Peter Frampton: 55 million streams and I got paid $1700
I always wanted to be in the music business. After I graduated college I got a job at a record label in Nashville. Typical story, start in the mail room and work your way up. After two promotions I was “artist development coordinator” - and got to see higher up into the company. It wasn’t appealing.
The president of the company left and the new guy didn’t like my boss so he fired him and all four of us that worked for him. My boss was like “sit tight, I’ll be somewhere else soon and I’ll give you a call.”
I said “Nah, I’m going to law school.”
Well, we just did it flip-ways and ended up in the same place!
In my experience, the oil business was always a LOT less skeezy than presumed in popular culture. I did a ton of overseas work and, notwithstanding the cliche' of Big Oil raping and pillaging and simply doing a watered down version of colonialism, it more often felt to me like we constantly were fighting a whack-a-mole game to prevent the locals in power from skimming the large majority of the host nation's take from the public coffers. Certainly, we were getting our large share of the pie (and ALMOST ALL of the financial risk). And, over a 30 year career, there were less than ONE handful of times when I had to play the "I'm going to my General Counsel and, if you pressure him too much, then to the Board's Audit Committee if you don't reconsider" card. But the real sleaziness, in my experience, was consistently in the host government Oil Ministry (including state (but not federal) equivalents in the US).
Anyway, more to the point of this thread, for 30 years almost everyone I was dealing with directly had some kind of personal ante' into and acknowlegement of the risks of the pot. But the music industry? You've got these mostly young people who are just totally committed to their art, harboring almost no pecuniary artifice of their own, and they're just thrown in with a bunch of sharks without whom the product of their passion can get no audience. It's like taking candy from babies and then kicking sand in their faces.
Much, much uglier than the oil business IMHO.
Oh, and just for clarity, I was BIG oil. I do think things are sleazier at the mid-size and smaller-size level. Not because the people are better in Big Oil, but because Big Oil just has so much more to lose without proper corporate safeguards in place.