Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future.
Share
Bootleg: Beyond The Setlist. Being There
Published 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 derive their value from the quality of the people who believe they're worth attending. if that belief wavers, something real is being said about where an industry is in its own story.
Personally, I'm excited to be there this year to see what it looks like. Last year was the first time the entire Bootleg team attended together, and a lot has changed in the twelve months since. We're going back with more experience, more clarity about what we're building, and a couple of things in motion that feel like the right expression of where we are right now.
On Thursday, March 12, we're partnering with Groover to bootleg their Groover Obsessions showcase, an official SXSW showcase featuring an exceptional slate of emerging artists. We're making these Bootlegs available for free so that anyone can relive the night or hear it for the first time if they weren't in the room. RSVP here.
And, on Saturday, March 14, we're hosting a small, invite-only BBQ in East Austin. No agenda. Just a carefully chosen group of people we respect, a backyard, and an evening to spend time together. I'll be sending these invites out separately, so check your inbox for more details.
SPIN Acquires Live For Live Music
For four decades, SPIN built its identity around recorded music, new releases, artist profiles, cultural criticism, the ongoing argument about what matters and why. That's their lane, and they've owned it with authority.
So when a brand like that makes a deliberate move into live music community infrastructure, acquiring Live For Live Music and the fifteen years of trust it earned, it's worth reading as something more than a business transaction.
Live For Live Music is exactly what it sounds like: a media and events company built entirely around the live experience, with deep roots in the jam, festival, and independent music scenes and a loyal audience that shows up because the people behind it genuinely do too.
SPIN looked at where attention is moving in this industry and concluded that live music isn't just surviving the streaming era but emerging from it with more cultural weight than it had going in.
The fans who care most have always known that a great night in a room full of people is irreplaceable. It's something else entirely when a forty-year-old institution decides to build its future around that same belief.
Last week in Los Angeles, we hosted the first dinner in what will become a series.
About twenty people from across the music industry including artists, managers, executives, and other builders.
Our table at Mother Wolf in Los Angeles.
What happened was a reminder of something I keep coming back to: there is no substitute for being in a room together. Breaking bread is one of the oldest human rituals for a reason.
Something shifts when people sit across from each other, share a meal, and actually talk. The music industry moves fast. The day-to-day is loud, and it rarely affords the space to step back and make sure we're moving with intention to keep music human as technology leaps forward.
These dinners are not networking events. They are a practice of gathering intentionally with people who care about where this industry is going. New York and Nashville are next and we’re keeping these tables are intentionally small. I'm excited to see where this goes.
The conversations worth having about the future of live music are not happening on stages or panels.
They're happening in rooms where people feel safe enough to say what they actually think.
That's what we're trying to build toward. Not just a platform, but a culture and a community of people who believe the live experience is worth protecting.
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...
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...
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...
