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*****
Marvin stepped back, holding his ginger ale, and took a slow look around the crowded room. He felt a fleeting sliver of melancholy. He was returning to LA tomorrow. Then, he would be jetting off to different locations for book adaptation negotiations and the Asian Market.
Just like Amy, who had left for LA five days ago to hunt down those elusive authors.
He watched the crew members guzzling studio-funded wine or flirting with camera assistants. Since principal shooting finished a week earlier than planned—entirely due to Marvin's one-take efficiency—the relieved producers threw a lavish party to celebrate the money saved.
It was counterproductive to throw the saved cash away on a party. He knew that. But that was how showbiz operated.
He understood the business side of the deal.
Giant corporations engaged in wild spending. If a department received a budget allocated for a quarter, they had to use it all. Otherwise, the next time they asked for funds, the studio executives would cut their allocation, expecting them to do the same job with less just like last time.
The money sat allocated on a spreadsheet. They might as well spend it on booze, lest the executives embezzle it themselves.
This corporate corruption was not as rare as working-class people might think.
Especially, Marvin knew, in the impending Era of Streaming. Tech companies like Amazon and Netflix would throw money at the wall. They would pay incompetent showrunners ridiculous sums until television budgets routinely reached $500 million.
Marvin clearly remembered the historical disaster of the Amazon show *Rings of Power* from his past world. A show which had an astronomical, mind-boggling budget of literally billions of dollars. And yet, besides the incredibly shitty, completely lore-breaking story and the heavy-handed, exhausting 'woke' messaging, the physical sets and the armor costumes looked exactly like they were cheaply bought from a local Walmart or a pop-up Spirit Halloween store on clearance.
It was glaringly clear to anyone with a brain where all that massive money actually went. Besides the padded pockets of the bloated crew, and the wildly overpaid, low-tier stars or demanding Unions, the vast majority of the budget was taken by the greedy higher-ups who saw an opportunity for easy, unsupervised money.
Or just in general Hollywood corruption, like Amazon pulling incredibly massive, expensive A-list actors just to do basic voice work for an animated show like *Invincible*, while simultaneously, not giving anywhere near enough budget to the actual, overworked animation department, resulting in stiff, cheap visuals.
Or the hilarious fact that the mediocre writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge was reportedly paid $100 million in cold cash by Amazon Studios in a massive, exclusive production deal... that ultimately yielded absolutely zero finished content for them.
Examples like these filled his encyclopedic mind. He didn't even need to look at the catastrophic, billion-dollar failures of the future Disney *Star Wars* sequels or the late-stage Marvel Cinematic Universe.
'This is,' Marvin thought, taking a slow sip of his ginger ale, 'what I call the stupidity of the rich. And I am going to exploit every penny of it when I build my studio.'
"A penny for your thoughts, Marvin?" Toni Collette's warm, Australian-accented voice broke Marvin from his cynical reverie.
"Nothing important, Toni," Marvin explained smoothly, flashing his dimples. "Just thinking about going back to sunny LA tomorrow."
"And do what?" she asked, smiling down at him. "Some more writing work?"
"Exactly," he nodded.
"Another project? Geez, what kind of billionaire genuinely likes to work all the time?" she inquired, her tone filled with confusion.
"The kind of man who intends to own the world before he turns eighteen, Toni," Marvin purred softly, raising his glass of ginger juice.
And just like always, their easy conversation flowed seamlessly into the noise of the party.
---
Principal photography for *The Sixth Sense* was finished in Philadelphia, but Marvin's work was not over.
He still had to compose, arrange, and record the orchestral soundtrack for the film.
Marvin flew to New York City.
Here, operating during the same frantic period as his movie shoot, he had done what he always did with his excess capital and forward-looking certainty. He had built a studio.
Maratone Studios came into existence with the quiet corporate efficiency that characterized everything Marvin established. It joined Wolf Cousins, which would dominate the landscape in Los Angeles, and Cheiron Studios, which maintained a primary seat of power in Sweden and operated a branch in the United Kingdom.
Three studio compounds now existed. Each possessed its own distinct character, its own musical language, and its own way of hearing and producing music.
To the cynical Wall Street eye, the newest East Coast addition looked like arrogant overreach.
The quarterly balance sheets were not flattering. The Backstreet Boys were profitable, yes. But everything else Marvin built from scratch bled deeply in the red. The three studios, taken together in early 1998, represented a multi-million dollar net loss that most rational accountants would have characterized as a fatal business mistake.
Marvin did not view it as a mistake. He viewed it as planting unshakeable roots.
He had thought deeply—more carefully than anyone around him could understand—about the actual architecture of the global music industry. He saw what it fundamentally was, hidden beneath the shiny gold records, the glossy magazine covers, and the romanticized mythology of "discovering" raw talent.
Strip the music industry down, rip away the glamour and the PR spin, and what you found at the center was simply this: *Power*.
Not raw talent. Not artistic taste. Not even the rare ability to identify a global hit before the world had heard it, though that mattered for cash flow. Power. Leverage. The brutal capacity to set your own terms. The ability, when necessary, to make it financially impossible for someone to tell you 'no.'
Every human industry had a dark version of this leverage. He knew this from eons of genetic memories. But music was different in ways that most people—even the powerful executives currently operating inside the industry—only half understood.
The first, most crucial difference was its *permanence*.
Music would never die. It could not become obsolete the way a piece of technology did. It could not be disrupted out of existence the way a fragile business model could. Whether human civilization advanced to neural interfaces implanted in skulls or regressed to a starving man with a broken acoustic guitar on a street corner, humans would continue to consume music with the same desperate hunger.
Because the hunger wasn't really for the music itself. It was for what music did to the interior of a soul. And that need wasn't going anywhere until the sun burned out.
This meant the supply of aspiring artists would never decrease. No matter how unforgiving the industry became—no matter how grimy the 360-contracts were, how soul-crushing the corporate structures became, or how complete the disillusionment of every generation that came before—the next generation of dreamers would still come.
They would come running because the intoxicating dream of being a star was vastly more powerful than the statistical evidence stacked against it. Demand was permanent.
Supply was permanent. The business, therefore, was permanent, provided you were positioned correctly at the top of it.
The second difference was harder to articulate. Music could not be separated from the person making it.
You could not sell a Drake song without Aubrey Graham's swagger. You could attempt to manufacture cheap substitutes—and desperate record labels did exactly that, endlessly, like a factory—but the fanatic connection between a fan and an artist was not a connection to a snare sound, a beat style, or a clever set of rhyming words. It was a parasocial connection to a breathing human being, with a face, a tragic story, and a unique way of being alive in the world.
That human connection created the maximum earning potential for a label. That connection was the only thing that could not be legally replicated or transferred.
And—this was the dark, morbid part that most people in the industry understood only intuitively, refusing to examine it in the daylight—*death* made that connection infinitely more valuable.
A living, breathing artist was a liability. A volatile variable who could get arrested, say something offensive, or simply lose their voice. But a dead artist was a monument. The finite catalogue of someone who could no longer add new material instantly became a sacred, historical text. It became something people wanted to own a piece of, to preserve in amber, to return to when they were sad. This phenomenon was not mere sentiment. It was cold economics, operating through human sentiment as its primary instrument of extraction.
Marvin kept these observations locked in a vault in his mind. They were his working notes for empire-building, not polite dinner conversation.
What he ultimately wanted—long before Maratone Studios existed, before he bought out Cheiron, before Wolf Cousins signed its first act—was exactly what Sony, Universal, and Warner Music would eventually build.
He wanted an inescapable constellation of independent labels. Each with its own cultural identity and its own roster of superstars, but all of them secretly orbiting the same central financial structure.
The "Big Three" legacy labels, by the time the next decade finished rearranging the digital landscape, would control the vast majority of all recorded music on the planet. They would only get there through bloody acquisition—buying up vulnerable legacy catalogues, absorbing failing indie labels, and consolidating power until the open music market looked less like a free marketplace, and more like a gentrified space with only three greedy landlords.
Marvin intended to be the largest landlord on earth. But he was going to build his castle differently.
The fatal error the legacy labels made was their concentration. Load too many A-list artists onto a single label, and you created a resource allocation problem that no amount of money could solve.
Every record label had a hard ceiling—a finite amount of executive attention, limited promotional radio infrastructure, capped marketing spend, and exhausted creative support. Once you exceeded that ceiling, you were no longer developing artists; you were triaging them in an emergency room.
The A-list stars got all the attention and the Super Bowl spots. The vulnerable B-list waited in the dark. And raw talent, when forced to wait too long in the wrong conditions, had a tragic way of curdling into bitterness and failure.
He had a list.
He had always kept a list of names, kept strictly internal. He kept it formless, the exact way you keep a weapon formless when you don't want your enemies to see its shape.
The names on his mental list were not global stars yet. In 1998, most of them were children playing in their backyards. Some were not even born. Others were awkward teenagers sitting somewhere in the world, not yet handed the magical set of circumstances that would turn them into what they were destined to become.
Taylor, sitting in Pennsylvania with a guitar. Rihanna, running around Barbados. Selena, Dua Lipa, Avril—each of them a billion-dollar future that the industry had not yet learned how to price. Mariah, who already existed as a star, but whose catalogue's second life was still ahead of her. Lady Gaga, Adele, Katy—names the world would eventually use as historical shorthand to define an era of pop culture. Sheeran, Bruno, The Weeknd, Justin, Drake, Kendrick, Nicki, Travis. He let the list go on in his mind, smiling.
BTS, BLACKPINK, EXO, TWICE—unstoppable acts that would prove, against the resistance of every conventional assumption in the market, that foreign language was not the barrier ignorant executives thought it was, provided the music underneath the vocals was perfect.
Coldplay, Imagine Dragons, Maroon 5. Billie, Olivia, Harry, Zayn, Camila. Bad Bunny, who would eventually make something extraordinary happen to the global charts in ways English-speaking executives would spend years trying to explain in boardrooms.
The combined commercial footprint of those names—what they would earn in gross revenue, what their publishing catalogues would be worth, what the stadium touring, the brand licensing, the streaming, and the merchandise would add up to—was a number that did not currently exist in any Wall Street model. Because no one alive had yet thought to model it that way.
He had.
And he understood something else: launching all of them from a single corporate source like Columbia or Sony would be a PR catastrophe.
The cynical market would see the pattern.
Audiences, who forgave almost everything else, had a surprisingly low tolerance for the appearance of corporate manufacture. You could not push a hundred unique voices through the same corporate door without people noticing it was the same door, and rejecting them as "industry plants."
The artists themselves needed to believe they had organically found their artistic home, not been assigned one by a billionaire in a suit.
The various labels had to look and feel different—different urban culture, different visual aesthetic, different A&R philosophy, different countries of origin. Because they *were* going to be different, in all the artistic ways that mattered to the fans, while secretly sharing the same financial infrastructure and negotiating power in all the corporate ways that didn't show on camera.
Above it all would sit Meyers Music Group. Invisible to the paparazzi or the gossip papers, but quietly present in every boardroom where the terms of the industry were set in stone.
*****
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