Artis we should've taken over Atlantic Records 4 years ago.

I was texting with my good friend Artis the past few days on how Warner Music is operating at a loss. A few years ago when we were at Atlantic Records we were discussing the future of the music business. This was around 2006. Artis asked my brother and I where do we see the music business in 2010. We bluntly told him that the business will be insolvent but more than ever the population will want new music. As contradictory as it sounds, that is the reality of what the music business is today. 

So around 2006 Artis was able to secure a meeting with  some pretty high ups over at Atlantic to discuss future strategies and planning of their artists and businesses. After our introductions and brief presentation, he asked where do you see music in the near future, we said everything is going electro and there's going to be rappers and artists coming from different races and areas in the world. First off nobody believed us, second which really pissed me off was that they said that Pop music was going to start to use more instruments. Well tell that to Ke$ha and Far East Movement. That was the first prediction that came to fruition.

The second prediction we came up with was that artists will start to look for corporate sponsorships to release new music. This is a little difficult to grasp because we talked too much business at the table, but our thoughts was that if you go this route the public will reject most of the music that is associated with a product or brand. Since music is still ART, people will ultimately reject this music. There's a bunch of examples out there such as the Bacardi Music Launce, Axe music launch and the Toyota music launch that failed. Here's a tip, Brands and Sports work 99.9% of the time, Music and Brands may backfire on you 99.9% of the time. 

The lesson from this was that Artis, my brother and I were right. LOL J/K. The real value to this story is to always look ahead in your business no matter what industry you are in and sometimes the executive may not have all the answers, as we saw from the banking crisis.