One Of Ones: Lessons From Clive Davis

The legendary record label executive's rarest talent isn't necessarily his "golden ears," but what's between them.

Over the better part of a century in the music business, Clive Davis has signed some of the greatest artists of all time, from Janis Joplin to Whitney Houston. It’s earned him the reputation as “the man with the golden ears.”

The primary key to his success hasn’t necessarily been those ears, but what’s between them. And fostering the reputation of having an otherworldly knack for discovering artists, despite no formal music training of his own, has paid incredible dividends.

“People are saying I have golden ears—it’s certainly not something I’ve been saying about myself—but I do talk about ears in general,” Davis, now 92, told me a decade ago. “I was just trusting my instinct.”

Though Davis indeed signed Janis Joplin to a record deal after hearing her at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, it didn’t take a music PhD to recognize her as a generational talent. His specialty was recognizing artists that embodied genres ready to jump from niche to mainstream, whether psychedelic rock or (eventually) hip-hop, and help them make it happen.

In other words, he was a specialist at scaling. And that skill can translate to most industries, which is why Trapital founder Dan Runcie and I decided to dig into his career in the latest installment of our “One of Ones” series. Check out our podcast episode here; my written breakdown on lessons I learned from Davis is available to paid subscribers, as usual, below.