Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy

We're doing something new this week that has me excited.

This week in LA, I'm hosting an invite-only dinner with managers, label executives, and other music industry visionaries.

I've been having a lot of conversations lately with managers, artists, label people, folks building new platforms, and the same thing keeps coming up.

Everyone senses that the ground is shifting, but nobody has the space to think clearly about what to do next. The day-to-day is loud. There's always another release, another deal, another fire to put out. The urgent crowds out the important.

What I keep noticing is that the people who care the most about music, the ones who got into this because they actually love it, are the ones feeling the most squeezed.

The economics are getting harder. The algorithms are getting louder. And the conversations that matter most keep getting pushed to the margins.

The question is not whether new technology will change music. It already has. The question is who decides how to keep music human.

That question has been sitting with me for a while. Not as an abstract concern, but as something I feel a personal responsibility to do something about.

I didn't start Bootleg just to build a product. I started it because I believe live music is one of the most human things we have, and I want to be in rooms with people who feel the same way.

The goal of the dinner is simple: step out of the daily noise of business-as-usual and connect with like-minded people to start collectively building the future we want to see. If everything feels right, we'll do it again in NYC and Nashville this spring.

I don't know exactly what comes out of a dinner like this. But I know that the right people in the right room, talking honestly about what matters is where things start to change.

Jimmy Iovine Thinks Streaming is Almost Obsolete

On a recent episode of David Senra's Founders podcast, Jimmy Iovine said streaming platforms are "minutes away from being obsolete."

Coming from anyone else, that might sound like provocation.

But Iovine built Interscope, created Beats, sold it to Apple for $3 billion, and helped launch Apple Music. He's not speculating from the outside. And his core observation is hard to argue with: streaming platforms have become interchangeable utilities.

They don't help artists connect with the people who care about their work. They sit between the artist and the fan and extract value from both sides.

I've been saying a version of this for a while, just from a different angle. The problem isn't only economic, it's experiential. Streaming made music infinitely accessible and almost entirely disposable in the same move.

You can listen to anything, but you don't hold any of it. Nothing belongs to you. Nothing belongs to the artist, either.

This is the gap Bootleg was built to fill. Not by competing with streaming, but by caring about something streaming was never designed to protect.

The live moment. The memory of being in the room. The connection between an artist and the people who actually showed up. We're building in the territory streaming left behind, and it's encouraging to hear people like Iovine naming what's missing.

Shout out to Joel Gouveia who wrote more about this last week on his Substack.

Venue Partnerships: Red Rocks, Cain's Ballroom, and What's Next

Up to this point, most of our partnerships have been direct, working with artists and festivals to capture and preserve live shows. That's still the foundation. But we're adding a new strategy alongside it.

Bootleg now has a partnership with Red Rocks Amphitheatre, one of the most iconic venues in the world, giving us the ability to record any show there, with artist approval. We've done the same with Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa, a room with nearly a century of history running through its walls.

The artist still has to say yes. But having the venue's stamp of approval changes the conversation. It signals that the space itself recognizes the value of preserving what happens there.

Shows at places like these just feel different. The room carries weight. Fans who were there know it, and they're far more likely to want to hold onto the night through a Bootleg recording. The venue isn't just a location, it's part of the memory.

We'll be pursuing additional partnerships like these throughout the year, with the goal of building a network of historic and legendary rooms around the world that believe in what we're doing.

Something is shifting. You can hear it in the conversations, in the questions people are starting to ask out loud, in the rooms that are forming around a different set of priorities.

For a long time, the music industry optimized for scale and speed. And somewhere along the way presence, memory, and connection got treated as secondary.

I don't think they're secondary. I think they're the whole point. And I think more people are starting to feel that way than anyone realizes.

We're going to keep building for them.

With gratitude,

Rod Yancy​
Founder & CEO, Bootleg.live

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​www.bootleg.live​

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