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...
22 days 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...
about 1 month 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...
about 1 month 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...
about 2 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...
about 2 months 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...
2 months 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...
2 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 months ago • 2 min read