Music is the heart and soul of this industry, but it runs on relationships.
Building a company like Bootleg requires more than a great product, the real building happens through thousands of individual interactions that become relationships, that become partnerships.
What’s amazed me most is how serendipitous it all feels. One introduction leads to another, a single conversation opens ten new doors, and suddenly you’re connected to someone who changes the trajectory of what’s possible.
But serendipity doesn’t happen by sitting still. As Henry Rollins reminded me in his talk in New York a few weeks ago, you have to keep moving. And I’ve definitely been on the move.
Over the past year, I’ve been on the road nearly every week, watching the network effect unfold in real time, and every opportunity we’ve created has come through the relationships we’ve been able to build.
From our ongoing partnership with the Music Managers Forum, to collaborations with Woodsist Festival in upstate New York, C3 Management, Triple 8 and too many managers to name, and now pilots with Warner, UMG, and The Orchard, I can see how Bootleg is steadily becoming part of the fabric of the music ecosystem.
On the horizon are more international partnerships, as we bring Bootleg to new corners of the world in the home stretch of the year.
The more we build together, the clearer it becomes that relationships are the infrastructure that form the bridge between vision and reality. The more energy I put into forming new relationships, the more I’m amazed by how the right people seem to show up at the right time, again and again.
In a year that has felt like a lot of planting seeds, we’re beginning to see the fruit in the form of real traction, real partnerships, and growing optimism for what’s ahead.
The vision is coming to life, one relationship at a time.
