Bootleg: Beyond the Setlist
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future.
Bootleg: Beyond The Setlist. Going With Flow
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO Rod Yancy 🎤 Sound Check A few weeks ago I shared my thoughts on the pros and cons of raising capital versus bootstrapping Bootleg. At the time, I was on the fence. The act of putting that uncertainty out into the world brought the clarity I was looking for. Investors have been reaching out and major funds are doing diligence. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in life and business is knowing when...
Bootleg: Beyond The Setlist. The Music is the Merch
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO Rod Yancy 🎤 Sound Check Working in the music industry it’s not hard to look around and see where it is broken. Artists struggling to make a living from streaming, fans paying inflated ticket prices to middlemen, and whole systems designed to profit off the music without truly supporting the people who create it. One of the clearest signs is that artists today seem to be selling everything but music. It wasn’t...
Bootleg: Beyond The Setlist. Connection Is a Two-Way Street
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO Rod Yancy 🎤 Sound Check Bootleg went international last week, as we kicked off a European tour with rising star Evan Honer. His music carries a raw, plainspoken honesty that cuts through the noise. Some songs it’s the full band jamming, others it’s just Evan and his guitar holding a room in silence. Most importantly, his fans see themselves reflected back in him, and that genuine connection is a pure example...
Bootleg: Beyond The Setlist. The Collector Mentality
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO Rod Yancy 🎤 Sound Check For as long as there’s been music, there has been the impulse to keep a piece of it. Ticket stubs, magazines, setlists folded into pockets, wristbands that stayed on for weeks after the festival. Even the homemade mix CD or the folder of mp3s you swore you’d never delete. We didn’t just consume music, we collected it. We built personal museums of moments. Bootlegging itself began this...
Bootleg: Beyond The Setlist. To Raise or Not to Raise
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO Rod Yancy 🎤 Sound Check Entrepreneurship is a game of problem-solving. Some problems keep you up at night, feeling heavy and at times insurmountable. Others you’re grateful to have because they signal growth, momentum, and new possibilities for the company. Right now, I’m focused on one of the good ones: should I raise outside capital for Bootleg, or keep bootstrapping it myself? Historically, I’ve built and...
Bootleg: Beyond The Setlist. When Artists Think Like Founders
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO Rod Yancy 🎤 Sound Check The best entrepreneurs I know aren’t obsessed with building companies. They’re obsessed with solving problems. That’s what first drew me to entrepreneurship. It was never about the title or the hustle culture. It was the drive to bet on myself to build something that adds value to the world, and the challenge of looking at a broken system and thinking: there has to be a better way....
Bootleg: Beyond The Setlist. The Change We Want to Hear
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO Rod Yancy 🎤 Sound Check The music industry would not exist without artists. Literally. They generate the product, and everything else is built around that. But over time, the ecosystem has evolved in ways that often extract value from what artists create, sometimes removing them from the process entirely. This isn’t the result of fate or technology. Industries evolve based on the choices people make. What we...
Bootleg: Beyond The Setlist. Certified Human
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO Rod Yancy 🎤 Sound Check We knew it was coming. We knew it was here. But over the past few weeks, it’s started to feel like AI isn’t just on the horizon. It’s already reshaping the music industry in real time. Fake bands are racking up real streams. An estimated 10–20 thousand tracks uploaded to DSPs daily are now fully AI-generated. And platforms are scrambling to respond, with some introducing “AI warning...
Bootleg: Beyond The Setlist. Remembering Why
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO Rod Yancy 🎤 Sound Check At Bootleg, and in entrepreneurship more broadly, we spend a lot of time talking about the how. How we scale with intention. How we deliver value to fans. How we support artists. But every once in a while, we get to slow down and reconnect with the why. Why we build. Why we gather. Why we choose to live this life in pursuit of something meaningful. Recently, I had the joy of hosting my...
Bootleg: Beyond The Setlist. Choosing Gratitude
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO Rod Yancy 🎤 Sound Check Holidays always offer a moment to pause. It’s a time to reflect, to breathe, and to reconnect with what matters and be grateful for everything, even in all its imperfection. We all know the world can feel overwhelming. There’s no shortage of chaos, injustice, and disconnection. But moments like this remind me to return to gratitude. To choose, intentionally, where I place my energy and...
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future.