LinkedIn Post: The Whole Band Quit

Source: NSFW Podcast Episode 128 — "The Caucasity" (Kennedy, Rachel, April, Brandyn discussing the Current Affairs staff walkout)

Timestamps: ~7:48–8:35 (band analogy + burden of proof)

Topic: Creative ownership and what it means when everyone else leaves

There's a band analogy I keep coming back to.

When you're the last person standing and your entire staff walked out, there's an immense burden of proof that you have to provide that everyone else simply wasn't pulling their weight. That pitch is hard enough to make with one person. When it's the whole band — or the whole newsroom, or the whole crew — it's basically impossible.

The thing about collaborative creative work is that everybody is bringing their own influences to the thing you're building together. And in that space, you end up with something more impressive than any one of you could have done alone. That's what makes it actually worth doing.

But that also means the question of "who owns this" is more complicated than the paperwork says.

We were talking about the Current Affairs situation on the podcast — the writer who owned the publication technically, but not in any way that mattered once the team left. What he had was a name and a filing. What he lost was the thing that made the name worth anything.

I see a version of this in video work. Someone builds a brand over years with a creative team — director, editor, on-camera person, whoever — and then one day there's a falling out. Or someone gets hired away. And suddenly the person who "owns" the project is holding an asset that stopped being an asset the moment the people left.

The creative work lives in the relationships and the collaboration, not just in who signed the paperwork.

When the whole band quits, you gotta ask what you actually own.

draft from corpus — based on NSFW Podcast ep. 128, pub. August 25, 2021