Lessons for Sustained Success

We do a lot of work in creating new products for consumer products companies, particularly in the food and beverage world.  Yet I often look at other industries to see how they handle innovation.

Lately I’ve been looking at the music industry.  While music is an art, if you are an artist you are running a business. You basically have a brand and you compete against all the other brands out there for consumer’s discretionary dollars in both concert tickets and music (song/album) sales.  You have to stay fresh and relevant with every song and album or you end up becoming an icon of times past (hello Vanilla Ice) or worse, a one hit wonder (somewhere in a college bar in Mexico Gerardo is still singing “Rico Suave”).

So how do artists whose popularity spans decades do it?  Let’s look at the Dave Matthews Band, one of my favorites.  All they’ve done is sell 33 million albums in the last 20 years and have 22 albums hit the Billboard 200, 5 of which were number one.  Here are 3 things to learn from their sustained success over the years:

Constant Innovation

One of the reasons for their success over the years is an original sound that comes from having a violinist and saxophonist in the band.  When their first major album release, “Under the Table and Dreaming”, became a smash hit, one might think the band would stick to the same formula for success. Yet they’ve always tinkered with their sound trying to become better and better. In fact they did what few bands ever do- add new members. Originally there were five members of the band but over time they’ve added Butch Taylor on keyboards, Tim Reynolds on electric guitar and Rashawn Ross on Trumpet to keep things fresh. 

Real World Testing

The danger of creating new music is that no one will buy it?  So how does a band make sure they are making music their core fans will love?  They play it live on tour to see what sticks.  Then they decide what ultimately goes on the album.  Nothing like getting the reaction of 30,000 people all at the same time.  Another band from the past, Devo, recently did this as well putting songs up for a vote at clubdevo.com where more than 40,000 fans (who are these people?) voted on what to put on their new album.

True Teamwork

Sure it’s a cliché but imagine you worked with the same team for 20+ years.  Do you think there might be some dysfunction?  In the music world, that’s why they created “VH1 Behind the Music”.  In this case, Dave Matthews Band went down a very odd path- they had one person creating most of their content.  Dave would write the songs by himself and present it to the rest of the band to make the music.  That led to such animosity the band was on the verge of breaking up two years ago even with all their success.

The last album, “Big Whiskey and The GrooGrux King” turned it all around.  The band collaborated on the creation of the music and lyrics like they hadn’t done since their early days. "The sound is very much DMB because every individual contributed to the writing," says violinist Boyd Tinsley. The result: it debuted at #1 on the Billboard Chart and was nominated for the Grammy for Album of the Year.  Turns out that whole idea of teamwork and collaboration can be forgotten even by tight knit, successful groups.