COMBO member Chuck Hughes sent us this piece of advice from Bob Lefsetz: The best and the brightest will continue to not enter the music industry, which is a closed club that doesn’t want new members and doesn’t pay enough anyway. The big checks working for the man have evaporated, the money Lucian Grainge got for Universal going public is the last big payday. Sure, top execs are well-compensated, but they’ve paid their dues over years. The only big money available to newcomers is in management, where the odds of success are long. In the old days, with music generating as much of an income, if not more, than any occupation in America, the renegades who didn’t fit in all entered the music business. Today the business is calcified and, like I said, you can make much more money elsewhere, in finance and tech. So we’ve got the lowest common denominator people becoming acts… those with no options because they’ve got little education, and as for working at companies… you can’t make money without paying your dues for a long time, and therefore if you want to be closer to music it’s easier to just buy a ticket than work behind the scenes.
– Bob Lefsetz 1/7/2026