Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Imagine an artist plays 40 shows across a tour. Every night is different setlists, different energy, different crowd. Some nights are legendary, others are solid, a few are transcendent. Right now, those performances live in memory, and in some cases, on Bootleg. But what if multiple shows from the same tour charted simultaneously? Not as a single "live album" compiled from the best moments across...
13 days ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Bob Weir on Jan. 31, 2025 in Los Angeles. This week, the music world lost a giant who helped shape not just the sound of live music, but the culture around it. As a founding member of the Grateful Dead, Bob Weir helped create a way of thinking about live music that fundamentally changed the relationship between artists, fans, and memory. Long before bootlegging was debated or commercialized, the...
24 days ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy We are just over a week into the new year, and many of the challenges facing the music industry feel more visible than ever. I don't know about you, but I often find myself having the same conversations with people in very different roles, all noticing the same patterns and frustrations, yet rarely doing anything differently. Some people would call that the definition of insanity. In an effort to...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy This week marks exactly one year since we sold our first Bootlegs, partnering with Kaitlin Butts on her hometown show in Tulsa last December. What a difference a year makes. This year has taken me and our company to places I never imagined. From great American music cities like Tulsa, Nashville, Upstate NY, Atlanta and Athens, GA, to global hubs like New York, Los Angeles, London, Dublin and Dubai....
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Usually around this time of year, things slow down in a big way. The weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s can quickly turn into a blur of holiday parties, tying up loose ends, or getting a head start on planning for the year ahead. This year feels different, especially for Bootleg. If anything, we are accelerating. Ever since I returned from my retreat in Japan, doors have opened and new...
2 months ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy 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...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO, Rod Yancy Today I’m proud to unveil the new Bootleg brand identity, a design system that pays homage to the print, design, and cultural eras that once gave music its visual soul, while building something made for the future. A lot has changed about music culture since the rise of streaming. We now have millions of songs in our pockets, hundreds of festivals each year, and unprecedented visibility into the...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO Rod Yancy 🎤 Sound Check Something is happening in the music world right now: artists and fans are rediscovering the magic of the live album. In the past year alone, we’ve seen a surge of new releases that celebrate the raw, human energy of performance. Radiohead unearthed a live recording from their 2003 Hail to the Thief tour, Elton John released Live From the Rainbow Theatre this spring, the Jonas Brothers...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Notes on live music, connection, and the emerging future, by Bootleg founder and CEO Rod Yancy 🎤 Sound Check I spent last week in New York for the Mondo NYC conference, where I joined Ted Cohen, Killian Gesicki, Michael Delle Donne, and Felicia Palmer for a panel on Superserving the Superfan. I genuinely loved connecting and sharing the stage with these folks, and we had an inspiring conversation about how the next chapter of the music business will be built through the depth of connection...
4 months ago • 3 min read