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Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy |
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Every artist I know is releasing more than ever and reaching fewer people who actually hear it.
Singles get scheduled around algorithm windows, catalogs sliced into fifteen-second clips built for a scroll, and full albums arrive to an audience already onto whatever the feed serves up next.
More content was supposed to mean more connection. Instead it mostly means more noise, and noise is what you tune out, not what you remember.
A live show doesn't compete on those terms. It can't be skipped, scrubbed, sped up, or scrolled past.
There's no algorithm deciding what you hear next, no thumbnail competing for your attention before the first note plays. Everyone in the room gets the same signal at the same time, no feed, no filter, no version of it optimized for anyone but the people actually there.
Systems built around output eventually produce more than anyone can absorb, and at some point volume stops being an advantage and becomes the argument against itself.
The feeds get faster, the catalogs get deeper, and somewhere along the way the machine starts generating content that exists mainly to feed more of the machine, further from anyone actually listening.
When that happens, and it's already starting, whatever's left standing won't be the version that was easiest to make or fastest to distribute. It'll be the version that was hardest to fake.
Signal doesn't need volume. It needs a room, a night, and people willing to show up and be present for it.
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I've been following the Suno lawsuit closely, because how the industry answers this question is going to shape everything downstream of it.
This week, eight major organizations, including the RIAA, IFPI, and the Recording Academy, proposed a voluntary system to label songs as AI-generated or AI-assisted, distinguishing tracks made substantially by machines from ones where humans still perform the lead vocal and primary instruments.
The announcement lands while two of the majors remain in active litigation with Suno over how its models were trained, and Suno responded by saying transparency matters, pointing to new watermarking and audio fingerprinting tools it's building.
Deezer says AI tracks now make up something like 44 percent of everything new hitting its platform. Apple Music has said a third of what gets uploaded there is entirely machine made.
A labeling system assumes people will still go looking for the human made version once they know which pile to search.
That's a bet on discovery working the way it hasn't been working lately, which is part of why a room, a band, and a night that happened once are starting to look less like nostalgia and more like the last honest supply chain left standing.
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Last week I flew to Nashville for another Live Dinner and left more energized about this industry than I've felt in a while.
I ended up at a table with Adrian Michaels, Cameo Carlson, legendary manager Bob Doyle, Ted Cohen, and Bootleg's own Simon Aleman, which is another way of saying I spent most of the night listening and soaking up decades of wisdom.
Around the room sat Clay Hunnicutt, Bri Small, Tate Henshaw, Scott Welch, Nikki Sanz, Tom Truitt, and many more.
Some of these people I've known for a while. Others I met that night for the first time, and by dessert I couldn't have told you which was which. That's usually the sign the night worked.
We measure these dinners not by what deals get done, but by the quality of conversation, connection, and energy in the room.
By that measure the night was phenomenal.
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Somewhere underneath all of this is a simpler question than anyone's asking out loud: what do we actually want music to be.
Not what we can generate, distribute, or defend in court, but what we want to feel when we hear it.
That question doesn't have a policy answer. It only has the answer you get standing in a room with people who showed up for the same reason you did, listening to something that will only happen this one time.
That's the part worth building toward, regardless of how everything else gets settled.
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