Empire  is nearing the end of its much-ballyhooed first season, and its numbers are certainly makingFox look wise for pouring vast sums of cash into marketing and promotion.

The show is the first primetime broadcast in 23 years to experience audience growth during each of its five initial episodes; according to Fox Research, last week’s show was watched by 13.8 million people, up nearly 4 million from the debut. And Empire is breaking other kinds of barriers as well.

“I think you’re seeing shows with people of color can make money,” said Taraji P. Henson, who stars in the show as Cookie. “When you can make money, people are interested.”

The show is an excellent moneymaker in real life, but the main character, Lucious Lyon (played by Terrence Howard) might be a different story. Though he’s lauded in Empire‘s fictional universe for his business smarts–based partially on Jay Z, his character also contains notes of other shrewd music moguls like Diddy–his decisions throughout the first season have been puzzling in some cases, and downright destructive in others.

In no particular order, here are a handful of reasons why Lyon would actually make a terrible music executive in real life (timeshifters, beware of spoilers):

Lucious ignores the most important music business development of the past decade: streaming.

The future–and the present–of music consumption is streaming. Nielsen SoundScan revealed that digital album sales dropped 9.4% over the past year; according to Next Big Sound’s year-end report, though, streaming has jumped 95% from a year ago and 363% from 2012.

“The music industry has gone down a path it probably won’t come back from,” the report stated. “As harsh as it may seem, if you’re not already on board, you’re probably irrelevant.”

That quote applies to Lyon, who barrels headlong into signing new artists and pushing them to release new music without a clue of how to monetize their new releases. I’ve watched every episode of Empire, and I may be wrong, but I haven’t heard him mention the word “streaming” once. That’s a massive problem–look where it got the label heads of yesteryear.

He inexplicably refuses to empower the only staff member who actually has a streaming plan.

What makes Lyon’s streaming myopia even more unforgivable is the fact that he’s got an obvious solution staring him right in his angrily contorted face: his Wharton-educated son, Andre, the only Empire Entertainment employee who has even mentioned the word “streaming.”

Andre actually has a pretty interesting plan, one that he outlines to a frustrated rock star who’s thinking of leaving the label. He says Empire will start its own streaming service and share royalties with artists.

The idea of a label and a streaming service under the same roof is an intriguing one–imagine Spotify signing artists and releasing music without a middleman–but without a near-universal catalogue, it would be tough to attract an audience. Still, Lucious’s refusal to acknowledge and empower Andre is puzzling at best, and business-destroying at the worst.