🔵 Majors (and more): beware process-led optimisation

Everyone is focused on optimising and refining - and that's a bad idea

Terms like “optimisation” and “refinement” have loomed large in conversations I’ve had of late regarding the music industry and how things are changing. It feels like culture has ground to a halt (or at least a neolithically slow crawl), and as a consequence, majors (and yes, some indies too) seem to be focusing not on innovation or creativity so much as simply working to juice as much as possible from what is already there.

Hence the superfans obsession; having run out of road, the focus is now on simply extracting more from the people already there.

Alongside this, we’re seeing - in the majors, particularly - much focus on streamlining. Redundancies are an ongoing issue, and beyond that I am hearing of reshuffles and general review of structure etc in a bid to - and here’s that word again - optimise the working function of the business.

Optimisation is a word businesses love. It connotes extracting more from what is there without further investment. If you’re making a $1M per year with 100 staff, optimisation would be making $1.5M with 80 staff, for example. This is how the majors have been of late: stripping back staffing to increase profit and please shareholders.

Superficially, one can see the logic. It’s the same one RyanAir uses to great effect: strip out all but the most essential items and your profit margins will grow.

However the problem with this logic is that it fails to recognise the nature of arts and culture, which is fundamentally illogical. Yes, focusing on value extraction from what you have is viable, and undoubtedly profitable. But it is also a finite pool that you are drawing from, and at some point, that will dry up unless work is done to find the next places to be and the next platforms to build on.

The realities of this passive approach - in which labels just work with what is there - are coming home to roost. Midia’s latest findings in its excellent “All eyes, no ears: Why virality is not building fandom” report (which you can download for free, and I recommend you do) is showing that far from being a key driver for music plays now, social media is if anything cannibalising those streams. Put simply, social is not a place for discovery; it is now morphing into the consumption point, but in an incredibly transient and low value way.

The greatest successes in music - and often in the wider world - came not from people following optimisation strategies. They came from the mavericks who went in the opposite direction; who signed bands no one else would touch.

I’ve been reading an advance copy of

Chris Dalla Riva

’s incredible book, “Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves”. I have a whole post coming soon focused on learnings from his book (short version: buy it, it’s incredible), but there was one I feel applies to my argument here. Back when rock n’ roll was emerging, it wasn’t the major labels that worked to snap these bands up; it was the indies. The Beatles’ first hits in the US were not on a major; they were on a small indie label, Vee Jay Records.

Much of what brings true success does not make a good deal of sense. Those breakthrough moments don’t come from conformity; often they are people bucking trends or going against the grain. Don’t believe me? Go read “Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense” by Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland, which details this topic at some length, and to great effect.

This is why I worry about the focus on optimisation. It is a discipline inherently focused on what is already there. At this point though, where kids are thirsting for better ways to connect with music, and where social media is demonstrably failing as a tool to deliver that connection, what is needed is not optimisation: it is innovation, and as things stand, that’s a space that is gravely under-explored relative to what is needed.

However, this is also where opportunities lie. I am already demoing one platform that aims to bridge gaps and provide a deeper connection with music, and I am expecting more to pop up soon. In the face of that though, this obsession with simply extracting more from what’s already there is a fool’s errand. Right now, the best thing the music industry could do is focus on the mavericks, the weirdos, the people challenging the status quo, and look to empower those people to deliver new opportunities. If you’re increasing your profits through optimisation, maybe re-invest it into those gambles. Ultimately, some of that won’t pay off, but those that do might just prove to be your long-term future.

Have a great evening,

D.


🎶 Listening to “The Rope” by Wunderhorse. Sometimes, songs land on impact, on first listen. This song did that when I first saw it debuted on Jools Holland’s Later show, and I mentioned it here in Network Notes back then. Equally though, there are sometimes those moments in life where big moments occur, it all comes together, and maybe, just maybe, a song is playing at the time that lands so perfectly that you can only wonder at the beauty of how life plays out. That happened recently with this track, rebounding into my consciousness and giving me that buzz that only comes when songs really, REALLY hit the spot. God bless Wunderhorse.

📖 Reading “The Brain at Rest: Why doing nothing can change your life” by Joseph Jebelli. This book is a mind-blower, examining how the brain functions when at rest, and how that benefits in our daily lives. If that sounds a little obvious, trust me, it runs much deeper than that. This is not just some “sleep’s great, yeah?” argument: it actually shows how we are far more capable of achieving great things - particularly having great ideas - if we allow our brains periods of complete rest. That means gazing off into space, taking a walk and letting your mind wander etc etc. Honestly, it’s a fantastic read. Buy it and thank me later.

📺 Watching “A Modern Boombox Review - by popular request” on YouTube. I can’t lie: I love me some boombox action, and am a proud owner of an OG 80s Sharp Boombox that looks amazing and sounds… like a boombox made in the 80s, heheh. But are these modern boomboxes a cash-in, or worth it? This video answers that. Clue: I’m in.

🤖 Playing with Notion 3.0. I have spent SO much time neck-deep in AI things in recent months, and the larger proportion of it has all fallen short. Not Notion though, whose deployment of AI within its platform has been spectacular. Version 3.0 brings an agentic element that looks like a game-changer. This can take notes, learn about a client, then write a proposal for you based on the proposals you’ve trained it on. Incredible. Beyond that though, you can now plug in your Gmail, Google Drive and other apps to create a central, indexed, searchable-with-AI place to work. This is how it should be done.

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Now up: my appearance on Scuba’s excellent “Music, Not Diving” Podcast!

A couple of weeks ago I sat down with Scuba to chat about a variety of topics, chiefly led by what I’ve been writing about here. It was a great conversation though, touching on the death of monoculture, the purpose of labels in 2025, the true value of music, the importance of local scenes and much much more. Dive in (sorry) below, or find it on your podcast app of choice.