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Business Lessons from the Beatles

If you wish to achieve Beatle-level success in your field, you must first learn to think like a Beatle, say two authors who have analyzed the band’s business strategies over the years.
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What many fans may not know is that Lennon and his bandmates were not just talented musicians. They were also canny businessmen. The Beatles’ moneymaking power continues even now, well over three decades after they broke up, with four full albums still ranked among iTunes’ top 100 bestsellers nearly a month after they became available in a deal with Apple’. As Lennon once said, the Beatles at their height may have been more popular than Jesus, but many businesspeople would be happy to just be as popular as the rock ‘n’ roll band on its worst day.

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Better Late Than Never: Yoko Ono at the MoMA
John Lennon liked to joke that Yoko Ono was “the world’s most famous unknown artist.” Before she infamously “broke up the Beatles” (but not really), Ono built an internationally recognized career as an artist in the developing fields of Conceptual art, experimental film, and performance art. Unfairly famous then and now for all the wrong reasons, Ono’s long fought in her own humorously sly way for recognition, beginning with her self-staged 1971 “show” Museum of Modern (F)art, a performance piece in which she dreamed of a one-woman exhibition of her work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Now, more than 40 years later, the MoMA makes that dream come true with the exhibition Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971. Better late than never, this exhibition of the pre-Lennon and early-Lennon Ono establishes her not just as the world’s most famous unknown artist, but the most unfairly unknown one, too.
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