When Do Artists Make Good Entrepreneurs? Lessons From Joan Jett

We often try to hire people who are self-starters, who will work for us as if they own the business. The risk of finding such a person is that they may one day leave us to start their own company.

... The question of which musicians are most likely to become successful entrepreneurs has been the subject of research by Aleksandra Kacperczyk, professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management at MIT, and Peter Younkin, professor of Strategy and Organization at McGill University. They obtained Nielson Soundscan data on the careers of 5000 artists over the course of twenty years. They found that artists were more likely to start their own label and sign other artists to that label when they had a broad range of skills yet operated within a relatively defined genre.

Read full article: Forbes, November 13, 2014