My essential question explores the intersection between the music and business worlds. And as you might expect, the two worlds are extremely intertwined. At the label where I’m interning, 300 Entertainment, I’ve seen how the music business is a big thing with many different departments. There’s an A&R division finding new talent and managing artists, there’s a marketing team, radio team, PR team for the artists and company, an executive team, influencer marketing team, and more. While it is impressive to look at how many moving parts there are to the music business, it’s hardly surprising to me as I expected something generating so much money to have a lot of people involved. One surprising thing that I did learn was how inefficient labels are with singing successful artists. For the major 4 labels, their A&R signings are actually successful on about every 1 out of 10 signings. I was super surprised to learn that 90% of the talent signed for the most part doesn’t actually become successful. 300 has thrived as a smaller label by having about 3 out of 10 artists signed working out. I had no idea that there could be such successful businesses built out of major successes and mostly failures. However, my label has done a great job teaching me about the different areas of the industry. I’ve had the chance to talk to the CEO, marketing, A&R, PR, influencer marketing teams, and more. I’ve also gotten to do workshops on things like contracts. That was super interesting because I got to see actual contracts the label put together and see the advance, royalty structure, and more about deals with specific artists. What I learned from that workshop is that the labels take a lot of money off of the artist but at the same time they’re putting up the advance and taking the risk which I know often doesn’t pay off as they might hope.