Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy South by Southwest has always been a strange kind of mirror for the music industry, a moment when everyone shows up in the same city at the same time and you get to see, all at once, what people are building and what they're worried about. This year the format is condensed, the convention center is gone, and there's genuine uncertainty about whether it will still 'feel like SXSW'. Conferences...
16 days ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy We're doing something new this week that has me excited. This week in LA, I'm hosting an invite-only dinner with managers, label executives, and other music industry visionaries. I've been having a lot of conversations lately with managers, artists, label people, folks building new platforms, and the same thing keeps coming up. Everyone senses that the ground is shifting, but nobody has the space...
23 days ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy For most of modern music history, live shows existed to sell records. The recording was the product, and the performance was marketing. That relationship has been inverting for a while now, but the forces accelerating it are worth paying attention to. The tools for making music are becoming as important as the platforms for distributing it. Production software used to be a place to sketch ideas...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Every night on tour, artists fill rooms. Fans buy tickets, show up, experience the music. Then the lights come up and the relationship scatters into Instagram feeds, streaming platforms, and algorithmic reach that artists don't control. The live experience generates the deepest fan connection in music. But once the encore ends, most artists have no direct line to the people who were there. The...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy The music industry has become very good at selling access. For $10 a month, you can stream virtually every song ever recorded. For $50, you can buy a t-shirt. For $150, you can get into the show. The infrastructure is built around transactions: you pay, you receive, the exchange is complete. But that's not actually what people want. What they want is the memory. The feeling of hearing that song for...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Like many systems, the music industry runs on what's often called common wisdom: the accepted way things are done, the rules no one questions once they've been repeated long enough. Common wisdom is useful until it isn't. At some point, it begins to reward conformity over judgment and familiarity over curiosity. For decades, the industry operated on the assumption that recorded music was the...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Imagine an artist plays 40 shows across a tour. Every night is different setlists, different energy, different crowd. Some nights are legendary, others are solid, a few are transcendent. Right now, those performances live in memory, and in some cases, on Bootleg. But what if multiple shows from the same tour charted simultaneously? Not as a single "live album" compiled from the best moments across...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Bob Weir on Jan. 31, 2025 in Los Angeles. This week, the music world lost a giant who helped shape not just the sound of live music, but the culture around it. As a founding member of the Grateful Dead, Bob Weir helped create a way of thinking about live music that fundamentally changed the relationship between artists, fans, and memory. Long before bootlegging was debated or commercialized, the...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy We are just over a week into the new year, and many of the challenges facing the music industry feel more visible than ever. I don't know about you, but I often find myself having the same conversations with people in very different roles, all noticing the same patterns and frustrations, yet rarely doing anything differently. Some people would call that the definition of insanity. In an effort to...
3 months ago • 2 min read