Three Spheres
I was talking to a friend a few weeks ago and he commented that he knew an executive coach that talked about three spheres that needed to overlap to have professional success. I’m not sure if Andrew used the word “spheres” but I’m thinking about them as overlapping circles. A venn diagram if you will.
So those three spheres are
1. Your interests
2. Your skills or talents and
3. The market
All three of those need to be in harmony to achieve true professional success. And the point that was made was that too many people focused on only the first two and ignored the third. I’ve written previously that perhaps the most fundamentally strategic choice to make is your market. And that the rest is largely tactics. So I think there’s a lot of merit to the notion that optimizing not just for what you like and what you’re good at but, to put it crassly, what pays, is a good idea.
Many people have great little artisan ideas about one thing or the other. Maybe it’s making candles or something. But the point is that even if you’re smart and good at doing stuff and you’re really interested in candle making, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the candle making industry is something that will lend itself to high levels of Return on Investment.
Maybe you can see where I’m going with this. Much of the music industry is shrinking (from a revenue perspective). If the market is shrinking. If less money is being spent. That’s important. That’s a decisive consideration in things like if you want to start a new tech-focused music company.
Not saying it’s impossible. Just saying that shrinking markets lend themselves to consolidation and to one or two dominant players. If an ad-supported freemium subscription model is the format through which people will consume music in the future it’s perhaps unlikely that there are going to be more than one or two companies that survive.
And the real question is whether the money that’s added up is more than or equal to all the money that used to be added up for people paying for CDs and albums and going to concerts. My guess is that it’s not nearly as much (but I could be wrong). So if that’s the case, again, even if you’re really smart and talented and even if you’re really interested in the music industry, it’s worth a moment of pause if you’re thinking about working in it.
