Scars vs Spreadsheets
On the people who took over the music industry, why they were structurally guaranteed to do a worse job, and where the music people actually went.
I want to start with something I’m not supposed to say.
I sit in industry meetings every week. Some of them are with people who genuinely love music - who remember exactly where they were the first time they heard a particular track, who came up working merch tables and stage doors and tiny radio shows. They’re still in this. Thank god.
But … there are others…the ones with the platforms, the “creator economy” guys, the catalog acquisition funds, the marketing-tech wrappers around music-marketing-tech wrappers?
Those rooms have a different temperature.
Nobody in them has a favorite album. Or if they do, they don’t bring it up. The vocabulary is customer aquisition cost and lifetime value and retention curves and addressable market and “engagement velocity.” Music gets discussed the way logistics get discussed at Amazon. The artist is a stock unit. The fan is a session. The song is a piece of content. Everyone is very smart, very polished, very well-funded.
Three kinds of people in this industry
To get this right, I have to draw a distinction nobody in industry commentary makes cleanly enough.
There are three kinds of people who work in music:
→ (a) People who love music AND understand the business. Rare. Disproportionately valuable. They’re the ones who can sit in a room with an artist and a finance person and translate both ways. A&Rs with taste. Managers who came up at the merch table. Label founders who used to play in bands. Bookers who can read both a venue contract and a kick drum.
→ (b) People who love music but aren’t business-minded. The vast middle of the industry. Artists. Producers. Engineers. Scene heads. The booker who runs a 200-cap venue and is terrible with spreadsheets but has booked every important act in your city for 15 years. The record store owner. The DJ on the weird local radio show.
→ (c) People who are business-minded but music-agnostic. The sellers. The tech-platform founders, the SaaS people, the catalog acquisition analysts, the “music marketing” agencies that don’t actually know any music, the consultants, the fund managers.Smart. Well-funded. Mostly nice. Mostly do not care about music as anything other than units of monetizable attention.
In a healthy industry, (a) runs things, (b) gets supported and amplified, and (c) gets checked by the other two → they have a job to do, but they don’t get to define what good is.
In the current industry, (c) is running everything, (a) is underemployed or working at three-person indie labels, and (b) is alone at home at midnight trying to figure out why their CRM isn’t syncing with their distributor.
That’s not a complaint. That’s a structural diagnosis. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
How the sellers won
The seller class didn’t take over by accident. They took over because the financial structure of the industry changed in two specific ways, on two specific timelines, and nobody from inside music was structurally positioned to stop it.
Pipeline one: tech ate the front end. This is the part you already know from the previous pieces. Streaming flattened margins. Discovery moved to algorithms. The artist-fan relationship moved to platforms. Every tool that touches the artist’s actual workflow - distribution, fan data, ticketing, smart links, mailing list, social posting -is now run by a SaaS company founded by people whose music credentials are usually a Spotify Wrapped screenshot. They built the tooling layer. They charge a subscription. They define what’s possible.
Pipeline two: Wall Street ate the back end. This is the part most music people miss because it’s happening in places we don’t go. Private equity funds, hedge funds, and specialized music-rights vehicles - Hipgnosis, Primary Wave, Concord, Round Hill, the Blackstone-backed deals, the catalog-as-an-asset-class movement - have been buying up song catalogs for the last 5–7 years like they’re municipal bonds with melodies attached. They don’t develop artists. They don’t break new acts. They don’t have a roster. They have a portfolio. And songs they own become inputs to a return target, not pieces of culture in the world.
The tech sellers are loud about themselves. The finance sellers are quiet. Both run on the same underlying premise: music is a unit of return. Neither of them is calibrated for making music matter.
And here’s the part that should make every music person reading this furious: between those two pipelines, the entire industry got financialized in under a decade, and almost nobody from inside the music world had a seat at the table when it happened.
The labels signed the deals. Senior executives took the bonuses. And by the time the contracts were inked, the people whose job it was to develop the next generation of artists looked up and noticed their budgets had quietly evaporated.
Why “spread everywhere” is the symptom
You feel it as “the industry is everywhere now.” That’s not a vibe. That’s the actual structure.
In 1995, the music industry had a center. You could draw it on a map. Major label headquarters in LA, NY, London. The big agencies. The big publishers. A few critical radio stations. A handful of magazines. Power was concentrated, which meant accountability was possible. If a label president did something stupid, other label presidents could yell at them in person at the same charity dinner.
In 2026, the center is gone. Decisions about an artist’s career now get made - sometimes in the same week - by:
→ A VC firm in San Francisco who funded the distribution platform they use → A SaaS company in Stockholm who built their fan dashboard → A private equity fund in New York who owns their publishing → A streaming algorithm team in Sweden who decided which playlists they qualify for → A TikTok content team in LA who decides which sound gets pushed → A management company in Berlin who specializes in “creator brands” → A bookkeeping outsource firm in Manila
None of these people know each other. None of them ever meet the artist. None of them are responsible to anyone in the music ecosystem if it goes wrong. The accountability layer collapsed with the geographic layer.
This is what “spread everywhere” actually means. It’s not that the industry got bigger. It’s that the industry got decentralized to the point where nobody is responsible for the artist as a whole human being anymore.
Every node optimizes for its own metric. Every node is run by people from bucket (c). And the artist sits in the middle, trying to hold a career together while seven different SaaS subscriptions and three catalog-fund clauses and an algorithm-determined release schedule pull them in different directions.
They’re selling tomatoes, not booking artists
Let me bring this down to ground level. The abstract argument only matters if you can see it in actual rooms.
Across this industry, it seems to me, the booker is increasingly someone whose previous career was in pure sales. They got hired because they could hit targets. They have no particular love for music. They didn’t grow up at gigs. And now they sit in meetings talking sales principles. Not music. Not the artists they’re booking. Not the audience. Sales principles.
And the people around them - who actually know what music is - nod, because the bookers have the title and the targets.
Here’s my honest read on what’s happening at the desk level in 2026: they are selling tomatoes, not booking artists.
Look at what’s downstream of this. Press kits that all look the same because they’re being templated. Creative documents being treated as deliverables. The first impression of an artist to the rest of the industry is now a SKU description with a logo on top - and the people whose job it is to catch that are letting it pass, because they don’t know what they’re looking at either.
This is what (c) running the industry actually means at the desk level.
Not villains. Not bad people. People who genuinely don’t know that something is missing - working alongside other people who genuinely don’t know that something is missing - validating each other’s competence.
It’s not malice. It’s a closed loop.
Here’s the line I want you to walk away with.
The people in bucket (a) - the music people who also understand business - have something the bucket (c) people don’t have and never will. They have scars.
They have memories of a record that was supposed to be the next big thing and tanked because the band fought during the third single. They have memories of a tour that got cancelled because a venue went bankrupt mid-route. They have memories of standing in a studio at 3am being told to choose between a song they loved and a song the label wanted, and the consequences either way. They have memories of an artist they signed who didn’t make it, and an artist they passed on who did.
That’s embodied knowledge. You can’t fake it. You can’t McKinsey your way to it. You can’t earn it from a podcast or a conference panel. It only comes from being in the room when things went right and when they went very wrong, and having to keep going to work the next day. The bucket (c) people don’t have any of this. And they don’t know they don’t.
So they make decisions that look weird, then bad, then catastrophic, to anyone who’s actually in the work. The release-every-three-weeks treadmill. The “let’s tip the artist a dollar for streaming” pilot programs. The catalog deals that strip songwriters of long-term equity. The recommendation that the artist build “fan journeys” instead of writing the next album. The dashboards that show the artist their numbers in real time, like a slot machine they’re losing at.
None of these decisions get made by people who have scars.
They get made by people who have spreadsheets.
A spreadsheet can model an outcome. It cannot tell you what it costs an artist when the band fights during the third single. It cannot tell you what happens in a room at 11pm when the crowd isn’t with you. It cannot tell you which song to put first on the album because you can feel it when you sequence the tape. It cannot tell you any of the things that actually matter.
This is the deepest version of the curator collapse I wrote about last week. Not just that the function went away. The people who replaced the function are working from inputs that don’t include the actual work.
That’s why everything they ship feels off. That’s why every “innovation” feels like it’s making the artist’s job harder. That’s why music in the algorithmic era feels both more available and less alive than at any point in the recorded-music era. The people designing it have never made any.
Where the music people went
The music people didn’t leave. They’re still here. They just got displaced from the rooms where decisions are made, and pushed to the edges of the industry where decisions don’t carry capital.
They’re booking 200-cap rooms in cities you’ve never been to. They’re A&Ring at indie labels with two employees and a shared Google Drive. They’re managing two artists they actually believe in instead of twelve they don’t. They’re running record stores that are somehow still alive. They’re producing in home studios for people they grew up with. They’re working at the venues, the press, the local radio, the scene-level publications.
They’re the (a) and (b) buckets, still here, still doing the work. Still building the constellation I wrote about last week.
But almost none of them are in the meetings where the capital flows. Almost none of them are on the boards that decide what gets built next. Almost none of them have a vote in the structural decisions that shape the industry their lives are inside.
And the bucket (c) people running those rooms? They genuinely believe they’re doing a good job. They have the dashboards to prove it.
If you take only one thing from this piece, take this:
The industry has not been ruined by stupid people. It has been quietly captured by people who don’t love the product they’re selling.
They have funding. They have decks. They have rooms full of people from the same business schools. They are correct, in their own terms, about almost everything they do. They are also operating an industry whose product they fundamentally do not care about.
That’s the thing music people have to internalize before any of this changes.
We are not in a fight against bad ideas. We are in a fight against good business logic applied to a thing it was never designed to handle. The fight isn’t to make them smarter. It’s to make sure the (a) and (b) people are loud enough, organized enough, and visible enough that decisions about the future of music can no longer be made entirely in rooms where nobody has any scars.
Until that happens, the spreadsheets win.
And the music gets quieter.
Yes.