get more than you paid for.”
April 14, 2026
Some vegans don’t eat avocados.
They’re concerned that the bees that are trucked in to pollinate the trees are mistreated, and so they choose to not support this practice.
But we live in community, and someone running a vegan restaurant or serving a meal to vegan friends, concerned that they might offend, doesn’t serve avocado. A few strong opinions change the culture.
And so the cycle continues.
Humans care about status and affiliation, and both are at play in a purity loop.
One can earn more status by caring more about the issue that others are adjacent to. And so the loop gains momentum.
Once a few people make it clear that they’re more orthodox or progressive or concerned or strict or unhypocritical or obedient, others seek to claim the same status. And that becomes a point of affiliation.
Just about every tribe goes through these loops.
Four hundred years ago, neck ruffs became popular among the aristrocracy in Europe. The neck ruff began as a modest collar but evolved into enormous pleated confections that could span two feet across. At their peak, ruffs became so large that special eating utensils with extended handles were invented to allow wearers to get food to their mouths. Some ruffs were so tall and stiff that wearers couldn’t turn their heads and needed help eating.
The instinctual response is to criticize the newest form of purity as absurd. But of course, the absurdity is part of the status on display.
Perhaps it makes more sense to see the loop at work and get back to the work at hand.
“Shut up and drive” is the answer to an argument about what song is playing on the radio. We can tune the radio as we go, but we’re here to drive this thing to where we’re headed.
Enrollment is at the core of the mission. Where are we going and why? If it’s not helping with that, let’s drive and work on it as we go.
Everyone is entitled to their own take. But when we focus on purity and status at the expense of the journey, the distraction costs all of us.
We’re going. Come if you’d like.
April 13, 2026
Sometimes it pays to accept and celebrate what we get.
And sometimes, we only get something because we settled for it.
It helps to be able to discern the difference between the two.
April 12, 2026
There’s a difference between telling someone their work can become better and saying it can become even better.
When we say even better, we lock in a foundation — we’re affirming that something good already exists — at the same time we create the conditions for improvement.
Ennui and disappointment, on the other hand, are multiplied when we promise things are going to get even worse instead of merely worse.
April 11, 2026
If you’re hoping for this meeting or this performance or this engagement to produce something extraordinary, why are you setting it up as if it’s ordinary?
The hard work of a brainstorming session, a pitch collaboration or a negotiation happens long before most people begin.
We hire architects to design expensive buildings, but we design expensive human interactions as an afterthought.
If it doesn’t feel like you’re putting a lot of effort into creating the conditions for magic, you’re probably not creating those conditions.
April 10, 2026
