Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Every stage has a story. Very few of them get kept. The ones that do get kept tend to belong to institutions that somewhere along the way arrived at the same understanding: the archive is the asset. We've been in conversations with one of those institutions recently, and what struck me most wasn't the scale of what they've built. It's the seriousness with which they think about what they've already...
12 days ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy The first recognized commercial bootleg was a Bob Dylan record in the summer of 1969. Two guys in Los Angeles pressed unreleased Dylan recordings onto vinyl without his permission, without a label, without anyone’s blessing. They called it Great White Wonder. It sold tens of thousands of copies. What followed was an underground economy built around a single insight: fans wanted to own the moments...
21 days ago • 2 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Justin Bieber headlined Coachella on Saturday night for the first time as a solo artist: stripped back set, minimal production and a laptop from which he pulled up old YouTube videos of himself and sang along. For his core fans, it was emotional and earned. For critics, it was a missed opportunity on one of the biggest stages in music. Most people had an opinion. Whichever side you were on, people...
28 days ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy There is a kind of music origin story that fans talk about in a very particular way. The National playing a bar in Cincinnati to forty people in 2003. Arctic Monkeys on their first US run before anyone outside Sheffield had caught up. Phoebe Bridgers at a small room in Los Angeles before Funeral made that kind of discovery feel impossible. The details change, but the feeling doesn't. The music...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Anyone who has been to a great festival knows the feeling that sets in a few days after. The weekend that felt infinite while you were inside it starts to compress. Within a week it can feel like something that happened to a different version of you. Vivid and distant at the same time, like a long strange dream. That compression is not a failure of memory, it is almost a feature of what festivals...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy There is a theory gaining traction in certain corners of technology and finance that goes something like this: the more the digital world expands, the more valuable the physical world becomes. When everything can be replicated, the thing that cannot be replicated is the one worth paying attention to. Musicians have understood this longer than anyone. A show happens once, in one room, for the people...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
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...
2 months 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...
2 months 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...
3 months ago • 3 min read