Blog articles
Ideas, research notes, and essays from our work on local scenes, distribution, and independent music infrastructure.
Corrido Tumbado Proved Two Things. The Industry Only Noticed One.
Peso Pluma's 2024 Éxodo Tour grossed $71 million across 39 shows. One year earlier, the same artist playing the same number of dates grossed $48.8 million. A 45% revenue increase, same-sized tour, ...
How Two Rappers Made $1M in 48 Hours Giving Their Music Away Free
Run The Jewels generated over one million dollars in pre-sales within two days for an album they'd eventually release for free. Again.
The 38-Year Lag: Why We Won't Know If AI Sparked a Cultural Renaissance Until 2060
Here's something that stopped me cold while digging through 600 years of technological disruption: when the Industrial Revolution began around 1760, nobody called what came next a "cultural renaiss...
The Algorithm Learned to Love Your Zip Code (And Killed the Monoculture)
Something strange happened between 2020 and 2023 that nobody in the music industry wanted to talk about: mid-sized venues—the 200-capacity clubs everyone declared extinct—saw 34% attendance growth....
The Artist's Dilemma: Why Giving Everything Away Made One Rapper Richer Than His Signed Peers
**Bottom Line Up Front:** A 24-year-old who never sold a single album forced the Grammys to rewrite their rules, generated $33 million annually, and proved that authentic community investment beats...
The Echo Chamber of Human Progress
In 2019, researchers at Harvard's Collective Intelligence Lab ran an experiment that should have failed.
The Metrics That Music Forgot
Here's something the industry doesn't want to admit: 78% of artists report feeling increased pressure from direct fan engagement on social media. Not from their labels. Not from critics. From the v...
The Streaming Platforms Were Supposed to Kill Local Music Scenes.
Here's what I didn't expect when I started digging into eight years of data on local music scenes: the cities with the highest rates of streaming platform adoption also saw the most resilient local...
They'll Call You Crazy Until They Call It a Movement
The establishment called them beatniks. It was meant as an insult, a dismissive term coined in 1958 by a San Francisco Chronicle columnist to mock the Beat Generation. These were serious writers—Al...