Derek Siddoway

In the mid-1980s, the head of Columbia Records attended a Harvard Business School workshop where he learned that companies used market research to try to predict interest in new products. He hired a team to conduct similar research within the music industry. They found that “New and contemporary” artists were preferred by potential buyers over “old and contemporary” artists. Among Columbia Records’ “old and contemporary” artists was the legendary country musician, Johnny Cash. Following the report, one of Cash biographers writes, Cash was “exiled” by the label. “It was, like, completely apathy from the record company,” Cash said, “and I guess I got that way too.” In 1986, Columbia Records dropped Cash after a 28-year run. Cash would remain in exile until 1993 when the music producer Rick Rubin, after a string of success working with young artists, wanted to work with someone “great and important, but who wasn’t doing their best work. I wanted to see if I could help them do great work again.” Cash and Rubin got together, and to get a sense of Cash’s musical tastes, Rubin asked him to play covers of some of his favorite songs. In doing so, they landed on the idea of making an album filled with solo acoustic covers. If they'd conducted market research, they likely would have found a solo acoustic album to be considered “old and traditional,” and therefore unlikely to generate any interest with an audience. But, Rubin said, “I wasn’t trying to look for songs that would ‘connect’ Johnny to an audience. I was trying to find songs that made sense for him and his voice…I wanted his presence to fill the record.” The two eventually picked thirteen songs for the album, American Recordings. It was released on April 26, 1994 and was a critical and commercial sensation—among other accolades, it won a Grammy, and Rolling Stone later placed it on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. “His years in musical exile,” Cash’s biographer writes, “were over.” Takeaway 1: The famous line about market research is often attributed to Henry Ford (though it's apocryphal): “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.” When I hear about attempts to use data to try to predict an audience's tastes—whether it's conducting surveys, testing titles or thumbnails, crowdsourcing ideas for what to create next, etc.—I think of the line by the great 20th-century writer E.B. White, “[Art] can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process.” The story of Cash's exile and later resurgence is just one among countless examples of the impossibility, the absurdity, of trying to predict the audience’s tastes. When you try, something or someone dies in the process. Takeaway 2: When Johnny Cash and Rick Rubin first went into the studio together, Rubin said, “my first challenge was to rebuild his confidence…to try to get him to go from all these years thinking his best stuff was behind him to thinking we could make his best albums ever.” It's crazy, yet somehow comforting, that even one of the great artists in music history could be full of self-doubt. It makes me think of Bill Russell, one of the greatest basketball talents ever. Once in an interview (well into his NBA career), Russell made a comment that he never got any positive feedback from his college coach. The coach heard the comment and wrote to Russell, saying that Russell had so much talent he didn't need positive feedback. “The hell I didn't,” Russell said. “[Everyone] wants to be told they are doing a good job...It never hurts to say a good word.” - - - “Sometimes it takes another person to believe in us.” — Steven Pressfield Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!