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Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy |
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For most of my time around this business, growth has meant the rooms got bigger, the tours got longer, and the festival poster added another row of names in smaller type.
Lately I keep noticing serious people betting the other way.
Some of the most in-demand artists in the world are choosing rooms they could fill fifty times over. Festivals are capping attendance on purpose.
Even the largest platforms in music are putting money into a few hundred people standing close to a stage.
What they're betting on is intimacy, and the feeling that a night was made for the people in it.
That is a harder business than it sounds.
The whole value of a small room is that most people aren't in it, and nobody has worked out how to grow something whose appeal is that it stayed small.
I don't want to take anything away from a hundred thousand people singing the same chorus. That is a spiritual experience for a lot of us, and I'd never want to see it go.
But there's a point where it stops working.
Put two hundred thousand people in a field, or a million, and most of them are only in the vicinity of a show, which makes me think large was just the first thing we learned how to sell.
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There's something telling about a company that can reach nearly anyone with a phone deciding that what it needed next was a room.
Apple opened one on September 28 inside Battersea Power Station in London, with space for 600 people and Elton John on stage the first night.
Apple has spent two decades making music weightless, available anywhere and tied to nowhere. Its newest idea is a place you have to physically get to, on a night that only happens once.
What I find particularly striking is what's behind the stage, where there are two recording studios and a control room wired for sixteen cameras. The room was built to keep what happens inside it.
For most of history, a great night in a small room belonged to whoever was there, and everyone else got the story secondhand.
I like that someone with real resources looked at that and decided the night and the experience should outlast the room.
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FORM has been betting on small since 2014, and this weekend Bootleg will be there as a sponsor.
The festival brings 2,500 people to Arcosanti, the town architect Paolo Soleri began building in the Arizona desert in 1970 on the belief that people do better when they live closer together. I can't think of a more fitting place to test that idea with music.
Lorde, Turnstile, Geese and Disclosure are on the bill, and any of them could fill the place many times over. FORM keeps the cap anyway, which means turning down money every year to protect a feeling.
That takes a kind of discipline this business rarely rewards.
No two sets overlap, there is no VIP section, and the artists spend three days in the same crowd as everyone else. By Sunday, everyone there has seen the same shows from roughly the same distance, and I suspect that shared memory is what people are really paying for.
Everyone who comes through the gate will find a commemorative ticket from Bootleg in their bag, something to hold onto from a weekend only 2,500 people will have.
If you're going to be there, reach out and let's catch a set together.
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Take away the size of the crowd, the production and the exhaustive list of names on the poster, and you're left with what people came for in the first place, which is the feeling of being there.
That experience is the important part. It decides what people remember, what they tell their friends about, and what they'd pay to feel again.
The rest of this business exists to serve it, and the people betting on small seem to have remembered that.
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