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- The Connection Newsletter 63 - Drama
The Connection Newsletter 63 - Drama
The Connection Newsletter 63 - Drama
Hello!
This is edition #63 of
The Connection
, the weekly email I send family, friends, and future friends (hello!) Glad you're here.
I wanted to revisit the Taylor Swift Tumblr post she dropped last Sunday as I was wrapping
The Connection #62.
ICYMI, the tl;dr is that Taylor’s old record label, Big Machine, sold the rights to her first six albums to Scooter Braun’s company. Scooter manages acts like Justin Bieber, Kanye West, and others.
There’s been beef between Taylor and Scooter over the years, and per Taylor: “This is the worst case scenario.”
Regardless of the he-said-she-said, the specifics about who-knew-what-when, or the motivations behind the deal, I’m devastated for Taylor. The idea of losing control of over a decade of your work is heartbreaking.
I spent the last week thinking about the takeaways from this deal. While music agreements are foreign to me, I’ve spent a couple of years during my Hollywood career working literary agreements and there are many parallels.
The three takeaways that stand out to me:
Takeaway 1: Negotiate like success is inevitable
Taylor released her self-titled album in 2006 under Big Machine. She was 16 at the time. Most of the songs she wrote as a freshman… in high school.
No one could predict the level of success she would achieve, least of all a 16-year-old Taylor. As the saying goes, "hindsight is a real motherf*cker."
Which is why on every deal, to the extent possible, you have to protect yourself on the downside and
capture value on the upside
. As I’ve
, in the case of Michelle William’s deal on ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD:
“Michelle Williams didn’t know her co-star earned $1,500,000 for the reshoots while she earned her $1,000 per diem. Then again, it’s not her job to know. That’s her agents, Brent Morley and Patrick Whitesell’s job. Their duties can be distilled down to a single sentence: Protect the client.
More specifically, make deals that maximize upside and protect downside. The difference between a good and bad agent is measured in degrees of how far one will go to do this.”
In Taylor's case, capturing the upside means NOT having a reversion clause dependent on her to produce an album to earn back an album. More on reversions in a minute.
Takeaway 2: Mind the details
Fortunes are gained and lost, careers are made and destroyed, on the details.
Quick example: In 1995, a smart television executive by the name of Gail Berman was reviewing the contract to a 90s film that bombed, but she thought had the potential for a hit TV series. In reviewing the contract, she found something interesting: a mistake.
The studio, 20th Century Fox, left out the standard clause reserving the film’s TV spin-off rights. That left the rights to her dream show free to shop around to the best network.
That show became BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, starring Michelle Gellar (
: Season Finale by Susanne Daniels, Cynthia Littleton; Location: 2034).
The details that mattered for Taylor in this circumstance: Right of First Refusal or Right of Last Refusal, to create a contractual obligation from Big Machine to enter into good faith negotiations for the rights of her catalog instead of defaulting to the reversion clause.
Speaking of…
Takeaway 3: Understand your reversion clause
The reversion clause can be tricky. Basically, it’s the obligation one must fulfill in order for the rights to revert back to the original owner.
There’s a rolling reversion, where if an option is exercised but no production commences within a set time period, the rights holder can buy back the rights after giving back the money, less the option fee.
There’s a reversion where the rights holder pays back everything they were paid AND any development costs undertaken by the studio to get the rights back (great example of this is Michael Connelly,
, and is now on its fifth season on Amazon).
Or in the case of Taylor’s reversion: “I was given an opportunity to sign back up to Big Machine Records and ‘earn’ one album back at a time, one for every new one I turned in.”
This last point is particularly significant because it’s a point of contention between Taylor and Big Machine: technically, she WAS offered the right to control her back catalog… with strings attached.
However, for an outsider buyer like Scooter Braun, all they had to do was right a (big) check.
As of the time I’m writing this, Scooter still hasn’t made a public statement, but there’s something David Sarnoff-like about the deal. It reeks of nefarious intent, especially when he’s reposting stories to his Instagram account about “
”
I’ll continue to follow the story with great interest. In the meantime, onto this week’s articles:
Make sure to hit "Display Images" above to see puppy pics.
Many Chinese people who understand the full story about the Hong Kong protests against a proposed Chinese extradition law just want the protestors to go home.
I think from a western perspective, it’s easier to empathize with the Hong Kong people. The right of the individual is paramount in the west, and especially in the United States.
But for the Chinese, where a prosperous middle class is still new and poverty is a recent memory, they’ll trade economic growth at the cost of individual rights.
“Freedom can’t fill stomachs, this thinking goes.”
Jony Ive is credited with Apple’s visual, industrial, and product design. He left the company left week. During his tenure, he made hundreds of counterintuitive design choices that ushered in the sleek, minimalistic design synonymous with Apple’s brand today.
These changes created immense value for Apple… and created a legacy of disposability and unrepairability that consumers must bear. Examples:
MacBook Pro keyboards with mechanisms that are, again, a fraction of a millimeter thinner but are easily defeated by dust and crumbs. Many MacBook Pros have to be completely replaced due to a single key breaking.
The iPhone 6 Plus had a design flaw that led to its touch screen spontaneously breaking—it then told consumers there was no problem for months before ultimately creating a repair program.
AirPods have an unreplaceable battery that must be physically destroyed in order to open.
Apple began gluing down batteries inside laptops and smartphones (rather than screwing them down) to shave off a fraction of a millimeter,
Meanwhile, Costco has made decades worth of counterintuitive decisions to bring more value
back to the consumers
, at the expense of the bottom line and shareholders.
Examples:
Refusing to boost markups (when they strike an improved deal with a retailer, they’ll pass the savings onto the customer)
Charging people via memberships to enter the store (with a 90% retention rate)
Small product line, massive volume (1/10th of most supermarkets)
Reengineers products lines to build less expensive products
Pays double the national retail average ($21 per hour)
Overtime specializes in short videos that give a semi-pro gloss to high-school and middle-school sports and then distributes the content via YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. Some of the stars coming out of the app include Zaire Wade (Dwayne Wade’s son), Bronny James (Lebron’s son) Shareef and Shaqir O’Neal (sons of Shaq) and share over a million Instagram followers between them.
Overtime and apps like it could change the sports media landscape (or the sports landscape, period) forever.
“We’re giving them the opportunity to see highlights in almost real time. We’re giving them the opportunity to choose their own announcers, choose their own stats feed, choose their own whatever—to get their own particular kind of telecast. That may or may not be enough, because they don’t want to watch the Super Bowl for three and a half hours.”
If apps like Overtime, Instagram, or Snapchat were around when Freddy Adu first signed to the D.C. United at the age of 14, he’d still be a superstar. We would have breathlessly followed this “next Pele”, watching his career unfold. And even if he still became the journeyman he’s known as today, he'd be able to make bank on his brand alone. The story is just too good.
Instead, at the age of 30, his former teammates think he’s done. Washed up. Meanwhile, Adu is quietly getting ready to make his comeback. In the coming months, he's determined to get in shape. He will drop from 162 pounds to his playing weight of 150.
If the time has come to trade on his name as a way to get back on the field, if that's the card he needs to play to pull on a uniform again, well, he'd be foolish to rule that out. "I'd be more open to that than I would have been before," he said. Because he still has more to prove. He can't have his career end this way.
He vows that the next time, his last last chance, will be different. "I know that for a fact," he says.
The analysis of 1,000 data photos is interesting but I included this article because I found the writer’s psychology fascinating. He laments that online dating sucks and is quick to point out all the flaws in the algorithm used by sites like Tinder, OKCupid, and Hinge:
I began to internalize my lack of success and, after some investigation, realized that there may be factors beyond my control at play: in the algorithm-based world of online dating, my stock as a short Indian guy isn’t worth a whole lot.
He then talks nostalgically about IRL dating like it was the golden age of coupling, where attributes like height, race, and status play no role in one’s success, and instead we are judged by the light in our souls.
Anyway, he jumps through a ton of psychological hoops to justify his lack of success with online dating, but the takeaway that stands out to me: moving the dating experience from real life to online doesn’t change your preferences, it just
exposes them.
Thanks for reading!
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