I've been in the music industry for about 28 years now, TV, chart data, artist management, pretty much every side of it at some point, I now run a company called Blinding Talent. And honestly, the longer I'm in it, the more I notice how much of what gets repeated as "how the industry works" is either outdated, way oversimplified, or was never really true in the first place.

A few of mine to kick things off:

"Labels don't develop artists anymore." Mostly true if you're talking about majors specifically, but that role didn't vanish, it just moved somewhere else in the industry that most artists don't know to look for.

"You need a huge following before anyone will work with you." Depends a lot on the stage you're at and who you're actually talking to. It gets repeated so often that people treat it as gospel, but it's not the whole picture.

"Streaming numbers are the main thing that matters." For a lot of working artists, especially outside the US and UK, sync and public performance income quietly matter just as much or more, and almost nobody talks about that side of it.

Would love to hear what you've all got, whether you're an artist, a manager, A&R, a distributor, doesn't matter what corner of this you're in. What's the thing everyone repeats that turned out to be wrong once you actually saw how it worked?