Nick is generally assumed to have been quite successful at Epic. I think he's pretty clueless; he did help break Scouting For Girls (not a huge global talent but not bad). He has made some profits from JLS (not hard after Simon Cowell found them and exposed them on TV).

I always thought Christian was the more able of the two when they were a team.

Nick signed the very talented Vacancy and ruined them.

We are in an era where music is making far less than it used to - mainly due to the explosion of the Internet and the changes in distributing music - as a result, getting music for free is so easy that buying it has shrunk. I myself bought very little music for 40 years (if I wanted it, labels sent it over for free) but these days I find I don't need to buy - I listen fewer times (I used to play a beloved track 2-300 times in the first week) and can easily quench my thirst with You Tube or Spotify.

I listen to far less radio since it became specialist. There is very little good music on TV since the demise of Top of the Pops and those far better TV music shows - Entertainment USA and No Limits.

But the real problem has been the executives - not coming up with new ways of exposing and building talent. The majors still dominate but in a far smaller pond. The only truly decent executive has been Richard Russell at XL.

When The Tip Sheet was dominating the scene, we criticised bad executives and praised the good ones (Simon Cowell was our Record Executive of the year many times before anybody outside the music industry had heard of him). Simon won that award not because he had great ears (he doesn't) but because he dared to challenge the uninspired attitude of music executives ("get radio") by breaking his product through TV.

Where is the music equivalent of Simon from 15 years ago (or Mark Zuckerberg today)?

Certainly NOT Nick Raphael.