Some musicians/bands who, in addition to thriving in the new world of the 21st century music industry, have a knack for making good business decisions.
The ability to monetise ideas is one of the things entrepreneurship offers musicians. Artists, like entrepreneurs, have a product or idea to sell and must enter the market. Just like entrepreneurs, artists have products or ideas to sell and need to find customers.
To do this, artists need (at a minimum) basic business skills and a willingness to engage in selling art, as any entrepreneur would. While not all entrepreneurs are artists, every artist is an entrepreneur. While not all entrepreneurs are artists, all artists are entrepreneurs. In all the entertainment industries, there is no power couple better suited to the artist-entrepreneur than Jay Z and Beyoncé.
They both went on to become big pop celebrities before going into business ventures that turned them into cultural leaders. Jay-Z The son of the Marcy Houses real estate project in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn, Sean Carter, better known as “Jay-Z”, went from releasing his first records for his label to becoming one of the most successful hip-hop entrepreneurial artists of all time. Sean Carter co-founded Roc-A-Fella Records in 1996 and has built the fledgling label into a huge empire over the past 12 years, using both his musical skills and his business experience.
Trent Reznor Nine Inch Nails, formerly of Interscope Records, are among the few top-selling artists who have recently chosen to manage and release their music on their own rather than under the auspices of a major. In the history of music, art and cinema, there have been dozens of creators who took their careers into their own hands and created a business empire that arose through their own creativity and hard work.
Gwen Stefani fans aren’t just looking forward to her turn as a judge on The Voice; they also can’t wait to see the dropline from her fashion label L.A.M.B. While some artists dabble in the fashion world, Stefani’s clothing line is a clothing powerhouse that sells in hundreds of stores around the world.
Billy Joel’s company, 20th Century Cycles, was born out of a love and need for motorcycles – the singer’s exclusive bike collection already exceeds 75, and he just needed a place to store and display his collection. So in 2010, Joel built a museum in his hometown of Long Island. According to the 20th Century Cycles website, Joel’s custom bikes aren’t for sale, but you can buy things like t-shirts! However, if he sells his collection, he might make enough money to rent every luxury box at his monthly Madison Square Garden concerts.
The godfather of grunge, Neil Young, is more of an inventor than an entrepreneur, and his innovations are more a response to his mindset than an attempt to increase his bank balance (like the LincVolt bioelectric car that Young has been working on for nearly a decade). ). Rocker has long been an advocate for cleaner, more efficient modes of transport, which explains his fondness for Lionel’s trains, which don’t tie society to dwindling, environmentally damaging, and war-inducing natural resources. So Young and his team turned a 1959 Lincoln Continental into a plug-in hybrid not to gain a foothold in the growing market for electric vehicles, but simply to prove the technology works. The young inventor then turned his eyes and ears to improving the way we perceive music with his PONO music player, its response to the flat, numb MP3 files we listen to daily.
