The title reminded me of a startup called Magic, that promised things like that for a fee through a SMS or something like that. I can't recall more details...
This is a wild time capsule of an article to reread now... Whatever happened to Facebook "M"? And why did anyone ever think this would survive as a business model?
Interest rates were low, near zero for seven years by 2016. It seemed like anything was possible because the funny money just kept coming in from investors with nowhere else to put it. The ideas didn’t have to make sense and they didn’t have to be profitable, it was the last days of Babylon and it seemed if you just reached out with an SMS you could get the Backstreet Boys at your birthday party.
It was Magic, they did YC W15! They still exist; they've just pivoted a bit into virtual assistants. They mostly were for normal stuff early on, although Justin Kahn (who invested in them) used to do some weird stuff using Magic: https://justinkan.com/feed/fun-with-magic
One of my favorite stories is an acquaintance's aunt had Willie Nelson perform at her birthday party. The condition was that he was to be paid $200k in cash. He arrived, performed at the party, took the bag of cash, and left without exchanging any words.
That's genuinely surprising given how affable he seems.
But does remind me of Elon Musk doing the commencement address at my graduation. He spoke for five minutes, then walked directly off stage and to his waiting car.
"If you've got the money honey I've got the time. We'll go honky tonkin' and we'll have a time [..] If you run short of money I'll run short of time. If you've got no more money honey I've got no more time."
An acquaintance has a business/platform in this space, which started around sports personalities: https://pickstar.pro/au
Seemed to catch the wave of "side hustle" popularity at the right time. Many people with jobs have a wandering eye as it is, and athletes/etc often have enough of an audience to leverage.
> Despite all the luxuries, “corporate events can be sort of soul-destroying,” Viecelli said. “It’s not really an audience. It’s a convention or a party, and you just happen to be making noise at one end of it.”
Doing a jam session while the crowd are "networking" and exchanging linked-in tier anecdotes about how they thought they were missing a meeting with the CEO because they were helping a homeless person is not a good creative environment.
I work for a Fortune 100 company that fairly frequently has big name artists perform at corporate events. I always feel a bit sorry for them. Most employees are just wandering around, chatting with friends and enjoying the free food and drinks. Hardly anyone pays attention to the musicians.
I really like this kind of informal type of music where you can alternate between chatting to people and listening to some music. There's certainly a place where the music is the #1 attention, but in general I think this more informal type of atmosphere is how music is supposed to work. This is even more even more true if anyone can just join in if they want (which probably isn't the case for these parties).
Joe Rogan told a story where he was at some rich guy's party and Stone Temple Pilots performed. Hardly anyone paid any attention to them. He said that they nonetheless cranked out any amazing set.
The wide spectrum of the human experience never cease to amaze me. Reading the stories in this article just made that spectrum a little bit bigger. Just wild. I am too shocked to have any sort of moral opinion about it.
It's really hard to imagine "scale my net worth up to billions" and work out what that practically means - even just your random billionaire can hire people to do things we wouldn't even think of considering, like having multiple houses around the country/world that are identical, and you have staff at each that makes sure they remain identical - if you left the New York Times on your desk in Milan, it will be on your desk in New York when you walk in the room.
Power cuts both ways. Move one or two random items to a location they’ve placed them before but haven’t in awhile, call coworker in Milan with list of things to update, note down reactions and make slight adjustments to tactics until they snap and buy a social media network for $40bn. Never mess with the help.
Your example sounds infuriating. First, I want items where they are supposed to be, not where I left them. But who wants the same thing all the time? If I go out to a large meal and every course tastes the same because it's all covered in the same sauce, it doesn't matter if it is my favorite sauce. I want to have variety. Similarly, when I travel, different spaces please. On the other hand, I would like to arrive at a hotel and be handed a key as I walked in and had the closets already populated with my clothes.
This would be so much fun. I imagine being rich and without meaning or a direction. I'd spend my time messing up my housing, secretly taking photo's of it. then flying around for a few hours in a jet to my identical house and yelling at the staff for not having it match the photos.
Super extravagant, but to blow $150k any random weekend you "only" need to be making ~$10M/year. A massive amount, but I'm guessing even many HN users have businesses making in excess of that (feel free to invite me to your next party).
I don't understand where you got the 10MM/year number from. Blowing 150k/weekend requires 7.8MM/year. Double it for taxes and you get to make 15MM/year just to pay for the talent on your private shows. If you want to live indoors or eat you'll need more money.
But bemmu also calculated that you need $10 million, as if he were calculating doing this every weekend. I mean, to do it once, you only need $150,000.
Here's an alternate explanation for his calculation. People usually spend around 2-4% of their annual income on vacations. Depends on a lot of factors of course, but that's a reasonable amount. A person earning $10M could afford to blow 2% on one weekend ($200k), 2% on fancy vacations rest of the year and still spend consider themselves fairly responsible.
How much would an ordinary person earning $60,000 be prepared to spend on a big weekend blowout with live music, drinking, partying, clothes etc. Now scale that up to a person earning $10,000,000.
It doesn't scale linearly, more like exponentially. Wealthy people can devote a much, much larger percent of their income towards discretionary spending.
Bemmu said a random weekend, so I would expect it to cost about the average of what they spend when no big events were happening . I didn't even add blow out weekends for vacations or major events.
This long form article was excellent in audio mode.
What’s interesting is that there is a market for artists today even though their hits were from previous generations: the new aristocracy were once high schoolers and are now are adults looking for unique experiences.
> Charles Ruggiero, a drummer in Los Angeles who is active in jazz and rock, told me, “The way musicians look at it, generally speaking, is: It’s a fucking gig. And a gig is a gig is a gig.”
I absolutely love such deep dives into how a slice of the world functions (or, should I say dysfunctions?). I feel like I've heard several aspects of this piece before, because many of my friends are musicians and performers. I get to be fly-on-the wall during their conversations about the commercial side of things. This anecdote stood out, because I've heard a version of it before...
> Even geniuses have had to navigate a certain servitude to their sponsors.
Some years ago, a friend was a performer in one of the myriad shows at one of those insane $100 million weddings. Our film industry's G.O.A.T. superstar was the emcee. Redefined cinema for generations, absolutely revered by the public. My friend recounted pretty much this impression of the status and treatment meted out to that person...
> Mozart fumed about the Archbishop of Salzburg, who “treats me like a street urchin and tells me to my face to clear out, adding that he can get hundreds to serve him better than I.”
The world must look very different when you know you can wake up one fine morning and decide which way you want to drive a small country's economy, while you relieve yourself or sip your morning cuppa.
I worked at Apple in the late 2000s and early 2010s, at a time when iTunes was still king of the hill in terms of music distribution. During the summers, they would periodically host private performances from popular musicians on Apple campus. It was a neat perk for a fresh-from-school junior engineer.
I have no idea what the details of those performance bookings were, but I always assumed that plenty of money changed hands to make it happen.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadI mean it’s the New Yorker. It would be news worthy if they did do blogspam rather than long form articles.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/05/make-magics-assistants-do-...
They're still around: https://getmagic.com/
But does remind me of Elon Musk doing the commencement address at my graduation. He spoke for five minutes, then walked directly off stage and to his waiting car.
Not surprised by his IRS problems
Seemed to catch the wave of "side hustle" popularity at the right time. Many people with jobs have a wandering eye as it is, and athletes/etc often have enough of an audience to leverage.
Expensive noise!
The musicians are probably the most fun and interesting people in the room.
This is just a symptom of our regression back to a dominate aristocratic class that is pleased when the king hires Mozart as the court musician.
Watching the car-crash documentary about everything going full steam ahead was wonderfully entertaining.
Less so for the Fyre guests mind...
What’s interesting is that there is a market for artists today even though their hits were from previous generations: the new aristocracy were once high schoolers and are now are adults looking for unique experiences.
Was that a Scott Pilgrim quote? :)
> Even geniuses have had to navigate a certain servitude to their sponsors.
Some years ago, a friend was a performer in one of the myriad shows at one of those insane $100 million weddings. Our film industry's G.O.A.T. superstar was the emcee. Redefined cinema for generations, absolutely revered by the public. My friend recounted pretty much this impression of the status and treatment meted out to that person...
> Mozart fumed about the Archbishop of Salzburg, who “treats me like a street urchin and tells me to my face to clear out, adding that he can get hundreds to serve him better than I.”
The world must look very different when you know you can wake up one fine morning and decide which way you want to drive a small country's economy, while you relieve yourself or sip your morning cuppa.
(edit: formatting)
I have no idea what the details of those performance bookings were, but I always assumed that plenty of money changed hands to make it happen.