Jeremy Sirota Grills Lawrence Peryer on Creative Leadership
The Merlin CEO has our podcast host explain why he believes in everything and nothing, how to facilitate creative thinking in corporate environments, and what the future holds beyond streaming platforms.
Today, the Spotlight shines on someone we have not spoken to in a while…
Over the years, we have periodically turned the tables by having friends and colleagues interview me, most notably in episode 100, or by airing talks and interviews I have done in other forums.
Today is a little different. My longtime friend and colleague Jeremy Sirota is hosting a livestream series on LinkedIn called Creative Leadership. There, he interviews figures from the worlds of music, sports, business, and more to discuss their work in applying creativity to realms that are not often thought of as creative fields. I liked the idea and asked him to run his format on me. What follows is that talk.
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Dig Deeper
• Visit Lawrence Peryer at lawrenceperyer.com and connect with him on LinkedIn
• Merlin - Digital rights music licensing partner for independent record labels
• Jazz Journalist Association - Professional organization for jazz writers and critics
• Lateral Thinking - Edward de Bono’s problem-solving methodology
• Brian Eno Against Interpretation - The source of the quote that Jeremy references
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Jeremy Sirota: Welcome everyone to Creative Leadership. I'm Jeremy Sirota, your host today. This is a space to explore creativity and leadership—how to think counterintuitively, identify problems around the corners, and turn obstacles into opportunities. Today's guest has spent nearly his entire career in the music industry finding creative solutions in places where most people are just intimidated by the artist they work with.
Lawrence Peryer is a friend, a former colleague, a mentor, an inspiration, and someone who dreams big. Lawrence, welcome to the show.
Lawrence Peryer: Thank you so much for having me on. What a beautiful introduction. I hope I live up to it.
Jeremy: Well, we will see over the next forty-five minutes or so how this goes. I want to provide a little bit of background to the guests who are listening.
You started your career in the physical space. You ran a bookstore. You launched numerous successful CD sales businesses, run e-commerce stores for artists and major brands. You oversaw a company called Artist Arena, which led you to oversee artists and label services at Warner Music Group. You worked at Amazon ticketing startup. You host a podcast, you run a curatorial online magazine, and you've always worked directly with artists. Plus, you're a massive jazz fan. I am excited for this conversation. For everyone listening, Lawrence is going into this completely blind. You didn't receive the questions in advance, so what you're about to hear is all unscripted, unedited, and unfiltered.
You ready for this, Lawrence?
Lawrence: I feel like it's turnabout's fair play after hosting the podcast and interviewing so many people. It's my turn in the hot seat.
Jeremy: Great. Well, I will slow roll ourselves into this. We're not going to go right to the deep end. I want to start with something you said. You've talked about making a crucial decision in your life where you pivoted from wanting to be an artist to being an enabler of creativity. When I look at your career, it seems to be filled with a lot of creativity. I want to understand, has there been an evolution in your thinking? Do you agree with that, that you are someone who's an artist? Or is there a different way that you look at your career? Or has it just changed and evolved?
Lawrence: Yeah, I think I have a couple of answers to that question, and the first is, if you're a creative person or you are interested in creative fields, it's going to come out. I don't think you can really suppress it. So then it becomes how am I going to channel it?
I think I've been on a little bit of a pendulum with creativity in my own life. When I learned early on that I really wasn't good enough to make a living on the performing side of music, it bothered me for about five minutes. I realized early on that the things that make people successful in creative fields go beyond just talent and capability. There's a drive, there's a hustle, there's a single-mindedness, there's a devotion to craft. There are parts of it that I didn't really want to do because I have so many other interests. I couldn't imagine that level of dedication, quite honestly.
But what I did realize was I wanted to be around creative people, and helping creative people was always very interesting to me. So that extreme end of the pendulum meant I put my creativity aside and worked in business for a long time in lots of different ways. But pretty early in my career, maybe in the first quarter or so of my career, I came to view business as very creative. That may make sense to listeners of a certain age who have the wisdom to look back over a career and they say, well, of course there's creativity in all aspects of life. But I really saw them as different things and incredibly bifurcated.
But once I realized that problem solving and understanding how to work with and motivate people, how to put together equitable deals, how to understand people's motivation—that all those things involved creativity and the problem-solving part of business—I think it allowed me to start to live into a life of creativity again and ultimately get to a point later in my life in the last several years where I've become much more comfortable leaning into it. Not only for others, but on my own behalf by putting some of my creativity out there under my own name and writing and making music and collaborating, not having the pressure of having to do any of it for a livelihood. Which quite honestly makes it so much more enjoyable. It doesn't mean I take it less seriously, but the stakes just aren't high. I don't have to be a starving artist. I could skip the starving part and just be an artist.
And so I say all that also very reluctantly. It's hard to self-identify as an artist. I'd give other people the advice all the time that nobody else gets to call you an artist. If you make art, you get to be an artist. But I have a hard time owning it. I recently, in the last year or two, joined the Jazz Journalist Association. I go to the meetings and I get involved, and I look at all these men and women who are accomplished in the field of journalism, and I think I'm not a journalist. What am I doing here? So it's hard to differentiate between imposter syndrome and just wondering, am I a dilettante? Am I a journalist? I don't know. Those are all mantles that are hard to take up for myself, but I guess I'm doing the work, so—
Jeremy: I understand all of what you just said because I have very similar background to you in the sense that my mom's an artist, my aunt's an artist. We had a lot of creative people within the family. I would sit down and I would draw a stick figure, and that was the closest I could get to drawing. And I had this binary view of the world. There were artists who had this incredible ability, and I had a friend who could paint basically the Mona Lisa with absolutely zero formal training. And that wasn't me. I have to really apply myself.
And there's this weird tension where artists, especially in the music space—you see the people who are on stage, who are putting out albums or hit tracks, and there's not a lot of space for another word. There's this word "creator," which is starting to feel a little dirty in this day and age. Anyone can be a creator, but not anyone can create art. I love that you've just come to accept you're an artist, and there are different types of artists. Not all of us can be that superstar on stage with a hundred thousand people that they're just owning with their voice. That's okay because there's these niches out there that we can live in to explore.
And it's interesting because you did mention something that I find really fascinating about your career, and you were talking about how you've approached business and there's a creativity there. And as I was going through your background, I was realizing every element of your career has been a different language. You've worked with legendary artists, you've worked within major corporations and within large tech companies, and then within areas, and all these require different ways of operating and acting and speaking. And I'm curious how you bridge these different cultures without losing your own point of view.
Lawrence: It's really kind of incredible to me that you're asking that question because I've been thinking—I've been in kind of a reflective mood in the last few weeks, and one of the things I've been thinking about is this idea of integration. I'll explore that and explain it to you in a minute, but it's something that at a high level has been part of my life for a long time.
So what I mean is about a year ago I had done that exercise with you where you asked me to talk about my superpower, and I thought my superpower had to do with multidimensional thinking and problem solving. It's something I've always taken pride in and thought I was good at and that I could help others with. But I think there's a more core first principle even behind that, which is this idea of integration—that I can integrate information, experiences from all different parts of my life, and I really just want to be one person. I don't want to be that different at work than I am at home, or I like when my professional friends become personal friends or when my different friend groups get to know each other. I really like that idea of one true self and trying to be integrated that way.
Now it's an aspiration and it's an ideal. It gets out of hand sometimes. Certainly in younger years, you can't be the boss at work and then go be the boss at home when you're married with children. That's not appropriate. But I'm sure there are other people in my family you could ask if I was that way. I don't know, but I would think maybe.
This idea of being integrated, taking my experience as a fan—I professionalized my fandom in a lot of ways. I've been an obsessive music fan since I was a little kid. You and I talked about this in the past, spending a lot of time alone in your room or finding a little cubby to hide. And I spent time with books, with records, with magazines to the extent that they existed, just taking in information. And what I've realized is that as my information sources have expanded, I've really been able to integrate all that into a point of view, into a way of communicating with artists.
Jeremy: That's really interesting because I get to ask this question a lot from the upcoming generation: how do you achieve work-life balance? And the first response I give to them is, don't look for work-life balance. Just look for balance. If you're setting up these binary worlds where things are in opposition to each other, there's a similar conversation we had with each other about the difference between the artists and the suits. You brought this up. You need both for the music industry, and to put them in opposition to each other is to misunderstand how the industry works.
And I want to tease on that theme of integration because I have another quote from you. I'm going to use your words against you a lot here, like the true recovering lawyer. You stated that a project or technology has to be in service of creativity, designed to present it in the best possible way in alignment with the artist's vision. I love that sentiment. Let's also be honest with each other. I was thinking about this a lot, and it pulls in three directions: artist integrity, which is what you're referring to here; commercial success; and operational efficiency. And they all can pull—sometimes they all roll in the same direction, and that's just beautiful. But a lot of times they're pulling different directions. When a star artist comes to you and has something that makes no business sense or there's no simple way to deliver what they're looking for without just a bunch of manual tasks, how do you navigate those tensions? Because you want to deliver, I presume.
Lawrence: Oh, yeah. And I can even talk about times where an artist has presented an opportunity and have said, bring me ideas, and the ideas are too big. They become impractical from a financial or a technological point of view, so it definitely works both ways.
In a lot of ways, one of the false binaries is to say that we have to treat the artist or talk to the artist differently than anybody else. Really, I think "yes, but" is always a good way to start a hard conversation. I think if I were in the improvisation troop, it would be "yes, and," but I think "yes, but" is really important.
I have found in the majority of cases that most of the time there's somebody in the artist's world who understands all the different asterisks that come around "yes, but." You have to be able to have a trusted dialogue with somebody, either the artist or somebody in their orbit that they trust, because at the end of the day, we're talking about pop art basically here, which implies commercial art. None of this is demeaning. None of this is about lessening the art, about saying it's not fine art or trying to define art as high or low, but sometimes it's just money conversations, and sometimes artists say, I'm okay. This is what I want. Or an artist's team will say, that's okay. This project is in service of a bigger picture that you don't know about. So if your P&L takes a little bit of hit, I'm okay. Don't worry about me. I've got somebody else that's funding it, or it's part of another thing, or I have a five-year plan, and this is a great investment.
You can't be afraid to have the conversation. The worst thing, and I see people do this over and over again, especially in corporate music environments, is they try to just say yes and go do it. With good intentions—you and I have both seen it. A lot of times those people aren't supported, they're not supported with resources, they're not supported by their executive structure, and they're just going out there and trying to do the right thing by everybody. And it ends up being they can't win. So you have to be able to speak and have a dialogue.
Jeremy: I have a new phrase we should start using instead of "yes, but"—"yes, and."
Lawrence: How about "yes, or"? I like that even better. I'm going to use that.
Jeremy: I'm going to use someone else's words now that will resonate with you as well, especially given your career. Brian Eno once said the point about working is not to produce great stuff all the time, but to remain ready for when you can. I love this one. I'll tell you why. And we have a little bit of different styles because we've talked about this. You tend to schedule how you work. I am very—I kind of go with the current. I'll sometimes cancel a call if I'm just ready to do something else. Clearly I can't just cancel on a board member or a significant client. If I make commitments, I stick to those. But I just let my brain say, this is what you need to be doing now, and I've kind of trusted that.
That's actually not what I'm curious about. I'm actually curious about how you seem to always be at the edge of when something new is coming, and whether that was early internet when it was just a fad, about experiential retail, about artists in e-commerce online. Clearly luck plays a role in everyone's life. Let's just be clear about that. Sometimes that luck is about always doing what you do—reading, involving yourselves in more materials and taking in information. But you must have some approach to how you make sure luck—and I'm curious if you have a way or you've thought about how you define that for yourself.
Lawrence: Well, part of it is that, as trite as it sounds, that's an outcome from being not only curious, but acting on my curiosity. So I learn constantly. How do you become the person people go to because they know you're thinking about it and talking about it? I do recognize that pattern. Again, as hard as it is to own it, I recognize that pattern that I will frequently get the call when there's some new wave cresting and an artist manager or somebody will say, what do you think of X, Y, Z? Or, what do you think we should do with X, Y, Z? Or all these X, Y, Z companies are knocking on our door, help us come figure it out.
So I think the fact that I've taken it upon myself to be an applied learner is really important. But the other thing too is when you're interested in innovation in applied creativity—you and I talked about this, I think in relation to AI—there's a lot of self-proclaimed experts, meaning there's really no experts yet in a lot of these fields. So then what do you need? If there's no expert yet, maybe somebody with taste, discernment, a bullshit detector, domain expertise in adjacent or similar fields. So it helps to be well-rounded, I guess, or to be curious and to be diligent and to be careful. You don't want to touch the hot stove too many times.
Jeremy: You are just a click away from the Socrates quote: All I know is that I know nothing. But it is truly the beginning of exploration. This is something I was reading in the biography about Leonardo da Vinci. One of the axioms that came out of that that gives me a lot of courage in some ways is he wasn't the smartest person. Clearly, incredibly smart and talented, but that's not what he banked his career on. He banked his career on just having a more curious mind than anyone else and willing to throw himself at it.
Particularly for myself—to talk about me again—I am not the greatest writer. I read about people who can write an entire pulp book in one day at a typewriter without missing a beat and have a 150-page cohesive book. I have to edit ruthlessly forever, feels like sometimes, but I throw myself at that. That sometimes gets missed. Even with some of the most talented artists, and this is leading to a question, because if you listen to artists in the studio starting to put together songs, they're trying a million different approaches. It's not just they sit down and suddenly a hit song comes out, and it happens.
Of course, I think of this as a creative framework. This is something that feels foolish at first, doesn't make any sense, but you start tugging at that thread and suddenly it becomes something. And I was curious about for yourself and all the endeavors you've done, do you subscribe to that kind of philosophy or are you more methodical about your approach to whether it's your own creativity and artistry, or about how you approach business?
Lawrence: It's a little bit context specific. So in other words, if I'm entrusted with somebody else's project and budget, I can't be quite as mystical as I might want to be on my own project. But I think fundamentally the approach is the same, which is no, I do not have a creative framework or creative process per se. It's pretty organic. It's based on continual, again, this integration of information and new information.
Very, very rarely now, especially as I've gotten older, there's not many hills I'll die on in terms of my ideas. I would much rather see the project through to fruition and to kind of badly paraphrase that Eno quote, I'd rather see 85 percent of the project get realized than none of it. I don't really have much by way of purity tests anymore. As long as it represents the artist well—the artist could be me, represents well, could just be my opinion—it could just be this is the best I can do today, so I'm done. It's not the best work I can do. It's the best work I can do today. I'm going to do better work when I come back and do this next time. But if I wait until I do the—until I put out the best work I can ever do, I may have no work that ever gets out there, or it may be one thing at the end of my life.
So you have to be a little bit—I don't know if fearless is the right word because that's something that somebody else can call you, but you have to not be afraid to be embarrassed, even when, especially when taking on a big project on somebody else's behalf. There's projects that I get the phone call for and I even have friends and colleagues say, why'd they call you? I'm like, that's a fair question. I think it's because, one, I'll be responsible. I'll be communicative. I'll do what I say I'm going to do. I'll give it a shot. I won't come up with fifty reasons not to do it. And I think that there's something in there.
I forgot what it was you said earlier, but it triggered for me there are these two contradictory impulses that I've been thinking about a lot lately. And one is I like to say I don't believe anything. I don't believe in anything because I think as soon as you start to believe something, you dismiss everything else, you start to shut yourself off from possibility. So I try to be really careful, even in my semantics around like maybe? Could you levitate right now? Maybe, but I don't know. But I also have this competing impulse, which is I'll believe everything. Are you—could you levitate right now? Maybe so. I don't believe it, but I believe it's possible, and that realm is so important to me. If I lost that, I would feel old.
Jeremy: There's a lot that resonates with me there as well. There's two ways people approach projects and you nailed one of them—let's get 85 percent of the way there and call it a success. The second is let's get 85 percent of the way there, and similar to a lot of the great painters, let's just do a paint stroke every day afterwards. We don't have to call this finished. Now, of course there are some—you have to put an album out. But even when an album's put out, a lot of times the artist goes back and re-records or makes changes and edits it. This is where you have this idea of this living, breathing art. I can continue to evolve, and I'm a big fan of that.
I'm also a big fan of sometimes you want to get 85 percent of the way there. Sometimes you want to get a hundred percent of the way there. Sometimes you want to get 110 percent. You have to think in each one of those, what is going to achieve the most for you with the time and the resources and the impact you're trying to have.
Which leads me to a question. This is something that I struggle with as a leader of an organization. You have people who have jobs. They have tasks that they need to do. At the same time, you want to continually push them to think about their work differently because you need them. The world keeps changing on us. The way we operate has to continue.
So the very simple example is an exercise. Let's sit down and reimagine how a bicycle works. You're not actually trying to create a better bicycle. You're trying to activate the brain in different ways to get out of these set ways of thinking—crazy amounts of benefits in these lateral thinking exercises.
The challenge with it is that people have jobs and they have to get them done, and people are busier than ever, and I'm just curious how have you reconciled those because you at ten thousand feet know how valuable it is for the team below you to engage in exercises and different ways of thinking and these strategic sessions against, we got to get things done. Has there been a path that you've found? Because I've always struggled how to integrate those.
Lawrence: Yeah, that's really interesting. As you were asking it, I had all these mental flashes of times over the years where—and I think you've probably even witnessed this, and maybe even we've done it together—but I think there's a couple of ways to answer that.
One is you have to be a facilitator of those moments. So if people are busy and they have all these things they have to get done as a manager or as the executive, you have the ability to make this part of everybody's job description. You have the ability to make the time for it, but you also have the ability to model the time for it. And more importantly, you have the ability not to punish people when you catch them doing it.
So you've stumbled into my offices sometimes when I'm sitting around with three, four, five people and we're just talking, or one of us is at the whiteboard or we're in deep on some topic and it's not even about solving the problem at hand. It's just somebody brought up an idea we should be thinking about, and it's like, let's make the time to think about it and just think about it and talk it through. Who knows, you even get to a resolution—you put a pin in it, and now you just have to do that.
But I've also walked into my employee's offices where it seems like it's really busy, but three or four of them are sitting around talking, and you can't even really joke too hard like, hey, what are you guys doing? You have to make that environment okay. In fact, you kind of have to require it. I've definitely been in situations where there was carved out time, but to your point earlier, it's hard to—let's have a brainstorming meeting. It takes a while to heat up if you're going to do it that way. It's much better when a few people stumble into a room or a meeting agenda's done and there's time left and it happens a little more organically.
So I think there's some combination of facilitating it, allowing it, and mandating it.
Jeremy: I love the idea of putting it into job descriptions. It's a great concept.
Lawrence: And putting it in reviews. How much time did you spend this year thinking? You don't timecard it, but people have to answer that question. They're going to want to have an answer.
Jeremy: Someone said to me once, and I scoffed at it first, which was when they were younger, their dad had a rule, which is you can come to me with any problem you have. All you have to have is a solution to it as well. And it could be a solution you just came up with five seconds before you shout the question at me or the challenge at me. And it was about inspiring a way of thinking. At first when he said it, I was like, oh, of course. This is so obvious. And then the next day I woke up and I said, yeah, sometimes saying, reminding people the most obvious facets of life are the most important because they get forgotten so easily.
This idea of, we just got to get to it, we got to do this. Yeah, you do. There's long checklists. We all have so many tasks in front of us. But if you weave it in that idea of the facilitator, yeah, it's really good.
Let me take you in a different direction here then because this hitches right on that theme of too much information. I was reading a book last week by a gentleman named Edward de Bono. He's the one who invented the concept of lateral thinking, that phrase at least. And he had just this very simple observation that was so obvious—it's like, why don't I think about this more?—which was before the Renaissance ideas would not change in your lifetime. So whatever your worldview and the way the world worked and operated at ten years old, or twenty, or whenever you died at forty stayed exactly the same. I kept thinking about it more and more. It's just like boggled my mind. It's like nothing in your life would change.
Lawrence: Yeah. I can't wrap my head around that.
Jeremy: Yeah. So, and I keep thinking about it a lot, and now I think about how ideas fly at us so fast that we almost don't even have time to process them before we're onto the next. You've talked obviously a lot about you have a lot of inputs. I do too. How do you take all those inputs and try to either synthesize them or cut through the noise and find the signal? Do you have a process for that?
Lawrence: Yes. It might be easier in the specific, as opposed to the abstract to answer, but generally speaking, I'm a big fan of principles, and so those are some things that, of course, evolve, but they don't change as much. I would argue, and I'm not trained as a philosopher, but I would argue that principles change even more slowly than ethics. I could apply principles today to my work and to my decision making and to the onslaught of information that I applied twenty-five, thirty years ago.
It's a principle to me that I am going to try to execute a project in a manner that's consistent with the artistic vision. That's never really changed. So I think it's really important to have an ethos—what do you stand for? What do you want to stand for? How do you codify that in such a way that it turns into something that guides your behavior? As self-important as that sounds or as even aspirational as that can be from time to time.
It's really hard to violate your principles. It's really hard to let yourself violate your principles. You could violate your values pretty easily. You could even make ethical compromises pretty easily. But it's hard to violate your principles. It's almost physically hard.
Jeremy: Yeah. They almost become your operating system.
Lawrence: It's your operating system for sure.
Jeremy: As you get older, they just sort of weave into how you perceive the world, how you interact with the world. I'm a big proponent—the reason I started doing this series—I'm a big proponent of the creativity and some of the areas you've talked about and how you operate. Those are learnable traits. They're skills. Now, obviously some people can be more talented than others, but they can all be learned in life. If you just start to think bigger and open your mind to those, it just starts to—I call it opening the aperture of your camera. You just start to see the world in a different, bigger way.
Speaking of bigger ways, I want to come back to the artist for a minute here. One of the artists you've worked with throughout your career has been David Bowie and now the David Bowie Estate. If David Bowie was launching his career today, what would be fundamentally different about how you would approach that process? How would you support—so it's David Bowie, who he had been throughout his career, but suddenly he's dropped into 2025. The world is just fundamentally different, still has this incredible creative vision and way that he interacts with the world. Would you do it the same? Are the principles of what you've done the same about how you would approach this?
Lawrence: The first thing I have to say is I wasn't there at the beginning, so how we might execute some things that, how we might relitigate some of the things we did in the time I was on the scene working on his behalf is one answer, but if I think about him, how he did it, how he emerged, how he became who he became, it's very interesting because he tried on many personas before he became famous. He tried everything. The famous examples about he was a mime and he did dance hall music and schmaltzy pop music. And he played, dabbled in psychedelia—he was trying everything. The ambition wasn't like there's some artistic purity here. The ambition was, I'm going to be a star and I'm going to make art at the pop stardom level. At least that's how it seems in retrospect, watching him just keep churning through all these attempts.
And so it's really interesting because would he have gotten successful faster because he was so good at identifying and capitalizing on trends, would he have flamed out faster because he would've just gotten chewed up earlier on, or would he have been able to stay on top of it and adapt? All really fascinating questions, very obviously hard to have scenarios for, but I think the way he did it, despite all the struggle he had getting to where he got, really served him well, but it also served his legacy well because there's this whole mythology now about where he came from and how he did it, and it's so fascinating to look back on, and maybe even some of it's personally embarrassing to him. I can't say.
What we do know is that in the late nineties, early two thousands, he recorded an album and started playing live in concert a bunch of the songs he wrote early in his career, even ones that never came out. And he didn't release the album. It only came out posthumously, but he was playing some of the songs live, so he couldn't have been that horrified by it. He went back and looked in his trunk and was like, hey, some of this stuff's pretty good.
But the big thing that he did, I think that really broke him wide, that is probably the part of the story that most people focus on is when he finally got professional management, they basically said a version of fake it till you make it. You're a superstar now. So behave like a superstar. And they spent—he was a superstar and they dressed him like he's a superstar. The first time they came to America, he was a nobody and they stayed at the Park Plaza or whatever, and they lived like he was already a superstar. And it blew people's minds that he basically became a superstar.
Now he had the art to deliver it and all the other elements to deliver on that. I don't know. Could you run that playbook today? There's plenty of people that are posers and preeners, and I wish I could answer the question better. It's so fun as a parlor game to sit around and think about and talk about.
Jeremy: I love transporting people from the past into the present and from the present into the past to see how they would behave differently or how if you could hold everything else the same, what would change around them? Because it allows you—I mean, this is one of the exercises I like doing. I've done this at Merlin, I've done this exercise myself, which is, I took Merlin—I said, okay, Merlin's been about the digital age. What if we were around historically and started it thirty years earlier in the age of CDs? What would Merlin be? What would it be in the lives of independent record labels? How would that have impacted careers and the trajectory of the industry? They're just these interesting thought exercises.
The reason I was thinking about Bowie is because of all these personas and because of all these ways that he was really—seemed to understand the system so well, and then build a team around him, build this network, this community of people to help him execute that vision.
And now I look at today, and I was writing this down and this is what I came up with. We are all aliens living on an alien planet, being served alien food from an alien cookbook. I'm of course talking about algorithmic recommendations. There's a lot to it that can be very valuable. We've all discovered music from recommendations. Of course, I'm going to focus on the other side, which is the value of not just human curation, which is also a form of creativity, but of really just the way that we discover and who are the editorialists in our lives, like yourself.
I'm a technophile. I love technology. I find it super fascinating. But I wonder whether we're being marched into an era where machines that we don't understand are defining our output. And for someone like yourself who's always been very curatorial, someone like myself who represents labels, who think in those ways as well—is there still a business case for this? Some of these genres in music particularly have always been niches. They've not broken through. We're not now talking about pop music. They've always had smaller audiences. Are we building back towards that? Is there going to be a boomerang—look around the corner for me. This is what you've done your whole career. What's around the corner?
Lawrence: Yeah. I mean, the first part of your question or what you were saying is to me the harder part to wrestle with, which is—you didn't quite say it this way, but the way I heard it was the societal implications of unleashing this technology at scale.
What perplexes me the most or troubles me the most is we just went through this with phones and social media. We know what happens when we deploy technology before we've even—never mind metabolized what the implications could be, but even stop to think about what the implications could be. We don't have to solve it all, but we should at least say, hey, some of us are going to think about it. We're going to meet once in a while and talk about it and decide if this is a good idea. The fictional people, the people get left out of the discussion. I don't get a choice as to whether I want some of this stuff unless I really want to be alienated and left out. And that's fine. You can make that choice too, but I want to be a citizen in the modern world. Why do I have to accept all of this? It's hard. That's a hard one.
The curatorial role is really interesting because I'm a hypocrite about it. I don't really like other people's reviews and recommendations. Almost the only people I want to hear from are my close friends or people whose opinions I respect that I know personally. There's no critic that I say, oh, if they write about this album, I'm picking it up. There's no publication where I say, if it's in that publication, I know it must be good. I just don't care. Yet I co-publish an online art and culture and music magazine. I have a podcast where I carefully select the guests. So I'm a hypocrite. I want to be heard, but I don't want to hear anything.
Jeremy: Welcome to being human.
Lawrence: Yeah. Thank you. Makes me feel less bad. But when you say, look around the corner at what the culture business is going to look like—
Jeremy: That's exactly right. What is the business of artistry five years from now? Is it just in the same way that the digital evolution changed how we consume—it's changed how mediums always change. Things like the length of a song, whether a song has a long intro or it gets to it quickly. It's a concept of a hook. Every time there's been a technological evolution, it's changed the nature of songwriting and how artists perform. There's obviously elements that could become more empowered. You can see the live business becoming stronger. People don't trust what they read or listen to online anymore, but you can't fake a live performance surrounded by sometimes ten people, a hundred people, a hundred thousand people. I wonder whether there just becomes—there's with every action, there's an opposite and equal reaction, as I like to say. So it's not just this march towards an AI future where people talk about AI robots talking to AI robots, no one's even emailing each other anymore. If that becomes the case, then the power of picking up the phone and having a conversation suddenly becomes more impactful.
Lawrence: Yeah, absolutely. So to try to answer your question, one other anecdote I would share before I do is I've witnessed that in my own life, in my retreat from most social media, which is now I'm more connected with the people I really care about. I might be on a group text thread with three or four people that I'm sharing pictures from being on vacation with, or a funny meme, and I don't have to worry about a comment thread or what I appear—I'm not curating my personal appearance constantly. It's much nicer. It's much nicer to talk to my real friends and to not really be bothered by the people that I didn't really have a relationship with. Most of it was voyeuristic—people I knew in high school or ex-girlfriends or whatever. Yeah, it was nice to know they were okay in the universe and hopefully happy, but there was no relationship there. There's no reason to be connected other than to be distracted and have a lot of noise.
It's funny you talked about niche genres, and that's a topic I find really interesting because I, as a fan and as a curator, focus a lot on those genres. I don't think any of those genres need to become mainstream in terms of having mainstream media outlets, access to the stages and stadiums. A lot of this art doesn't scale that way and it doesn't work that way anyway. And the artists don't aspire to it that way. But what our current era does allow—it's so much nicer now the way tribes can connect. Yes, there's something lost in being that one kid in your town who was getting the zine in the mail and you're the only one that knew about this band, and there was somebody on the other side of the mailbox who knew about them. And that is a very special feeling. But it's also really nice to know every day you could go on Reddit and find thirty-five people talking about that thing and then get more of it. And really, when you're communicating with people about the art and artists you like, what you're really talking about is your worldview and what you want the world to be and what you want your life to be, and the fact that it's easier to connect with people in that way. I'm still bullish on that to an extent.
And so the culture business, I would like to see the culture business lean into that more. And by that I mean, how do you make the economics of your business survive off of that? How do you thrive in that environment? I talk to a lot of artists, and as part of the publishing side of what I do, a lot of them in niche genres are leaving mainstream streaming. A lot of them—it's not just one or two people I talk to. They see it doesn't serve them. It's not only just about the economics. It's like this just isn't a place I feel good about being. There are people that own platforms that are doing things with the money they make off me that I don't agree with. I can't be here anymore. What's going to happen then? This isn't all going to go away. There's something really interesting is going to happen. There's going to be—we've talked a lot about is there something after streaming? I don't know it's necessarily there's a format per se after streaming, but there might be some other thing that streaming comes wrapped in. Some other user experience that feels better for the stakeholders. That feels good for artists, that feels good for fans, and that doesn't solve all the problems, doesn't become the way you make money and the way you communicate with your fans and the way you super monetize your fans. But it just may be these environments where people feel a little more humanity. And then people will figure out how to make that interesting.
Jeremy: Couple things that strike me is one, the music industry's always been a hard industry and it's never talked about enough—the challenges, the struggle, and this is not even an artist in the industry. I just having been the suit and watching it. The second is, there's a lot of angles to it and a lot of different ways to approach it. And there doesn't need to be a one size fits all. I was just talking to someone who said they started off in a band and then they ended up doing becoming a session player and then they ended up getting into the live business. So there's a lot of different ways to tackle it, especially for anyone who's listening who's interested in it.
And something you said really resonated with me. I love that term "tribes." It's relegated to the dustbins of history, but it's a great way of really honing in on it because community sounds so ephemeral. Tribes kind of got a little bit of a negative connotation to it, so I kind of want to bring it back because a tribe isn't a bad thing. It's people with common interests that are really into it. And I thought about this phrase my friend uses, which is about you meet people in life for a reason, a season, or for life. That one made a lot of sense to me because sometimes we get overly fixated on people staying in our lives forever. And it's okay—things, life changes.
Lawrence: Yeah, well you said that to me recently and it resonated with an experience I had about ten years or so ago, and I was really struggling with the fact that there was somebody in my life that wasn't going to be, and I was just miserable about it. A mutual friend of ours said basically a variation of that was like, maybe this person played their role—their role's over. What are you going to do? They came into your life, the thing happened, and now they're going to leave your life and it's all good. And I found it very helpful. I did. It transcended the realm of philosophy and turned into a very practical way to view the world.
Jeremy: It's the—going back to that theme of integration, these feelings don't have to be in opposition to each other. Not to turn this into a therapy talk, but you can have both loss and acceptance at the same time. And they don't have to be mutually exclusive. You don't have to wall one in and not acknowledge the other. It just can feel challenging sometimes.
Lawrence: The sooner you could get to the loss and the acceptance at the same time, the sooner you can hold both of those ideas and both of those emotions. Yeah. The quicker you can move on or just live—you can live better. And even "move on" connotes getting over it or putting it behind you or what have you. But you can integrate it, you can put it in its proper place and not be destroyed.
Jeremy: That raises a good question. I want to kind of start to wind down this conversation with, which is this next generation. I really started doing this as a pay it forward. Let me be blunt. I started doing it because I'm just curious and it gives me an opportunity to talk to people in a form and format that I find very interesting. Within that was this idea of trying to pay it forward. So you're in a room. It's full of a bunch of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old wannabe—not creatives, not artists, but creative leaders, people who want to work in the creative space, next generation of leaders. What is the advice you give to them? You get to give them one piece of advice to help them navigate the challenges and opportunities that this next generation is going to face. They'll be both very similar to what others have faced, but very different as well.
Lawrence: Yeah. Well, I'm going to pull the punch a little bit and say to you, I think when I say it, you'll recognize the same—you may feel the same ambivalence that I'm feeling because I don't know if people—you can only hear this when you're ready to hear it, but I think it's important to have it said to you. So that's kind of my preamble.
Jeremy: It sounds like something I'm about to tell my daughter that she doesn't want to hear.
Lawrence: I tell people to know themselves.
You save yourself so much suffering if you know yourself because you can short circuit a lot of posturing or chasing things that turn out to be emptily satisfying or satisfyingly empty. It will help you. It's a great framing device for decision making. If you—imagine being so lucky that you have two great job offers. How do you choose? There's the money, there's the location, there's your perceived lifestyle benefits. What if you know you don't like working in an office five days a week, but the better looking job requires that—you're going to go do it and you might be miserable, or you might say you can at least have the negotiation with yourself. If you don't know—if you haven't done any self-examination and you haven't committed to a plan or a routine of self-examination, you learn things that would've been really valuable to know too late in life—not too late in life, later in life, and you don't get the full benefit from them.
And so it's something that someone may have said to me and I didn't hear it. I don't know if anyone said it to me. I wish someone did and I wish I had heard it. And it's what I would wish for pretty much everybody at an early age.
Jeremy: I like that a lot. Self-awareness is incredibly powerful tool for our lives. The one piece I would put onto that and this—it's very in line with what you were saying about Bowie—is it's also an unfolding. It's not this static moment where, aha, I know myself. And it evolves and changes. So that's why I say it becomes more of a tool and a mechanism—as you get older, it continues to unfold and change. And especially as you look backward—I'm turning fifty in a couple years—the way I view my twenties is a lot different than my thirties viewing my twenties. And so your awareness of yourself—there's some particle physicist who said something smart about you can't see the location and the speed—
Lawrence: Quantum reality.
Jeremy: Thank you. We'll on the spot there with that one. That is a very good setup. How I'd like to end each show—this is one of my favorite exercises—is the only question I prep guests for, because it can be a little bit challenging to do it on the fly.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Jeremy: Describe yourself in six words.
Lawrence: Many strong opinions, all lightly held.
Jeremy: Oh my gosh. I don't know why that's so you, but I just hear it. And if I had to pick it out of the hat and a hundred people in the room, I would instantly say that was Lawrence.
Lawrence: Yeah. And it goes back to the cosmic maybe. It's important to have a point of view and it's important to have a perspective. It's important to contribute the fullness of what you can bring to a situation. But it's important to be open and to know what hills to die on and to know when to change your mind.
You talked about the self-awareness part of self-knowledge, and I think a big piece of that also is you have to change the narrative of who you are over time and what you're capable of over time. Before I worked at Warner, my narrative was I could never work in a big company. At Ultrastar, after it was acquired by Live Nation, I left because I was like, I can't work here. There's no place for me here. I don't know how to do this. And when I got to Warner, I actually realized I'm actually kind of good at this. I know how to do it. I can thrive here and I can help other people be successful here. I could do good work here. That was a big mind shift change.
I could have stayed in that narrative. I've watched other people—I watched people stay in that narrative. You mentioned Artist Arena merging into Warner. Warner bought that company. They were staunchly independent. They served independent artists and a lot of the people that worked there, their self-identity was, I can't work in a big company. And so they left and they didn't get to see all the fun things we got to build and do. And it may have been the right choice for them. I don't fault them for it. I would encourage everybody be a little more open about what your narrative is. Again, have principles—don't have limiting self-narrative.
Jeremy: I could go on forever, but I'm going to say Lawrence has been fantastic. I appreciate you meandering the fields with me today. So many interesting things. Thanks for doing this.
Lawrence: Yeah, thank you. The lucky part for us is that this is just one hour in a multi-decade dialogue, so we'll get to finish this tomorrow.
Jeremy: Oh, I'm going to be picking up the phone in a couple hours.
Lawrence: No, but thank you. Thank you for making me part of this.
Jeremy: Thanks everyone for listening. And I look forward to seeing the next creative leaders of the future.
Lawrence Peryer
Host, Spotlight On
Lawrence is a forward-thinking, pioneering executive who has worked with some of the most well-known entertainment artists and brands of our time.
His work is at the crossroads of technology, creative media, commerce, and community, developing businesses, products, and solutions that bring fans closer to the artists and experiences they love.
Lawrence has produced numerous award-winning music releases, documentaries, TV specials, online events, and short films for a diverse portfolio of new, established, and high-value clients. He possesses a reputation as both a creative leader and executive business strategist who fosters cohesive and collaborative relationships with A-list talent, business executives, and production partners.
Activities & Affiliations
Host, Spotlight On Podcast
City of Normandy Park, Arts Commissioner
iVoted Concerts, Board Member
National Academy Recording Arts and Sciences, Voting Member
National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), Advisory Board
Jeremy Sirota
CEO, Merlin
Jeremy Sirota is CEO of Merlin, the largest and most important organization on behalf of independent labels, distributors, and other rightsholders.
