Lucian Grainge was being brought back to life. It was his 20th day at UCLA’s intensive care unit, and the opiates that had left him unconscious were dissipating. Doctors prepared to remove the ventilator they’d put down his throat. He was going to breathe on his own again. “It’s like a plane landing,” Grainge remembers. “Seats back, tables up, drinks come away, and you’re coming in to land.” Doctors would later tell him it was more like a miracle.

Grainge does not know the names or faces of the staff who cared for him, because they were dressed in head-to-toe protective gear. But a friend had overnighted an iPod to the hospital, and someone by his bedside kept pressing play. Grainge, who’s the chief executive of the world’s biggest record label Universal Music, has always believed in music’s palliative qualities. Now he was experiencing them first hand. “It was life-giving,” he says, “and it was a joy.”

The same five songs were on a loop. There was Frank Sinatra and The Beatles, but something about the other tracks was bugging him. It wasn’t long before Grainge, still groggy from his near-death ordeal, put his finger on it. “There were some Sony records from the early ’90s. And I just thought, someone is torturing me by intentionally playing non-Universal music.”