Invent Your Job | Musicology.fm

Imagine you’ve landed your dream job. Here’s the twist: your employer doesn’t know what your dream job is and refuses to define it. The company is brand new and the mission is huge, but what you do is up to you. Clearly, there’s tons of work to do.

What projects would you manage and which tasks would fill up your day?

I am a product manager and lead writer at Live Nation Labs. My first project is to invent my job, create the products that I’ll manage, and choose the companies I want to disrupt.

In order to invent my job, I need to be honest with myself and lay out the things that I love doing, the things I hate doing, and leave a bit of wiggle room between the margins.


Things I Love

1. Asking big questions.
2. Exploring new ideas.
3. Developing theories.
4. Envisioning the future.
5. Writing in long-form.
6. Interviewing people.
7. Marketing my vision.
8. Imagining products.

Given the things I’ve listed, it’s no surprise—in hindsight—that I fell into becoming a music industry analyst and a deep thinker about technology and culture, but it was.

If you had asked me in college why I enrolled in a program focused on the music industry, I would’ve told you that I wanted to be a lyric writer, live music promoter, and A&R person at a record label. To me, this sounded like exactly what I wanted to do.

I spent hours and hours writing lyrics, attended tons of shows, and loved discovering music. In an attempt to combine these interests, I signed up for music industry school.

Little did I know, I’d discover a thing—a state of being, if you will—that I loved even more than these things: curiosity. If you distill the things that I love into one, it’s this:

I love being curious—about damn near everything.

With this in mind, I need to develop a blueprint for my job.

Ultimate Chart and Live Nation Labs require me to ask big questions, explore new ideas, develop theories, envision the future, market my vision, and imagine products. Labs, on the other hand, is much more focused on writing in long-form and interviewing people.

Beyond the blog we just launched, it has these other aspects too.

We’re in a position to lead several tribes: live music fans, music industry professionals, designers and developers, and rebel intellectuals, across other industries and disciplines.

In effect, it comes down to these questions: What does the future we’re trying to build look like—both for ourselves and everyone else involved? What type of change do we want to see in the music industry and how will we become the force that drives it?

Answering these questions is my job—the mission fueled by vision—that I’ve chosen to “invent” for myself. But in order to obtain this job, I’ll need to dream up the future first.

That’s my job. What’s yours?