Sterling Proffer

Glaringly, the prominent artists complaining about record labels demanding TikToks tend to be Millennials who love a good music video—or at least seem to appreciate the power of cultivating distance from their listeners.

Product teams overvalue hitting home runs vs hitting 100 singles back to back. This leads them to take bigger swings by going after bigger markets of new users. They get bogged down by trying to establish product-market fit for a new set of users and never fulfill the potential of their current product-market fit.

Are you actively practicing generosity and vulnerability in order to make the connections between you and others clear, open, available, durable? Generosity here means giving of what you have without strings or expectations attached. Vulnerability means showing your needs.

Great art, even good art, relies on the existence of individuals who are able to devote the lion’s share of their energy to producing it—in other words, professionals.

Record labels are digging their own grave. They finally have achieved their dream—which is to make money while doing as little work as possible. But the end result is a world in which they add so little value that no successful musician will want them any longer.