SIR LUCIAN TAKES OVER THE NEW YORKER

The latest issue of The New Yorker, dated 2/5, contains a profile of UMG ruler Sir Lucian Grainge headlined “The Next Scene,” wherein staff writer John Seabrook delves “Inside the Music Industry’s High-Stakes A.I. Experiments.”

Seabrook certainly made the rounds—the massive, 8,200-word piece (that’s three cartoons worth of copy) is crammed with quotes from the likes of Monte Lipman, Jody Gerson, Irving Azoff, Bono, Daniel Ek, John Janick, Daniel Glass and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan.

While the piece focuses on the possibilities of generative artificial intelligence in terms of the music business, examining UMG’s interaction with YouTube and Google, it doubles as a career overview of the industry’s most powerful executive.

Here’s a sample:

“‘I always say that the music industry chooses you,’ Grainge told me. In the 1950s, his father, Cecil, was the proprietor of GrAInge, a North London record shop and appliance retailer. (The ‘AI’ in the logo was uppercased, a spooky coincidence.) Grainge has an early memory of watching his father shave while he whistled ‘Hey Jude’: ‘How is it he’s not cutting himself? He couldn’t stop whistling that melody.’ Music was always playing in the house. ‘I’d get woken up to Neil Diamond, the “Radetzky March,” Fats Domino, lots of Ray Charles,’ he said."

“‘It’s in the blood,” Irving Azoff said of being in a music family; both of his sons are in the industry. ‘Being around it your whole life, you get a perspective you couldn’t learn in business school.’”

The New Yorker is behind a paywall, but subscribers can access it here. Not a subscriber? Ask one of your egghead friends if you can borrow their copy.