What adaptation in the music industry can teach us about evolving business models and personal brands

Two recent music industry retrospectives focusing on the transition of popular tastes in the 1970s to the 1980s offer abundant nostalgia while also delivering lessons about market forces, change and adaptation.?

The first piece is a New York Times feature, “You Can Never Look Back: How ‘70s Rockers Rebooted for the ‘80s.” With sound clips inserted (for the benefit of those who haven’t heard the tunes hundreds, if not thousands of times), author Ben Sisario dives into the evolution that allowed such artists as Eagles drummer and singer Don Henley, Texas blues band ZZ Top and the British progressive rock band Yes to face down their own obsolescence as consumer appetites changed with the dawn of a new decade.?

Popular music in the 1980s was characterized by new sound and recording techniques driven by synthesizers and drum machines, with less emphasis on the individual proficiency of the musicians in the studio. And a public image that had been mostly represented in album art or live performances shifted dramatically in 1981 to promotion via music video on MTV.

The second look-back is a Max documentary, or rather a “Yacht Rock dockumentary” about the fusion genre rooted in the 1970s classic Steely Dan recordings and peaking with late-70s chart-toppers from the Doobie Brothers/Michael McDonald, Toto, Kenny Loggins, and Christopher Cross. The essence of this genre was the high-quality musicianship of the session performers, who brought a shared interest in jazz, funk, classical and soul into the studio, and where producers spared no expense in shaping and refining every note and beat.

While the latter set of performers faced the same challenges as the MTV era unfolded, this story is one with a more-pointed caution: Of the artists covered in the program’s 90 minutes, only Loggins manages to (somewhat) reinvent himself for the video era through movie-soundtrack hits (“Footloose,” “Top Gun”). The others did not, although the documentary spotlights several notable ways in which subsequent hip hop and rap artists re-purposed their tracks for a new generation.??

With these two divergent narratives, some non-musical lessons emerge:

Takeaway 1: Immerse yourself in what’s coming – confront the changes and get out of your comfort zone.

It was a terrifying time to be a drummer or keyboardist, when the technology was coming for your job. (Does that sound familiar?) In music, the studio can be a safe space for experimentation, and the acts featured here brought in new technology and new collaborators to remake their sound in very self-disruptive ways. Trickier still was the image remake that would fill the 24x7 programming needs of MTV. For an introvert like Henley, being a rock star suddenly required becoming a movie star, which he managed by playing a part that came naturally to him: the cool observer.?

Takeaway 2: Don’t lose yourself – what set you apart originally can still differentiate you if you adapt your capabilities and image successfully.

As much as these two stories are about change, they also demonstrate that the distinctive characteristics of these artists carried through from one period to the other, whether that was their voice, their storytelling, their ability to find the right hook or even their charisma or flamboyance. The band Yes in the 80s still sounded experimental and complex, with vaguely mystical lyrics. ZZ Top’s guitar riffs remained familiar, even if they were now mixed in with drum machines and unmistakable beards and shades.??

Takeaway 3: If you can’t outpace your competitors for attention and market share, they’ll not only take your place but may repurpose what once was distinctly yours.

The Times feature references the many video and synth “native” acts who were entering the scene in the 1980s – Prince, Madonna, Duran Duran. And those may be the artists we most associate with that period because they truly shaped it. But both of these retrospectives remind us that there’s room to reinvent yourself and your work–even to repurpose your past efforts. The Yacht Rock movie concludes by recounting the emerging hip hop acts–De La Soul, Warren G–who would mine the 70s classics for a late-80s/early 90s refresh.?

Take a deeper dive into that time period to see and hear for yourself. The Times feature is a 12-minute listen. The “dockumentary” is a greater time investment, but I found it to be a fun and illuminating watch, more substantial than I expected. If you need a teaser, the program includes an anecdote about how we almost never got to hear one of the most enduring songs from that era, but “it’s gonna take some time to do the things we never had.”