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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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What percentage of their earnings do you think average mega successful athlete/musician is keeping vs their agent and manager?

Interesting that I said record exec and you said manager.

One outcome of this is that you seem to be debunking my point by saying that agents and managers were likely acting in good faith but the rapper was negligent. But you really aren't because a manager and record executive are different. A record executive is, imo, widely accepted to have his own set of interests which intersect with making an artist successful but can diverge in other, crucial ways, while a manager is supposed to work for the interests of their lord.

Beyond that, another outcome is that you completely pass by my point that complaints about record executives are universal in the music business to tell a different story about ungrateful financial naifs blaming their managers.

Those people obviously exist, but the point is that everyone shares the same disdain here - even successful artists. Blacks just seem to get away more with making it racial. Though they seem to be running out their string now.

This is a classic Marxist complaint about capitalism, but assuming you aren’t a communist it isn’t clear that the CEO of Lockheed Martin (who i presume has a handsome equity comp plan) is “more unfair” about the surplus value he extracts than the CEO of Sony Music.

I'd disagree here. The CEO of Lockheed Martin is in charge of a giant bureaucracy, consisting of many moving parts, and where no single employee is vital or irreplaceable. The value is in the product

This is not the case with musicians or athletes. Jerry Jones relies on Dak Prescott to win football games way more than the Lockheed CEO (Jim Taiclet, apparently) relies on any single employee to make war machines. Similarly the record execs need artists, who are disproportionately important to the business of selling music.

That's why it's particularly relevant to American blacks. They are almost exclusively wealthy through entertainment, not business or manufacturing or entrepreneurship. And therefore the American blacks who get rich are almost always in these positions of producing vastly more value for their employers than your average employee, or even your average millionaire.

You can argue the unfairness is the same, but I'd argue that LeBron on Kanye (or Taylor Swift) is irreplicable in such a way as to give them credence to their complaints.