A little lesson on the dynamics of the Industry today, and I’m going to really try to do this without bringing my own stuff into it (we’ll see if that works).
Some of ya’ll may have heard this before, but the Music/Entertainment industry is like High School. It’s divided into cliques and social hierarchies, and you have to navigate through these over the course of you career.
You have the Cool Kids: These are the execs who everyone knows. They’re almost as famous as the artists they work with. They’re at all the best events; they travel in an entourage of people who just always seem witty and funny; they party like nobody’s business…they’re who everyone wants to know. Folks clamor for their attention and/or acknowledgement, drop their names to other people when trying to gain credibility, and basically just hover around hoping they’ll get pulled into their circle.
The Cool Kids have groupies (of both sexes) and often also have egos. But they’re the poster children of the Industry. They’re the examples that make kids say “I wanna do that,” because they make the lifestyle look so amazing.
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You have the Class Presidents: These are the senior level executives who’ve been doing this forever and who everyone basically bows down to (think of a Lyor Cohen or – my favorite – Sylvia Rhone). They’ve molded the game with their influence. They write books, run companies, and train rising stars. People study their careers like playbooks. They’ve seen it all and done it all. They also have groupies and folks clamoring to get near them, but they spot bs a mile off and are really too busy to entertain any of it. (Not that many of the Cool Kids aren’t genuinely busy, but some of them like the attention).
You have the Nerds, who actually aren’t shunned as maybe they used to be when we older (cough) folks were actually in high school, but are actually respected and have their own cool factor simply for their vast knowledge of one particular area.
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These are the producers and beat makers who do nothing but stay in the studio and study music and the latest/best ways to make it better; the digital folks who are always up on the latest tech advances, gadgets, web sites, etc; the editors and video producers who are all about production techniques, visual tricks, and a whole bunch of other film stuff that I don’t even know enough about to list here. The Nerds sometimes interact with the Cool Kids, but they’d usually rather be in their own version of The Lab than out at Greenhouse chillin’ with bottle service.
You have Mean Girls: The Mean Girls are actually usually part of the Cool Kids, but they’re threatened by any
