Following the superb IPA debate - "Who makes the better planners - planners or creatives?" between Dave Trott and David Golding, it occurs to me that there is a parallel debate you could host in the music industry.
It would be called "Who makes the better songwriters - singers or songwriters?"
Think about it. To any rational observer, the act of singing and the act of songwriting are two wholly distinct specialisms. Simple division of labour theory would suggest that the two functions would be best performed by entirely different people - you would have expert musicians writing the songs, and attractive, coordinated people with good voices to sing them.
And, indeed, quite often this is how it works. Classical music sometimes operated this way - although not always. Bach was a tip-top organist and Liszt a first-rate pianist, for example.
And quite often popular music works this way. Elvis didn't write all that much of his own material, for example; nor does Tom Jones. Nor do many manufactured bands such as Girls Aloud.
Yet (ABBA, the Beatles, Hank Williams, The Beach Boys, U2, Coldplay....add your own 100 names here) it is astonishing how often the greatest and most successful songwriters are singer-songwriters. Even when their qualifications as singers (the velvet voice of Bob Dylan, anyone?) are not all that evident.
One explanation for this comes in the recent book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, My reading of this suggests that creativity is not for the most part a specialism in itself, but is rather the product of frequent and repeated execution. In other words if you want to write a good song, don't start by taking a songwriting course - do a lot of singing instead.
Yet we still adhere to an agency process which attempts to separate these two things - to treat them as though they were sequential and independent, rather than being inextricably intertwined. A brief spends two weeks in the song-writing department before being handed over to some singers.
There is a precedent for this approach in the music business, of course. The genius founder of Motown, Berry Gordy (below, left), bizarrely the sixth cousin of Elvis Presley, was perhaps responsible for more musical creativity than anyone else in the last century, a feat he achieved by modelling his business on Detroit car production lines. As you would expect, bands, recording studions, compositions, were all deployed with spectacular efficiency according to Taylorist principles, division of labour and economies of scale. And it worked.
Clearly you can't dismiss process in creative industries quite as easily as all that.
But this adherenece to process did have its downside. Gordy wouldn't allow anyone to perform dual functions, insisting that songwriters wrote the songs and singers simply sang them. Which is why a frustrated young singer left the label in 1975 in protest at not being allowed to write his own material.
Michael Jackson wrote Thriller in 1982.
