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Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy |
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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 force a room to mean something. You can only make space and trust it.
We spend a lot of time in the industry talking about obstacles on the horizon. AI and what it's doing to the value of a recording. The noise artists have to cut through just to be heard. The platforms standing between a musician and the people who love their work. Those problems are real, but you can hold a problem so tightly that you stop being able to see around it. These dinners are where we loosen that grip.
We stop trying to solve the thing and just put the right people in a room, and more often than not, the solutions are already sitting at the table. They surface on their own once nobody's forcing them.
This time I'm opening a couple of those seats to readers of this newsletter who have been following along the journey. If you'd like to be at the table in Nashville, reply and let me know why.
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The Senate Judiciary Committee just advanced the NO FAKES Act.
AI can now clone a person's voice and likeness convincingly enough to put words in their mouth they never said, or songs in their voice they never sang, and right now there's no clear federal rule against it.
The NO FAKES Act would create one. It cleared on a unanimous voice vote, and if it becomes law it would give every American, not only the famous ones, a federal right to authorize or block AI-generated copies of their voice and likeness. The penalties have teeth. Up to $750,000 per work for an online platform that hosts a replica and fails to take it down.
We're watching the law put a dollar figure on a line it has never had to draw before. The line between a real voice and a synthetic one. Between the person and the copy.
That line is the whole question I spend my days on. You can legislate against the fake, and you probably should. But the law is always a step behind the technology, and it always will be.
The more durable answer is the thing the fake can never have. A real performance happened once, in a real room, with real people in it. That isn't a quality you can synthesize. It's either true or it isn't.
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Summer's in full swing, and after a lot of quiet building, the calendar's really starting to fill up.
This weekend's the big one. Kevin Morby opens his European tour with us in Amsterdam, the first of many shows we'll be capturing together. We've talked about that partnership for months. Now it's just here, happening, on a stage in another country.
Around it, more keeps landing. We'll be announcing a major festival partnership very soon soon, and later this year we set sail on our first cruise with Sixth Man, with Drew Holcomb and Old Crow Medicine Show confirmed to Bootleg, and more names to come.
And that's just what I can point to. There are a dozen other conversations happening right now that feel like they could close any day.
Building something new like Bootleg has its ebbs and flows, but it feels good to close out Q2 with wind in our sails.
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There's a strange discipline in setting a table and then getting out of the way. I've been thinking about it a lot lately.
A law trying to draw a line around what's real. A tour finally leaving the ground. A dozen conversations I can't rush no matter how badly I want to.
None of it moves faster because I want it to. It moves when it's ready.
So I'm trying to hold it all a little more loosely. Set the table. Trust the room.
See you in Nashville, or somewhere down the line.
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