Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy All music was live music first. For nearly the entire history of the form there was no other kind. Before notation, before recording, before the song existed as an object you could own, music was something that happened in a room and then stopped happening. Every melody that survived antiquity survived because someone heard it performed and carried it to the next room. Performance wasn't one way to...
15 days ago • 2 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Every artist I know is releasing more than ever and reaching fewer people who actually hear it. Singles get scheduled around algorithm windows, catalogs sliced into fifteen-second clips built for a scroll, and full albums arrive to an audience already onto whatever the feed serves up next. More content was supposed to mean more connection. Instead it mostly means more noise, and noise is what you...
28 days ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Next week we're hosting a Live Dinner in Nashville Wednesday, July 8. These nights have become some of my favorite parts of this work, We set a table and then we get out of the way, and the night becomes whatever it's going to become. That last part is harder than it sounds. But the best things at these dinners are the ones nobody planned. You can't force a real conversation any more than you can...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Phoebe Bridgers announced a tour last week with one condition on every date: No phones. No recording. Everything locked in a pouch before the show starts. (GQ's account of her MSG show is worth the read.) This is not a new idea. Bob Dylan did it across Europe in 2024, and Jack White has been doing it for years. What is new is the scale. An arena tour, two continents, for an audience younger and...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Every few months something happens in the music industry that accelerates a certain kind of conversation. This week Suno announced a $400 million Series D round, valuing the company at $5.4 billion, more than double the $2.45 billion valuation it carried just six months ago. Alongside the capital, the company teased its first music model built in partnership with the industry rather than in spite...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy I saw a stat this week that caught my attention: 60% of all vinyl sold in America last year went to people who don't own a record player. Nobody buys a record they can't play because they misunderstood the product. They buy it because the thing they actually want isn't music, it's proof. Proof that they were there for something, that something mattered to them, that their relationship with an...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Growing up, I used to buy albums based on a review in a magazine. Music I'd never heard, from an artist I didn't know, on the strength of someone else's description. I'd hand over money, bring it home, and listen start to finish. The whole sequence required something from me. And because it required something, it gave something back. I was thinking about that when I was putting together the Music...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy There's something I keep coming back to when I think about where the music industry is headed. It's about what fans are willing to do. Passive listeners are abundant, but they're also easy to lose. The fan who shows up early, stays late, and talks about a show for years afterward is a different kind of person, and I don't think the industry has fully reckoned with what it would mean to actually...
3 months ago • 3 min read
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...
3 months ago • 3 min read