This year’s curriculum is already out of date: rockonomics for students

The original idea for this book came from a tense management workshop in the fall of 2013. My former Spotify colleagues Mark Williamson and Bryan Johnson put it together in response to the infamous Thom Yorke criticism of the Swedish streaming service being (‘the last desperate fart of a dying corpse’). 

A young woman came up to me and thanked me for all the PRS insight papers I had published between 2006 and 2012. She had read them all (I hadn’t) and got a distinction in her exams (I didn’t) and was now managing some of the most exciting UK acts (I couldn’t). It made me think how fast the industry – and the people who work in it was changing. I’d lectured at music management courses in universities in New York and England and kept on noticing over half of the room were women. Not just that, the questions the students were asking were all about what happens next. The students who had forked out the cost for the course had already decided this year’s curriculum was already out of date.

This book is for those street smart students who know just how fast the pace of disruption is unfolding. It build on the Don Passman bible ‘All You Need to Know about the Music Business’, and for British students the Ann Harrison book ‘Music: The Business’, and offers principles that will stand the test of time. Take principle #4: no matter what the pace and scale of disruption, we’ll always be asking Make or Buy questions – do you do it yourself or cede control to an intermediary. Or as the former federal reserve governor Alan Blinder once put it to me: ‘capitalism is when you employ someone else to cut your grass as you can do something more productive with their time’. Most of us would prefer to do something more productive (like work in the back of an Uber as opposed to driving our own car) but some of us love gardening too.