Stuff like this upsets me, mainly because Steve Stoute, whose creatively profitable career has been based on getting a percentage of the profitably creative careers of musicians, should know better than most people that the people producing the Grammy show and the voting body behind the Awards themselves are entirely different entities with separate goals in mind.* He even says as much. Which makes his whole argument pretty much bullshit.
Not to say that Stoute doesn’t have extremely valid points—because he does. The NARAS’ ability to be out of touch with the driving forces of culture is something of legend. Which I feel everyone pretty much understands by this point.
Which leaves me kinda confused as to why Stoute: 1) felt the need tomake this argument in such a public manner; 2) why he’s making it such a shoddy way. It reads like he had his panties in a bunch. Either that or he realized that Lucky Strike was gonna dump him and decided, No, we get to dump you, a la Don Draper.
Now, I’m not to say that Stoute’s being disingenuous, or that there’s anything wrong with with him making millions by getting 10 and 15 and 20% off rap artists and flipping that into making big coin deals telling clueless corporations which negro to use sell their cheaply made products. As a matter of fact, I kinda admire the guy for that. Someone’s gotta keep those sweatshops running; it might as well be Reebok or HP or Samsung or whomever. And if he can get Jay-Z or 50 Cent or Drake some of that blood money while sucking off a few drops for himself, so be it. We’re all guilty in this interconnected world, and if his part in the game has him in a Maybach, more power to him. No matter who you sleep with at night, you always sleep with yourself. Or something profound.
Back to the point: It’s mindboggling that someone with Steve Stoute’s depth and width of experience in the music industry (and business at large) writes an open letter as if he has no idea how the music industry works. We have blogs for all that, Steve.
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*I’m pretty sure there’s one very old, very rich, very wrinkled white man who controls all of it, though.
