Did The Internet Break Music, Sports, AND Markets? Roger Mitchell And Jason Buck On JUST PRESS RECORD

Call it a personal theory, but to understand the reasons I had to introduce these two strangers—Roger Mitchell and Jason Buck—AND capture their conversation on Just Press Record, goes a little something like this:

The world is always changing. BUT, the biggest change of my lifetime (and probably yours) has to be the advent of the internet. You probably think it’s already touched everything, and on that point you’re not wrong, but we don’t talk enough about what it’s still in the process of completely reshaping before our eyes.

The internet changed the way everything gets distributed. That's obvious. But, more than anything, the internet altered how entertainment gets distributed.

Music, sports, rumors, movies, news—all entertainment, all impacted by the arrival of the internet.

Music was the easiest initial target. Maybe alongside spreading rumors, but the commercial version of spreading rumors is "news," and that came later with social media.

Why was music the first form of entertainment the internet disrupted?

Music distribution happens in two key ways: live (in-person experiences) and recorded (captured on some medium to play anywhere you have the appropriate device). The business of recorded music never stood a chance against the internet.

Piracy, via Napster and the like, seized the opportunity from under the record labels', record stores', and radio stations' respective noses, forcing them to acquiesce and reimagine their entire approach to the business.

Movies and news had a little more time, but they took different paths. Luckily for movies, they represented massive files. Businesses like Netflix were able to form and at least protect a tiny corner of the industry while inventing internet-friendly business models (or at least cheap capital-enabled business models).

News is still undergoing the transition to social media. You can read other people's views on this. Bottom line, if you still watch the evening news or TV shows on broadcast television (I'll leave TV shows as a medium in between news and movies, for brevity), then this Hollywood Reporter quote pretty well sums you up:

Sports are the last holdout. And they don't even seem to be holding out much anymore. The rights deals with the aging-out cable networks are falling all around us.

Sports live viewing piracy, increasingly global viewer profit-chasing for the biggest teams, brand recognition via social media—this is a Napster moment, combined with the social media + news moment, combined with the advent of Netflix and streaming, all at once.

If you thought the other internet-led disruptions were huge, you ain’t seen nothing yet.  

I think of this stuff a lot. I think about how my own ambitions to work in and around music in the early 2000s were largely thwarted by me NOT understanding the shifting macro landscape. I shudder when I think of where I went stubbornly wrong by following the paths I thought were laid out (and then bang my head on the wall when I think of how obvious buying shares of Apple would have been if I'd even known what a stock was at the time).

Enter these two guests.

Roger Mitchell is a sports industry consultant via his company, Albachiara. His book, Sport's Perfect Storm, was easily one of the best books I read in 2024—largely because it threaded the needle on my theories above and combined them with a mix of financial markets and demographic history. It also doesn't hurt that he left the music industry to be in the center of the disruption in sport (even if he got there a little early, moving from EMI to running the Scottish Football Association before launching his company).

Jason Buck, who (of course) read Rog's book but luckily for us had never met him, is a volatility hedger via Mutiny Fund. Jason's approach to life, markets, sports, music, and you name it is—you might have a good idea, even a great idea, but the world, at some point, will do its damndest to try and destroy it. You're either prepared or you're not, and thanks to cockroaching his way through his own life/career(s), he and his company can help. (Psst, you can hear my interview with Jason about his life on The Intentional Investor).

I know, I know, I know, this conversation goes down a lot of rabbit holes, especially as it relates to sport.

BUT.

Read my theory above, and understand this through line:

The world is always changing.

If you can understand what is changing and how to survive, you can understand what to do differently and how to thrive.

Nobody understands this balance of profiting from chaos while still building local, humane, and personalized, free-markets-driven experiences like these two gentlemen.

Oh, and if nothing else, Rog's stories slay. The pope story alone, towards the end of our conversation, might be the funniest Just Press Record moment yet.

Without further ado, I give you Roger Mitchell meeting Jason Buck for the first time ever, ENJOY!

On Apple and Spotify too!