Applied Science #18(ish): The Future Is A Hollow Tree
A mailbag of my mind...
Over the holiday, I packed in plenty of reading time, chased my son around outside when it wasn’t raining here in LA, watched all four John Wick movies after my family was safely asleep across a handful of days, and spent a lot of quiet moments asking myself (and sometimes others) about the future.
Below is a mailbag from my own mind and a set of (late?) predictions to start the year.
Do resumes matter anymore?
One of my best friends stayed with us over the New Year. She’s a strategist for a marketing company in New York that works primarily with direct-to-consumer brands. We met as A&R’s in 2013. She wisely escaped the music industry years ago. We sat by a fire one rainy, cold night, discussing her desire to pick up more consulting work. Naturally, the topic turned to resumes.
Before we get back to the sorts of resumes a person used to typically print on a piece of paper and hand over to a recruiter at a job interview, I’m going to ask you to look at some basketball statistics.
Player 1: 19.1 points per game, 11.2 assists per game, 7.2 rebounds per game, 13 years played
Player 2: 23.1 points per game, 7.2 assists per game, 5.6 rebounds per game, 17 years played
Player 3: 21.0 points per game, 8.0 assists per game, 7.0 rebounds per game, 18 years played
On paper, these numbers are comparable. Abstracted from context and authorship, it would be easy to make a case for players two and three. While they averaged fewer assists than player one, their scoring is stronger, their rebounding averages are comparable, and their longevity would appear to make them more reliable players over time.
The first player is Magic Johnson, perhaps one of the five greatest basketball players ever. The other two are James Harden and Russell Westbrook, respectively. Two great players that no historian of the game would ever compare to Magic Johnson.
Johnson could put teams on his back in tight situations, willing the Lakers to championships in the 1980s with his scoring and passing ability. He was versatile and savvy, rarely making the wrong decisions in the toughest moments. Harden and Westbrook both built notorious reputations for notching gaudy regular seasons statistics before shrinking under the spotlights of close games and tight playoff match ups.
I chose a random assortment of three NBA players, but you could engage in this exercise across sports, film, music, and history. Raw numbers don’t always tell the full story. They certainly don’t always express a person’s impact.
I told my friend I thought a well-placed press piece or podcast likely meant more than a resume in her case (though it can be expensive to get press and there’s no guarantee of cutting through the noise).
In music, film, consulting, tech, and really anything that doesn’t have to do with nuclear power or taking a scalpel to someone’s chest to perform open heart surgery (though perhaps there too), it feels as though we’ve moved fully into the era of constructed personal narrative. A resume is only as good as the person pushing it and perhaps a complete non-factor if the person is captivating enough at communicating why they are the one for the job. Maybe it’s always been this way. Maybe resumes have never mattered and we’re simply told they do because they seem like something we can control in an often inscrutable job market.
As companies get flooded with undifferentiated resumes through platforms like LinkedIn, where people blanket employers with their CV’s in hope of some response, the likelihood that even a well-assembled, classically “impressive” resume will cut through grows slimmer. Relationships become more important. Storytelling takes precedence over actual achievement.
Of course, the era of narrative cuts both ways. A story can be used to communicate things a resume cannot. A story can also obscure reality.
(I may be dead wrong about this. I have not updated my resume in years. I tend to speak it when asked what I do, what my history is, my background. I have not had a proper “job” in years, not because I have reached some sort of retirement level of success, but because the nature of my work in service of clients has rarely demanded a chronological list of achievements and places I achieved them. Still, I can’t help but wonder what a resume does in industries shifting as rapidly as music and film.)
What is 2026 going to look like for the music producer?
In 2023, a client was lined up to produce an album for a pop singer who, at the time, was bubbling but not yet a superstar. That client got blown out after months of work by another established songwriter. I will spare the details of the story for obvious reasons. The lesson: Songwriting was more important to labels and artists than production in this moment, an inversion of how the industry had worked for much of my early career as a manager. Labels had begun treating producers interchangeably in the early 2020s, but this blow out marked a measurable shift in my eyes, as I watched A&R’s on the project (who had known and supported my client for years) back away from ideas they’d seemingly loved and move on like it was nothing after months of work.
In the time since then, I’ve watched this story play out in microcosm across all sorts of producers that I know and work with, from the most established to the newest. I have seen fees and budgets shrink, leaving me and my peers to argue for what feels like increasingly shrinking ground every time someone comes to us to clear a song’s usage. Most importantly, I have watched the role of the beat maker be reduced to near invisibility, while producers who can somehow gain an artist’s confidence have become more entrenched and important than ever, in-house tastemakers who help guide often mercurial creators. No matter how important this latter category of producer becomes, the pay for production still does not add up to the hours put into almost any project unless that project generates a hit record (or two or three).
Labels have signed more artists than they know what to do with. Budgets have dwindled. Producers are often only as good as their last hit. Even then, the world of major label A&R regards hit-making differently than it did in previous eras where the right producers could reliably mint superstars.
Producers must now get scrappy. They must be artists themselves. They must build their own collectives and labels. They must build multiple verticals around their music and identity to help monetize it. They must not rely on placements with record labels as the reliable primary source of income, unless they are comfortable with socializing and luck of the draw forming the core pillars of their business.
Chaos and the Land of Opportunity
2025 was one of the most incoherent years in music history. The increased balkanization of attention, the fragmentation of stardom, and the flooding of content across media combined with general economic and socio-political instability (or, at very least, the perception of doom around every corner) fomented a general air of anxiety last year that has polluted the early days of 2026. That sense may be more pervasive in my circles than writ large, but some statistics certainly back up the coalescing atmospheric dread (for random example, per Axios: “Roughly 40% of Americans couldn’t cover a $400 emergency expense without debt”).
This moment in music specifically reminds me of the early days of my career. I got my start in 2013. The worst year of recorded music income since the advent of Napster (1999). In 2014 revenue went down again. Only with the rise of Spotify, the introduction of Apple Music (2015), the shift to a unified global release day (also 2015), and the complete digitalization of commercial music did money begin to flood back in. Many of those able to start new companies in the 2011-2015 trough or grit through the lean days with their existing set ups have seen huge returns in the last decade of subsequent uplift. As two random examples, companies like 300 (founded in 2012, launched in 2013) and APG Records (founded in 2013) sold for $400 million and a reported $250 million respectively, each within eight years of entering the public sphere. That sort of rapid growth happened because of shrewd deals and break out stars, but it also happened because savvy operators started new ventures at a time when record deals represented depressed assets with limited paths to monetization and artists had fewer avenues for releasing music.
While the problems differ today (too many avenues for releasing music, too much music, broken discovery, every white girl singer sounds the same except Chappell Roan), the sense of entropy gives me a whiff of the opportunities that characterized 2011-2015. The next wave of eight to nine figure music companies will rise out of this bubbling cauldron of a time.
Will I ever like live music again?
A brief shoutout to Dave Harrington, who I met in a parenting class. Dave singlehandedly rekindled my love of live music, long-beaten down by shows I had to go to for work and a litany of years spent begging, borrowing, and stealing to get Coachella passes.
I’ve gotten to watch Dave play a few very different, transcendent live performances over the past nine months (two as a part of Darkside, his trio with Nico Jaar and Tlacael Esparza, and one as a part of his jazz trio with Billy Mohler and Jay Bellerose). If you live in L.A. and want to be absolutely transported by live music, seek out whatever wonderfully weird, improvisational thing Dave does next.
You can catch Dave and friends every first Monday of the month at Club Tee Gee in Atwater Village, a very good place for a beer and some fully improvised jazz.
Some rapid fire predictions…
A major Bandcamp competitor will rise in 2026. It probably already exists.
There will be a constant stream of articles about the ascendance of physical media and physical spaces in younger demographics.
The importance of “third spaces” (places that aren’t the home or the office) will rise and some start up will accidentally reinvent the concept of the coffee shop to great mockery across the Internet.
Crime will continue to go down in American cities. This has nothing to do with music or art.
Universal Music Group will gobble up even more ground than previously imaginable, leading to the eventual acquisition of either Sony Music Entertainment (spinning SME off from Sony, which has been a dream of some major Sony shareholders as far back as 2013) or Warner Music Group, or the merger of SME and WMG into a comparable second major (unless some tech company finally enters the arena and buys SME or WMG outright). This will essentially leave Concord as the third “major” (it is functionally the fourth at the moment). The field of independent labels (many of which are distributed by UMG, SME, and WMG controlled companies) will continue to balloon as majors become even less viable machines for artists that aren’t superstars.
Hip-hop will make a major comeback commercially because it never actually faded in its commercial relevance. Billboard just changed its rules.
The 2026 Grammy’s will feel as incoherent as 2025 felt in music. The so-called “Big 4” categories (Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best New Artist) will be split between different artists.
The 2027 Super Bowl will feature a performance from a country artist.
There will be think pieces about the rise of jazz in LA. Who knows, I might write one. (I think I already started above)
Local newspapers in big cities will make a comeback as local newspapers in big cities die.
I will rewatch John Wick 3 because it is the best John Wick. 4 was really fun but too long.
LA will cede ground to NY, Miami, Atlanta, Nashville, and London as a musical hub after over a decade as the center of the creative universe. You can feel it in conversations and anecdotes. Not a mass exodus, but a slow dissolve. LA will remain the epicenter of music creation and dissemination, but its titanic place in the solar system will shrink as the balance shifts back to other places that are also awesome to make music (hell, maybe even Detroit).
In 2026 there will be more partnerships like the UMG/NVIDIA deal that amount to a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing about how the music industry is attempting to metabolize artificial intelligence. Lots of buzzwords. Lots of big names. Lots of lawsuits transmuted into partnerships (hearkening back to the early days of Spotify vs. the record business). AI may follow the hollowed paths of NFTs and initiatives to support Black creators and executives, topics that rapidly dominated the atmosphere of music before dissipating just as quickly (in the first case, the dissipation was welcome; in the latter, deeply depressing). AI will likely hang around long enough to fade into freshly faulty infrastructure as the gold rush simply becomes the “is” of corporate architecture. And even AI could fall from favor if partnerships prove too costly, whether in a literal sense of return on investment or in the sense of alienating fans of living human artists. The latter will likely require stars to take a stand against whatever half-cocked applications of NVIDIA and UDIO the UMG-megaplex has in store. What’s more likely is the emergence of a steroidal new age of monetized fan fiction. Whether that is inherently good or bad is in the eye of the beholder. Inarguably, it will mean the continued explosion of entertainments that crowd out new music made by human artists from the attention market place. Is this what Lucian Grainge means when he refers to UMG’s strategy as artist-centric in his yearly memo?