Jazz Odyssey

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This article from the New York Times offers an interesting look at the current problems facing drug companies:

• The worldwide drug industry is struggling…"the $500 billion drug industry is stumbling badly in its core business of finding new medicines".
• Drug companies have tried to counter this failure to develop profitable new drugs through aggressive (and by extension, expensive) marketing campaigns, by increasing prices and attempting to utilize legal strategies to extend patents…while this has improved profits it has angered consumers.
• New opportunities through biomedicine are starting to offer glimpses of hope, but traditional drug companies haven’t had much luck with biotechnology.

Sounds eerily familiar, eh?  The two industries have much in common….the cost of R&D/A&R and putting a new drug/artist to market is astronomical, with no guarantee that the investment will recoup, let alone make money.  Yet the success of just one amidst the failures of many can produce an enormous windfall that puts enough money in the pipeline for the cycle to continue.

Since we at the record companies face many of the same challenges as the drug companies, why not put our heads together?  It would be fascinating to swap business development and marketing executives for a couple of meetings and see how we’re each addressing the issues….