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David_Gerard comments on Rational entertainment industry? - Less Wrong
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I've been in and around the music industry for a few decades. (As someone who actually likes music, Omega help me.) Whatever it runs on, it's not rationality and only occasionally seems to be business. There's lots of ape politics and towering mountains of BS.
We're talking about something where the product for sale is a subjective feeling in the mind of the listener, so being a skilled enough rhetorician to convince someone else that enough customers will feel the right subjective feeling is enough to get you a very long way, even with a terrible track record (because there's always an excuse, and 10 years' failure is 10 years' experience on your resume).
Rational business practice in the entertainment industry seems in short supply. I have only just-so surmises on why precisely it comes out this way, but it does seem to be the case, suggesting the possibility of an underlying more generally applicable reason or theory.
I suspect the problem is that being good at that, i.e., having artistic talent and/or having a feel for artistic talent, tends to be inversely correlated with rationality.
It's notoriously a field full of marks ripe for the exploiting.
Who exploits who how?
Typically the supply of those who don't have any business sense is farmed or mined by those who do.
Ah, so I'm not just imagining things then. Of course, exploiting whatever market inefficiency is thus produced probably wouldn't be easy (or more people would be doing that already), but it's interesting to note the existence of the phenomenon as the first step.
There are enough people on the small levels who are very good at the microeconomics of business that there's not a lot of fat left for the exploitation. The jawdropping inefficiencies happen in the large companies, which is why the major labels are floundering now that the Internet has dropped the marginal cost of music to zero - as gatekeepers of distribution, they used to form an oligopoly, got really lardy, and they aren't coping well with not being gatekeepers. There used to be six majors, there are now four and EMI's looking pretty shaky.