A promise for today: There are no spoilers, allusions or glancing references to GAME OF THRONES anywhere in this newsletter. This is a musical safe space. We may or may not, however, find ourselves asking what ABC was thinking in scheduling the finale of a very good season of AMERICAN IDOL (featuring, in ALEJANDRO ARANDA, the closest thing the show has had to a surefire pop star in years) directly against the GOT finale. Or should we be asking the opposite question?... But in honor of the long game that GOT's smarter characters prattled on about for eight years and that Aranda expertly played for 12 weeks, I've been thinking about the common belief that there was once a time when great record company moguls played a long game of their own by nurturing and investing in artists over many years and many albums, giving them as much time as needed to find their artistic footing and their worldwide platinum audience. I've never bought that it was true, which is to say I've never believed it was better in the '70s than in, say, the '90s, or that it was better in the '90s than it is today. It sometimes seems that way because we remember the SPRINGSTEENs and GREEN DAYs and NO DOUBTs who were allowed time to develop and we forget the hundreds of artists who were quickly and quietly discarded. We remember the winners. We remember the great artists who would have succeeded no matter who was running the show and we convince ourselves that the great men in charge (it's always men, isn’t it?) were somehow responsible. This is what the music industry apparently calls gurshing. Twenty years from now, we'll remember the 2010s as a golden age when great execs at great labels generously and deliberately developed DRAKE and JANELLE MONÁE and TAME IMPALA, and no on will question the narrative. But it's always been about the artists, and it always will be. The best execs will clear paths and find opportunities. And the best artists will either explode out of the gate—with or without a jockey—or find their niche. Same as always... H/T (and HBD!) PIOTR ORLOV for this mini-documentary on "The Wonderful Last Day of IRIS RECORDS, Feb. 16, 2019," chronicling the final hours of a Jersey City, NJ, vinyl shop that went into business by selling a BOB JAMES album for $4 in June 1996 and went out with the sale of a SCHOOLLY D record for $12 some 23 years later. JUAN ROQUE's doc is basically eight minutes of customers, age range from 20s to perhaps 70s, flipping through vinyl inside the store and standing outside the store talking about the joy and beauty of records. If it doesn’t make you smile a lot and cry a little, then, hey, there are "Game of Thrones" recaps to be read, go for it... And here, in what I believe officially qualifies as a shocker, is your new American Idol.