"They" watch what the really cool kids are doing, or at least the coolest kids they can find. When they've been consistently doing a particular thing for almost a decade, with the thing filtering down through the social hierarchy until almost-uncool people are doing it, that's the prime time to safely monetize the shit out of that thing for about 3 years until even your dad wouldn't be caught dead doing it.
Macklemore/ADA are kinda late to the party, "vintage" clothing stores have been milking that particular cash cow dry for a while now. Filtering down...
It's a process that sounds familiar to many people here, I'm sure.
But yes, this track is maybe not the best example for the point I'm making. Just replace "record companies spending millions of dollars" with "ADA spending some other very large amount of money and macklemore spending hundreds of man hours" and the point is the same.
That leads to the other interesting part- if he's already wealthy, does he care if the track makes a lot of money or not?
But, yes, for most any other hit pop song you'd be right.
The relationship between Macklemore and the ADA is fundamentally different from the traditional relationship between an artist and a record label, where the record label loans the artist money up front and takes care of all the promotional efforts in return for a majority share of the revenue from album sales. The ADA takes payment upfront - there is no "investment" going on. This is why Macklemore was able to take the lion's share of the profits from his album sales.
In fact, Macklemore addresses this very point in one of his songs on The Heist: http://rapgenius.com/Macklemore-and-ryan-lewis-jimmy-iovine-...
> But yes, this track is maybe not the best example for the point I'm making.
No, it's actually the worst possible example you could have picked.
> Just replace "record companies spending millions of dollars" with "ADA spending some other very large amount of money and macklemore spending hundreds of man hours" and the point is the same.
No, it's not the same. It's just about as different as it gets when it comes to the music industry.
That's not a fact, it's flat out wrong.