[xuki]

Yup.

“My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.”

[TheOtherHobbes]

The Beatles exploded into rancour, hate, and bitterness, so they're maybe not the ideal role model.

Bands are hard. People in bands are passionate, often drunk and/or on drugs, almost guaranteed to be egotistical, and fiercely competitive - not at all team players by default, more like literal 10X music rock stars. (It doesn't help if they are.)

There's almost never a supervising manager to keep it all together. (Producers are temporary, and band managers are more like salespeople and hired negotiators than corporate managers.)

It's interesting to wonder what would happen if you took difficult but talented musicians and somehow managed them into smooth cooperation. Maybe Jobs did indeed do the software and design talent equivalent - but even he would have struggled with getting to happen in the music business.

[braythwayt]

Genuine bands are hard. So are genuine partnerships in every field, including founding companies.

Top-down, command-and-control organizations that churn out product are different. Not all achieve the same success, but nearly every industry has figured out how to industrialize “creativity.”

In music, pop has had industrialization for sixty to seventy years. Instead of The Beatles, think of all the “bands” that were actually vocalists fronting for The Wrecking Crew or The Funk Brothers.

Think of producers and arrangers like Quincy Jones or Trevor Horn or Prince. They produced many acts, including their own, but they were essentially scaling themselves.

Bands of equals are hard. But industrializing music is an understood business.

[silvestrov]

You could end up with K-pop: South Korean Pop, something that is too smooth and too focused on the market.