It’s not that there really is no rhyme or reason to an artist’s success.  It’s not really random.  It’s just that the process of making a hit or a star is  irreducibly complex,unpredictable and impossible to model. It can never be duplicated. ...

Yet everyone in the music business seems to think otherwise. Artists, managers, agents and record executives will argue otherwise. They will cite their own personal narratives that show how their actions and decisions led to some spectacular success. But there are always a few strange logical fallacies at work.

“Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan”- arab proverb.

What this means is not that a successful project has many fathers helping to guide it on it’s way to success.  No, this means that many people claim to be associated or responsible for a project’s success no matter how tenuous.  People play up their role in a successful project but downplay their role or completely disavow involvement in failures and disasters.  It’s a genetically encoded survival feature of Homo Corporaticus.  By doing this people artificially increase their win/loss ratio.  Equity traders would say they fraudulently increase their alpha or skill quotient.

This also helps create an illusion of causality.  It helps us tell ourselves and others the lie that our actions decisions and theories usually result in great success. There’s also something called the narrative fallacy whereby an individual will look back on events and select a cause and effect narrative that brings order to what were really chaotic and random events and decisions.