that article seemed to be a bit shortsighted. i mean if they are going to say artists don't listen to much music themselves, i'd like to have something to back it up, or if they have poor taste who are the bands that the artists are listening to that are supposedly bad?

I think the idea was that musicians generally don't make for good label heads because they are too busy making their own music to really judge what is good in other musicians. Which makes sense in a weird way.

Of course, in Madonna's case you never really got the sense that she had anything to do with the day-to-day operations of her own label. I remember when Maverick first started out, the only artists on it were third-rate grunge and hip-hop acts which had little to do musically with Madonna.