Most artist managers have the wrong job description, and that’s why they fail.

There are two ways to lose this job;

1. Not know what your job is. Or;

2. Disagree with your artist about what it is.

Why It Happens

Our industry has never written a job description for the manager.

So the artist writes one.

And artists, like all of us, confuse what they want with what they need.

They want a friend. A counsellor. A publicist. A travel agent. A contact list with all the heavy hitters in the industry.

What they need is a CEO.

The friend, the deep contact list, the red carpets make them feel better.

The CEO makes them rich.

If you don't define the job, your artist will.

And the job your artist writes is the one that ends with you getting fired. Not because you did it badly. Because you did it beautifully.

Doing the wrong job well is the most expensive mistake in artist management.

You Only Have 4 Jobs As An Artist Manager

A manager’s real job has four parts. That’s it. Everything else is noise and distraction.

1. Increase Profile

Find the channel or platform driving the most audience growth. Build the growth plan around it. Make it compound every quarter.

2. Increase Revenue

Revenue follows profile. Capture what comes inbound. Negotiate harder on the money someone else brings. Hunt or generate revenue that hasn’t arrived yet.

3. Increase Equity Value

Most managers stop thinking at revenue.

The best ones build real businesses for their artists once their profile is big enough.

Brands outside the core art. Product companies, fashion lines, TV formats, investments in startups, or for music managers, maximising ownership or value of their masters / publishing.

4. Ensure Operational Excellence

The tour runs smoothly. The label actually markets the record. The content machine is humming. The team around the artist pulls one direction.

Four jobs.

Everything else costs you your career.

The Six Traps

Here’s the rest of what artists want their managers to be, and if you don’t push back and own your job description, you’ll eventually be fired.

You think you’re going above and beyond, in reality, you’re setting yourself up to fail.

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They’ve saved 80 hours a week across my management firm, Be Like Children alone.

Brand negotiations. Contracts. Project Management. Finance. Accounting. Pipeline reviews. Deliverable chasing. Reconciliation.

All of it, executing without me (or anyone).

That’s the work of roughly two full staff, gone from my payroll before I ever hired them.

I don’t even use performance marketers to run my Google or Meta ads anymore. My AI agent does it.

And the results are exactly the same as when I was paying an agency a retainer.

OpenClaw isn’t hard. But it is fiddly.

You build it in a terminal. You write the logic. Set up workflows. You get it wrong, then you get it right, then you get it wrong again when the API changes.

Most managers I know would quit by hour three.

Today, that barrier disappeared.

Perplexity released the Personal Computer for Mac.

It’s like OpenClaw, but you don’t have to programme anything.

You just download an app.

And every artist manager (or business owner) reading this should have one running ASAP.

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What Perplexity Personal Computer actually is

You install it on a dedicated Mac (a Mac mini is what Perplexity recommends, since it needs to run 24/7), and from that moment it can see your local files, your native apps, your browser, and your cloud connectors.

You tell it what to do. It does it.

Anything you can do with a keyboard and mouse, Perplexity Computer can do.

That means it has same capabilities as a human being sitting at a desk 24/7.

This is how you should think about it.

Whatever you would ask a junior staff member sitting at an office desk to do, you can now ask a Perplexity computer.

But this junior staff member has a PhD in everything.

What I built

While I was going deep on OpenClaw, I also built something of my own.

It’s called artist.build.

20 years in artist management, I’ve tried every tool that exists. Salesforce. HubSpot. Pipedrive. Monday. Notion. Todoist.

None of them understand how management actually works.

So I built what we needed.

artist.build is a purpose-built management platform that handles contract review (AI reads the Word doc, flags every problem clause, generates tracked changes on the actual word doc like a lawyer would - under your direction), pipeline, commission calculations across split rates and tiered structures and multiple currencies, Xero sync, deliverables tracking, team management, etc.

Across my own firm, artist.build has alleviated roughly 90% of the administrative load of running the company.

I’m opening up to a handful of beta testers soon.

If you manage creators and want early access, join the waitlist at artist.build.

So

Managers have spent a decade asking how to scale a business that’s structurally designed not to scale.

The answer was never more staff. Staff dilute margin and create their own management overhead.

The answer was always going to be a layer of software and intelligence that could do the repetitive thinking for you.

That layer is now installable on a Mac mini for the cost of a lunch per day.

That number came from Noam Dworman, the New York comedy club’s owner, when he sat with me a few episodes ago.

Owner of the Comedy Cellar, Noam Dworman on The Black Hoody podcast

I kept thinking about it when I sat down with Estee Adoram, the woman who has booked that club since the mid-1980s.

She gets 300 to 400 emails a week from comics sending their availabilities. All of them want stage time in a 115-seat basement underneath a cafe on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village.

Most of them will not get it.

Estee did not set out to become the most powerful person in New York comedy. She started as a hostess.

The Cellar now runs 12 shows a night and is building a new venue across the road from the Blue Note jazz club.

I saw the space the night before our interview when Noam walked us through it. It might be the best comedy room in the world when it opens.

How Auditions Work

I had read profiles of Estee that described her sitting in a dark corner booth taking notes. That is wrong. She sits at the front door. There is no notepad.

“I am in your face,” she said. “If you cannot handle it, you’re in the wrong business.”

When a new comic auditions, they get five minutes. Estee watches for confidence, how the comic handles themselves on stage, and what happens when a joke does not land.

That last one matters most.

She told me about a gesture she first saw years ago. A comic whose joke bombed put his hand over his head, the universal sign for “it went over your heads.”

She asked what it meant and got the explanation: “Oh, my joke goes over your head. I’m so much smarter than you.”

“How dare you do that in the audience,” she said. “You have a lawyer, you have a doctor, you have a construction worker, you have a student. You really think that the whole 200 people in the room are lesser than you are intelligence-wise? To me, this is a huge turnoff.”

She does not formally “pass” comics the way other clubs do.

She gets an impression from the five minutes and if she thinks there is something there, she gives them a few regular spots and follows up.

If they are great, they are welcome. If not, she pulls back.

I asked what she looks for in the material during those five minutes.

Her answer was blunt: if you come up with bathroom jokes, no. “There’s got to be something there.” You can be risque. You cannot be vulgar. She made the distinction clearly. “I don’t want to represent the club that way.”

Then comes the lineup construction. She books show by show. Friday 6pm, everything else goes away, and she concentrates on that one show. She wants balance in every lineup: ethnic, gender, political variety.

The bigger comics get slotted first, then she builds around them.

Estee Adoram, booker of the Comedy Cellar

All of it is based on merit. “I booked a show on merit, not because I like you or we had dinner yesterday,” she said. “The main core, it’s got to be merit.”

The Recommendation Economy

The way a comic gets an audition at the Cellar is through a recommendation from a comic who already works there.

With YouTube, she can now check a comic’s work in one click, which is far easier than the physical tapes she used to have to watch.

But she still needs someone she trusts to vouch.

The problem is that not all recommendations are honest.

Some comics recommend their friends as a favour rather than because the friend is ready. Estee hates this.

“Why would you do this to somebody?” she said about bad recommendations. “You are opening the guy for hurt. Who knows? Their confidence is shaken. Everything is shaken. What did you accomplish?”

She told me about a comic who cried after a failed audition. Put his head down at the table and physically cried. When comics shake her hand before an audition, their palms are wet and their hands tremble.

She understands the stakes. She tries to be compassionate.

But she will not change her opinion based on a favour.

Real Comics vs Career Comics

Near the end of our conversation, Estee drew a distinction I thought was worth printing in full.

There are comics who use comedy as a stepping stone to get a show or a bigger career. Then there are comics who, no matter how big their career gets, are still comics. Those are the ones everyone loves.

“Dave Chappelle is still a comic,” she said. “Ray Romano is still a comic. He puts in like he did before he had these shows and movies and everything. Chris Rock is still a comic.”

Dave Chappelle at the Comedy Cellar

Then there are people who make shows and movies and do a standup set once in a blue moon. “They’re not real standups like we understand standup. There is a distinction. And you can tell.”

Her advice for comics who have not made it to the Cellar yet: keep writing. Have passion. If you do not have passion for comedy, it is not for you.

John Mayer, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock and Aziz Ansari at the Comedy Cellar

Estee Adoram has been sitting at the front door of the Comedy Cellar for more than 40 years, watching comics walk down those stairs and try to make 115 strangers laugh.

She told me she does not see herself the way the comics see her. She does not feel the power they say she has.

She just wants to produce the best show she can.

I believe her. But the comics are not wrong either. She is the door. And the door decides everything.

Maybe. But the smarter question is what happens after they do.

Every great executive in Hollywood started by answering phones, reading scripts and doing tedious admin work. That is training.

The assistant desk is where you learn how deals get made, how artists think, how power moves through a building. No AI tool teaches you that. You absorb it by being in the room.

The companies cutting junior staff right now are solving a cost problem today and building a leadership crisis for tomorrow. In 20 years, who runs these businesses?

A generation of executives who learned to negotiate through AI prompts instead of the flesh on flesh contact that builds instinct, sharpens taste and teaches you the heartbeat of a deal.

The entertainment industry runs on relationships. Five years on the assistants desk is where you learn who the players are, how they operate, who you can trust and who you cannot. That knowledge does not come from a prompt. It comes from being in the room, on the phone and at the table for years before anyone gives you a seat of your own.

If Hollywood cuts all these assistants jobs, the executives of the future will be terrible.

Warner Bailey built a 150k+ person community by making fun of the most powerful people in Hollywood while sitting at a desk ten metres away from them.

In this episode of The Black Hoody podcast, I sit down with the founder of Assistants vs Agents to talk about the broken economics of entry level entertainment jobs, how a meme page became a media company now repped by UTA, and whether AI is about to wipe out the very audience Warner built his business for.

We go deep on the real numbers behind the business model paradox of building a company for people who can’t afford to pay you and what UTA representation actually unlocks.

About Warner Bailey

Warner is the founder of Assistants vs Agents (AvA), a meme page turned media company that has partnered with Netflix, Disney, Paramount, Amazon MGM Studios, Apple TV+ and more. He was previously a talent agent assistant at WME and worked in touring at Live Nation.

Follow Assistants vs Agents: www.instagram.com/assistantsvsagents

I am modelling a future that neither side of the AI debate in our industry is properly considering. If you think AI is nonsense that will never touch real artists, this piece is for you. If you think the music industry is already dead and AI is the final nail, this piece is also for you.

Both positions are wrong, and the real danger lives in the space between them.

I wrote this as a speculative memo from the future, inspired by a piece from Citrini Research that imagined the broader economic fallout of AI.

This is my version for the music industry.

I wrote it because neither the dismissers nor the doomers are modelling the second-order effects. The crisis I describe below does not require AI to replace Beyonce. It does not require the death of all music. It requires something far more mundane: a slow, structural erosion of the economics that support the 99% of professionals who are not Beyonce.

This is The Black Hoody Industry Memo from March 2029.

Industry Memo

Both Sides Got It Wrong

The Black Hoody

March 21, 2026 March 30th, 2029

The IFPI released its Global Music Report this morning. Global recorded music revenues fell 11.4% year on year. It is the first annual decline since 2014 and the largest single year contraction since the depths of the piracy era.

Three years ago, the global recorded music industry was worth $31.7 billion and growing at 6.4% annually. Streaming subscribers had hit 837 million. The IFPI’s 2026 report celebrated an “eleventh year of consecutive growth.” Every region was up.

Three years. That is all it took.

There were two dominant views in 2026. The first, popular among established artists, successful managers, and veteran label executives, went something like this: “AI music is a gimmick. It has no soul. Real fans want real artists. This will blow over like every other tech fad.” The second, popular among indie artists, songwriters, and industry pessimists: “AI will replace all of us. The industry is finished. We are all going to be out of work.”

Camp 1 turned out to be right about the art. AI never replaced the great artists. It never wrote a song that moved a stadium to tears. It never built a fanbase through years of touring small rooms. The emotional connection between a human artist and a human audience remained irreplaceable in 2029, and it will remain irreplaceable for as long as music exists.

Camp 2 turned out to be right about the economics. The financial structures that supported the music industry were far more fragile than Camp 1 believed. The money that paid for artist development, that sustained managers, that funded festivals, that made sync licensing viable: that money was protected by the scarcity of the supply. And AI ended that scarcity.

The tragedy is that Camp 1’s confidence in the art blinded them to the economics. And Camp 2’s panic about the economics blinded them to the fact that the crisis was survivable, if the industry had acted in time.

Nobody acted in time.

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The Scarcity That Held Everything Together

To understand what broke, you need to understand what was holding the music economy together in the first place.

It was not the quality of the music. There has always been far more quality music than any person could listen to. The music economy was held together by the cost of production. Recording a professional-sounding track required a studio, an engineer, a producer, musicians, mixing, mastering. It cost money and it took time. This acted as a natural filter. The economics of the industry were built on the assumption that producing music at a professional standard would always require meaningful human effort and capital.

AI removed that assumption.

In early 2026, the major labels were striking licensing deals with AI companies. Warner settled its lawsuit with Suno. Universal settled with Udio. Spotify announced plans for AI remix tools. Suno had hit 2 million paid subscribers and $300 million in annual recurring revenue by February 2026. Nearly 100 million people had used the platform.

The labels saw this and calculated their cut. They licensed their catalogues, collected upfront fees, and told shareholders that AI was a new revenue stream. What they failed to calculate was the cost of what that licensing unleashed.

How It Started

In late 2026, Suno shipped its V6 model. The audio quality crossed a threshold that the industry had been dreading but had convinced itself was years away.

A competent prompt writer could now generate a track in under 60 seconds that was, for the purposes of background listening, indistinguishable from a track made by a human in a studio. A workout playlist. A study session. Something to fall asleep to. The output lacked emotional depth. It had no artistic ambition. Camp 1 was right: this was not art.

But Camp 1 had made a fatal miscalculation. They assumed that because AI music was not art, it would not matter. They forgot that the vast majority of streams on Spotify are not art either. They are functional. Background noise for cooking, commuting, working, sleeping. The 50 million tracks on Spotify that nobody would notice if they were quietly replaced with something else.

Those tracks represented an enormous share of total streams. And the economics were straightforward: why would Spotify pay royalties on a playlist track when it could generate a functionally equivalent one for a fraction of a cent?

SPOTIFY Q1 2027: LAUNCHES “AMBIENT” AND “FOCUS” PLAYLISTS FEATURING AI-GENERATED MUSIC; REPORTS 30% REDUCTION IN PER-STREAM ROYALTY COSTS FOR FUNCTIONAL MUSIC CATEGORIES | Music Business Worldwide, April 2027

Nobody was surprised when it happened. Spotify had been building towards this for years. Liz Pelly’s reporting had already documented how the platform relied on cheap background music to pad playlists and reduce its royalty obligations. AI made that strategy infinitely scalable.

Camp 2 saw this headline and said “told you so.” Camp 1 shrugged and said “that is not real music anyway, it does not affect us.”

Both were wrong about what happened next.

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Streaming Was Finally Working. AI Broke It.

Streaming was working. That is what makes this so painful to write about.

As I wrote in The Black Hoody in 2024, there is more money in music now than there has ever been in human history.

The global music copyright market hit $45.5 billion in 2023, 38% larger than the entire global cinema industry. Recorded music revenues reached $31.7 billion in 2025. Paid streaming subscribers passed 837 million.

Thousands of artists nobody has heard of were making real livings. An independent artist with 10 million monthly Spotify streams was generating roughly $390,000 net annual revenue from streaming alone. Artists like BBNO$, Marlon Craft, Brother Ali: no household fame, real income. Before the streaming era, that was not possible. The long tail of music was finally making money.

The people who said streaming does not pay were, broadly, wrong. The people who said there was more opportunity than ever were, broadly, right.

AI is threatening to undo all of that progress.

When AI-generated tracks grew to an estimated 8% of total streams across all major platforms by Q3 2027, every human artist’s share of the pro-rata pool shrank by 8%. This had nothing to do with whether their fans listened to AI music. The pool is shared. The dilution is automatic.

Eight percent of a $22 billion streaming market is $1.76 billion in annual revenue redirected away from human creators. The labels were collecting licensing fees from the AI companies, but those fees were a fraction of what the dilution was costing them.

ASCAP REPORTS 4.2% DECLINE IN TOTAL DISTRIBUTIONS FOR FY2028; CITES “STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN THE STREAMING ROYALTY ENVIRONMENT” AND “INCREASED VOLUME OF NON-HUMAN-ORIGINATED WORKS” | Variety, February 2028

The independent artist who was making $390,000 a year in 2025 was now making $310,000. Still a living, yes. But the artist below them, the one making $80,000, was now making $64,000. And the one below them, the songwriter making $30,000, was now at $24,000. The margins were already thin. AI did not break a system that was already broken. It broke a system that was finally starting to work.

That is what made this crisis so perverse. The industry had spent a decade clawing back from piracy. Streaming had created a genuine middle class of working musicians for the first time in history. AI attacked the model that had just been fixed.

Camp 1 did not notice because Camp 1’s artists were doing fine. The top 1% always is. Camp 2 had spent so long saying streaming was broken that when AI actually broke it, nobody listened to them.

The Pipeline Collapse

The crisis in artist management was not about managers being replaced by AI. It was about the destruction of the pipeline that produces skilled managers in the first place.

I have managed artists for over 17 years. The fundamental business model has never changed: the manager works for free until the artist makes money, then takes a commission. The entire profession is a bet that the artist will eventually generate enough income to make the years of unpaid labour worthwhile.

The way you learn management is by doing it. You start with a young, unknown artist. You make mistakes. You learn how to negotiate, how to read a contract, how to build a campaign, how to manage an artist’s expectations when reality does not match their ambitions. That education takes years, and it only works if the artist you are managing generates enough income to keep you in the game while you learn.

When mid-tier artist incomes dropped 20-30% due to royalty pool dilution and the sync collapse, the emerging artists below them were hit harder. A new artist who might have generated $40,000 a year in streaming income (enough, barely, for their manager to survive on a 20% commission of $8,000 while building towards something bigger) was now generating $28,000. The manager’s cut dropped to $5,600. Brutal.

MMF (MUSIC MANAGERS FORUM) UK: MEMBERSHIP DECLINES 18% IN 2028; SURVEY FINDS 41% OF MANAGERS UNDER 35 HAVE LEFT THE PROFESSION IN THE PAST 24 MONTHS | The Music Network, September 2028

The same dynamic played out across every junior role in the ecosystem. Labels cut entry-level A&R positions and replaced them with AI-powered analytics dashboards. Publicists were replaced by automated campaign tools. Junior marketing coordinators were replaced by generative content platforms. Each individual cut was rational. Collectively, they eliminated the training ground where the next generation of music executives would have learned their craft.

The industry was eating its seed corn. The 25-year-old A&R assistant who got cut in 2027 was the person who, by 2035, would have had the ears and relationships to sign the next generation of artists. That person now works in SaaS sales. They are never coming back.

Artist management industry already had a real shortage of talented managers because the stress-to-remuneration ratio was so punishing. AI made the financial equation worse at the exact moment it was eliminating the junior roles that train the next generation. The profession was losing experienced operators at the top and cutting off new entrants at the bottom simultaneously.

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The Sync Collapse

For a decade, sync licensing had been the financial backbone of the middle class musician. A song placed in a TV show or a commercial could generate more income than years of streaming.

AI gutted it in 18 months.

By early 2028, production companies and ad agencies discovered what every budget-conscious content creator already knew: AI tools could generate purpose-built music for a specific scene in seconds, for essentially zero marginal cost.

A music supervisor who previously had to search through catalogues, negotiate licensing fees, and clear rights across multiple parties could now type “upbeat indie rock, female vocal, themes of freedom, 90 seconds” into Suno and get something fantastic before their coffee went cold.

The output lacked the emotional complexity of a great sync placement. For 80% of use cases, it did not need to have it. Most sync placements are background music in a reality show or a product demo. The kind of thing nobody Shazams.

Global sync revenues had already declined 2% in 2025, from $700 million to $641 million. By 2028, the decline accelerated to 22% year on year. High value placements in major films and premium television held up. Everything else cratered.

The $5,000 web content placements. The $2,000 library music licences. The small deals that kept managers’ lights on and songwriters housed. Gone.

The Catalogue Reckoning

We already had a preview of what happens when music catalogue valuations do not hold up. Hipgnosis Songs Fund spent approximately $2.2 billion acquiring catalogues between 2018 and 2021, lost more than half its market value, and was ultimately sold to Blackstone for $1.6 billion in July 2024. Founder Merck Mercuriadis stepped down.

The fund was rebranded as Recognition Music Group in 2025 before Sony Music Publishing acquired the Hipgnosis Songs Group subsidiary. The “future of music publishing,” as it was once called, collapsed under the weight of overspending and mismanagement before AI had even become a serious factor.

Now imagine what happens when AI becomes a serious factor.

Between 2020 and 2025, dozens of private equity firms followed the same thesis that Hipgnosis had pioneered: buy music catalogues, underwrite them on the assumption that streaming revenues would grow indefinitely, and collect passive income forever. Primary Wave, Concord, and funds backed by KKR, Apollo, and Blackstone itself poured billions into song rights.

The value of a music catalogue is a function of its future royalty income, discounted to the present. When per-stream rates fell and the royalty pool contracted, the projected future income of every catalogue on the market declined with it.

MAJOR CATALOGUE FUND WRITES DOWN NET ASSET VALUE 19.3%; BOARD CITES “MATERIAL CHANGE IN LONG-TERM ROYALTY GROWTH ASSUMPTIONS” AND “STRUCTURAL HEADWINDS FROM AI-GENERATED CONTENT” | Financial Times, November 2028

The funds that had paid 25-30x net publisher share multiples were now looking at catalogues worth 14-16x. Falling. The institutional investors who had been told music was a safe, uncorrelated asset class started asking uncomfortable questions.

Every dollar Spotify saved by replacing catalogue tracks with AI-generated alternatives came directly out of the royalty streams these funds depended on. Hipgnosis had been a cautionary tale about operational mismanagement. AI made the cautionary tale structural.

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The Label Paradox

Through 2027, Universal, Warner, and Sony maintained their revenue growth by cutting costs and leaning into the disruption.

They cut A&R staff. Why pay a team of 20 to find new artists when AI analytics tools could surface emerging talent from social data in hours? Marketing teams followed. Then admin headcount. Then regional offices.

Each label’s individual response was rational. The collective result was something else entirely.

Universal’s Q2 2028 earnings call reported a 14% reduction in global headcount alongside record operating margins. The analysts loved it. The stock rallied. The people who got fired were the ones who spent years learning how artists actually break: the people who understood why one campaign works and another does not, who could read an audience’s energy at a live show and know whether an artist was ready, who had the instinct to invest in an act that no algorithm would have flagged. These skills take a decade to develop. They cannot be replaced by a dashboard.

The labels had been struggling to break new artists for years. Social media had already disrupted the old playbook. The answer was supposed to be innovation: new methods, new platforms, new strategies for connecting artists with audiences. Instead, the labels responded to AI disruption by cutting the humans who were supposed to figure out the new playbook.

UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP: RESTRUCTURES DOMESTIC OPERATIONS IN KEY MARKETS; A&R TEAMS REDUCED BY 40-60%; “AI-ASSISTED ARTIST DEVELOPMENT” TOOLS TO SUPPLEMENT REDUCED STAFF | The Music Network, Q3 2028

The labels were saving money by firing the people who made them money. The savings went into licensing more AI tools. Which accelerated the disruption. Which required more cost cutting.

A feedback loop with no natural brake.

The Live Music Inversion

The consensus view in 2026 was that live music would be the safe harbour. AI could not replicate the experience of seeing an artist perform in a room. This was Camp 1’s strongest argument, and on its face, it was correct.

What actually happened was stranger than either camp predicted. Live music did not collapse. It inverted.

The artists who could perform, the ones who were electric on stage, who could hold a room, who made people feel something in person, those artists started making more money than ever. Many of them had never had a big recorded music profile. They were session musicians, jazz players, local heroes who packed out small venues every weekend. In a world where recorded music income was shrinking, the ability to walk into a room and earn money that night became the most valuable skill in the industry.

This was not the win Camp 1 imagined. It was a regression.

The economics of live performance do not scale the way recorded music does. A recorded hit can generate millions of dollars while the artist sleeps. A live performer has to show up, every night, in a physical room, to earn. There is a hard ceiling on how many shows a person can play in a year, how many cities they can travel to, how much their body can take.

The artists who had previously built their income on recorded music found that revenue stream shrinking. They were forced to tour more, play more shows, work harder physically to maintain the same income. The freedom that recorded music royalties had provided, the ability to take time off, to write, to be creative without performing, was disappearing.

Now consider the counter-argument. Live music can scale. Taylor Swift sold out multiple stadium runs across continents. Coldplay played to millions. At the very top, live music is an enormously scalable business.

But how did Swift and Coldplay get to stadium level? Through decades of recorded music dominance. Billions of streams. Global radio play. Sync placements in every market. The kind of cultural saturation that only comes from having your music embedded in the daily listening habits of hundreds of millions of people. You do not sell out a stadium because you are a great performer. Plenty of great performers play to 200 people on a Tuesday night. You sell out a stadium because your recorded music made you famous in every country on earth.

That is the pipeline AI broke.

The session musicians and local heroes making more money in the inversion will never reach stadium level. They will never have the global profile that recorded music dominance creates, because the recorded music economy that builds those profiles is contracting. They will earn well at venue scale. They will work hard for it. And they will hit a ceiling that previous generations of artists could break through.

The mid-tier touring artist was squeezed from both directions. The one playing 500 to 1,500 capacity rooms depended on streaming income and sync revenue to subsidise their touring costs. Without that subsidy, the economics of getting in a van and crossing a country stopped making sense. And the path from 1,500-cap rooms to 15,000-cap arenas, which required a recorded music breakout to build the audience, was narrowing as labels cut investment in artist development.

The festivals that depended on mid-tier artists for their lineups were hit next. Major festivals around the world had already been folding or being cancelled for years due to rising costs and weakening lineups. The festivals that survived into 2027 found their booking options shrinking as fewer artists could afford to tour.

Live music split into two economies: global superstars who had built their profiles in the pre-AI era, and local performers earning a living one room at a time. The vast middle ground, the 500-cap to 5,000-cap circuit that had been the backbone of artist development for decades, was hollowing out. And the mechanism that created new stadium acts, recorded music dominance, was the very thing AI was eroding.

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What Both Camps Missed

The music industry’s displacement spiral ran like this:

AI music tools improved. Streaming platforms integrated AI-generated content. The royalty pool diluted. Artist income fell. Managers and support staff left the profession. Artist development slowed. Labels cut headcount and redirected savings to AI tools. AI music tools improved.

Each link in the chain was a rational response to the link before it. No individual decision was wrong. The system was destroying itself.

Camp 1 watched each link break and said “that does not affect my artist.” They were correct about each individual link. They missed the chain. By the time the effects reached their artist’s touring support, their artist’s sync income, their artist’s label investment, it was too late.

Camp 2 watched each link break and said “we’re all finished.” They were wrong because the crisis was never about AI replacing music. It was about AI replacing the economics that supported the ecosystem around the music. Those economics could have been restructured. The industry had time in 2026 to ring-fence human-created royalty pools, to create separate streaming tiers, to build new economic structures around verified human artistry. The doomers’ fatalism gave the industry permission to do nothing.

The dismissers did not act because they did not believe it was necessary. The doomers did not act because they did not believe it was possible.

The Question

At the core of this crisis was a question that the music industry never honestly confronted: what is the value of human-made music in a world where machines can make infinite music for free?

For the entirety of recorded music history, human creativity was the scarce input. Capital was necessary. Distribution was necessary. Without a human being writing a song, recording a performance, and connecting with an audience, none of it mattered.

AI made creativity abundant. The output was not better. It was not more emotionally resonant. It was just everywhere, in quantities that overwhelmed the economic structures built on the assumption of scarcity.

Piracy, the last existential threat, had a clear message: “Your music is worth something, but I refuse to pay for it.” The industry responded with a better distribution model and survived.

AI’s message was different: “Your music might not be worth paying for, because I can make something close enough for free.”

The first threat required better distribution. The second required a fundamental revaluation of what human-made music means to the world. The industry needed to build economic structures that protect and reward human creativity specifically because it is human.

Whether we build those structures in time is the only question that matters.

But you are not reading this in March 2029. You are reading this in March 2026.

The global recorded music industry just celebrated its eleventh consecutive year of growth. Revenues hit $31.7 billion. Streaming subscribers reached 837 million. The IFPI report is full of optimism.

Suno has 2 million paid subscribers and $300 million in annual revenue. Nearly 100 million people have used the platform. Deezer is receiving over 60,000 fully AI-generated tracks per day. Spotify deleted 75 million spammy tracks last year alone.

The labels are licensing. The AI companies are growing. The artists are split between “it won’t affect us” and “it’s already over.”

Both are wrong. And neither is doing anything about it.

Between 2010 and 2024, the rulebook for breaking an artist globally was torn up and rewritten at least five times.

The managers who figured out each new playbook first made their artists into global superstars. The ones who clung to the old model watched their artists stall.

I asked some of the most successful artist managers in the world a simple set of questions: What year did your artist break globally? What drove it? And what did you do in the years before that moment to set it up?

Their answers, read chronologically, tell the story.

Before 2010: The Music Industry Cartel

To understand how dramatically things changed, you need to understand the world these managers inherited.

Before 2010, breaking an artist internationally meant convincing a chain of powerful gatekeepers to give your artist a shot. You needed a major label deal in each territory. You needed radio programmers to add your song. You needed MTV or Channel V to playlist your video. You needed a music supervisor to place your track in a film or TV show.

You needed an anointed middleman to grant you passage, extracting a toll at every turn.

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In America, you would start at one radio format, say college radio, and if the song performed, you would “cross it over” to alternative stations, then rock stations, and if everything aligned, maybe six to nine months later you would get a shot at pop radio. In Los Angeles terms, you might start on KCRW, spread to KROQ and KLOS, with the hope of eventually landing on KISS FM.

Each format was controlled by independent promotion people and station gatekeepers, essentially a form of arguably legal payola.

It was a mafia-esque protection racket dressed up as ‘ promotion’.

The bigger the station, the more expensive those payments would be. Labels were effectively test marketing songs at cheaper formats, then stepping them up to more expensive ones only when the data proved the song was generating sales.

Management’s job was to follow behind the radio airplay with everything they could muster.

Fly the artist into each market, do advance phone interviews with the local station, schedule an instore appearance at the local retailer, try to get press in the local newspaper, put gig posters on the streets. You were pulling out all the stops to convert local airplay into local sales. Then you would spend weeks shining a spotlight on each of these “case studies” to give programmers in other markets the confidence to climb onboard.

When managers talked about “breaking America,” they literally meant breaking the northwest, then the northeast, then California. City by city, station by station.

This was the same model that had existed since the 1980s and 1990s. Get the single on radio at one format. Once it proved to be a hit, the label would invest more to cross it over. Get the artist covered in local press, then national press. Land syncs. All while the artist criss-crossed the country putting a face to the song. And the whole time, you were crossing your fingers hoping the public cared, because if the sales data showed they did not, the label would yank your promotional budget and that was that.

Sometimes things had a genuine viral groundswell. Silverchair’s “Tomorrow” was one of those. But even then, it would still take many months for a song to reach the level of awareness that artists after 2010 could achieve within a week or two.

Era 1: The Temper Trap (2010)

• Manager: Danny Rogers

• Artist: The Temper Trap

• Breakout year: 2010

• Key stat: “Sweet Disposition” achieved platinum certification in both the US and the UK.

Danny Rogers, manager of The Temper Trap

2010 was the tail end of the gatekeeper era, and Danny Rogers knew the rules. To break The Temper Trap globally, he and the band relocated to London.

“We made a very intentional decision to relocate the band, and myself, to London, with full support from the label,” Rogers told The Black Hoody. “At that time, it was extremely rare for an Australian act to break internationally from home, so we knew we had to live inside the ecosystem rather than operate from afar.”

Being based in London meant they could say yes to everything: last minute radio sessions, TV appearances, support slots, industry showcases, and the unpredictable opportunities that can make or break a developing act.

Rogers’ answer to what single channel drove the breakout is telling: “If you had to isolate a single driver, radio was the most powerful catalyst. Radio airplay in three critical markets, America, the UK, and Australia, created a simultaneous international presence that very few Australian acts had at the time.”

Radio. Physical relocation. Label support. Being present in the ecosystem. This was the old playbook executed at its peak. “Sweet Disposition” ignited across alternative radio, became a staple on BBC Radio 1, received blanket support across Australian radio, and was amplified further by high profile sync placements including the film 500 Days of Summer and remixes from the likes of Swedish House Mafia.

But notice what Rogers also said: “The band became part of a creative community that included emerging artists like Florence + The Machine and Mumford & Sons.” The value went beyond access to industry gatekeepers. Rogers and The Temper Trap were embedded in a creative community that pushed everyone to operate at a higher level.

Rogers still believes physical presence offshore matters. “I still believe that being physically present offshore, particularly early in an artist’s global career, can be transformative for momentum, relationship building, and narrative,” he said.

He is probably right. But within 24 months, the geography moat would evaporate. You could conquer the global charts from your childhood bedroom.

Era 2: Gotye (2011/2012)

• Artist: Gotye

• Co-managers: John Watson and Danny Rogers

• Breakout year: 2011 (Australia), 2012 (global)

• Key stats: “Somebody That I Used to Know” spent 8 consecutive weeks at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It sold 6.8 million digital copies in 2012 alone, making it the best selling song of the year in the US. The music video has surpassed 2 billion views on YouTube. The track has exceeded 2.3 billion streams on Spotify. It won Record of the Year and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance at the 2013 Grammy Awards.

John Watson, manager of Gotye

Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” was maybe the first (if not the biggest) global hit built on the new model: artist communicates directly with audiences, and the industry scrambles to catch up.

The Natasha Pincus directed music video was the spark. It was simple, weird, eye grabbing, exactly the kind of thing people emailed to friends in 2011 and 2012. Because it was available globally on YouTube, discovery happened everywhere at once.

A few years prior, some label promo person would have needed to submit it for playlisting consideration at Channel V in Southeast Asia, VIVA in Germany and MTV in the US before audiences in those places could have seen it.

Australian radio station triple j had been early supporters of the track, and their airplay caused other tastemakers overseas to start exposing it. KCRW in Los Angeles and 3FM in Holland both watched the triple j playlists for possible new songs. Each of those adds was like a rock thrown in a pond, spreading more ripples.

As audiences discovered the video online they shared it via Twitter and Facebook, but particularly via YouTube where the algorithm picked up the high engagement and served it up more broadly.

The snowball went to a new level when Ashton Kutcher and Katy Perry tweeted about it. At that time, Kutcher had the biggest Twitter account in the world, and he amplified the song just weeks after the release.

This next part is the bit that rewrote the rules.

Up until this point in music history, artists and labels typically avoided selling music in a country until a local label deal was in place. Import sales were seen as “a waste” because they could not be correlated against local radio play. Every label advised against releasing the song in new markets until deals were sorted.

But Wally De Backer saw the world differently.

His view was that in 2011, holding back the song from international fans would simply force them to download it illegally. Limewire, Pirate Bay and Kazaa were still near their peak. So he set up his own indie release globally via iTunes.

Each week, you could see the sales growing everywhere around the world as people discovered the song on YouTube and via social media, then went to iTunes and bought it.

He also made the original stems available online for anyone to create their own remixes. This was a philosophical commitment to open creativity, but it also amplified the viral exposure, leading to thousands of bootleg dance mixes that exposed the track in places the original would never have been played.

The exponential adoption curves attracted label investment, and during the second half of 2011, labels around the world rushed to license the song and album. The fact that it was already selling on iTunes gave Wally extra leverage and allowed him to push back against creative interference.

Commercial radio had largely avoided the song until it went to number 1 on iTunes and then number 1 on ARIA. Every A&R person urged Wally to edit the song for their local market because “our radio stations are very different and will never play this.” Every single one of them was proved wrong.

Radio no longer made hits. They just played them.

The song’s clear audience appeal, shown by YouTube plays, iTunes downloads and piracy data, forced radio’s hand in ways that would have been unthinkable before 2010. Gotye’s SNL appearance and Coachella performance in April 2012 pushed it to number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it stayed for eight consecutive weeks. Billboard named it the number 1 single of 2012.

Gotye blazed a trail that every artist after him would follow: go directly to audiences, build undeniable proof of demand, and let the industry come to you.

Era 3: Vance Joy (2014)

• Manager: Jaddan Comerford (Unified Music Group)

• Artist: Vance Joy

• Breakout year: 2014

• Key stats: “Riptide” has surpassed 3.3 billion streams on Spotify. It holds Diamond certification (10 million units) in the US via the RIAA, is 16 times platinum in Australia, and spent a record 120 consecutive weeks in the ARIA chart. It topped Triple j’s Hottest 100 in 2013 and reached number 1 on Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart.

Jaddan Comerford, manager of Vance Joy

By 2014, the old gatekeeper model and the new direct to audience model had merged into something more complex. Jaddan Comerford’s strategy for Vance Joy shows both worlds working together.

“The rapid, organic spread of ‘Riptide’ across streaming platforms, radio and sync opportunities was the key tipping point,” Comerford told The Black Hoody. “Its inclusion in major playlists, film and television placements, and heavy rotation on US alternative radio significantly amplified its reach. At the same time, widespread sharing on platforms like Vine and YouTube helped drive the song into the mainstream global conversation.”

Notice that Comerford mentions streaming, radio, sync and social sharing in the same answer. By 2014, you needed all of them.

But the setup was deliberate and patient. “The breakout was the result of a deliberate, long term strategy built over several years,” Comerford said. “Early EPs established a strong grassroots fanbase in Australia and online. Extensive touring helped grow a loyal audience, while early sync placements, particularly in the US, expanded his reach. Strong support from triple j further amplified national exposure and credibility.”

Comerford described a “phased release strategy that allowed momentum to build organically rather than rushing an album.” There was an early focus on key global markets, specifically the US and UK, with carefully chosen touring and support slots.

This is the hybrid era. Triple j still mattered. Touring still mattered. But the new platforms were now doing what radio crossover used to do: carrying songs across borders and demographics without anyone needing to call a radio programmer or book a promo person.

Taylor Swift covering “Riptide” on BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge. Placements in Grey’s Anatomy, The Inbetweeners 2, Hawaii Five-0. The song appeared everywhere because the ecosystem now rewarded songs that audiences had already validated organically.

The most striking thing about Vance Joy’s trajectory is what happened after the initial wave.

“Riptide” has never stopped streaming. It was named the most streamed Australian song of 2023, a full decade after its release, and a Vance Joy representative told media there was no single TikTok video or pop culture moment responsible. The song just kept finding new listeners through algorithmic discovery. Year after year.

That phenomenon, a song with genuine emotional connection finding audience after audience through algorithms rather than gatekeepers, would become the dominant force in the next era.

Era 4: Tones and I (2019/2020)

• Manager: Regan Lethbridge (Co-founder and Director, Lemon Tree Music, who signed her before any music was released, alongside business partner David Morgan)

• Artist: Tones and I

• Breakout year: 2019 going into 2020

• Key stats: “Dance Monkey” has surpassed 3 billion streams on Spotify, making it the most streamed song by a female artist on the platform. It is the most Shazamed song of all time with over 44 million identifications. It topped official singles charts in over 38 countries. It spent a record 24 non consecutive weeks at number 1 on the ARIA Singles Chart and 11 weeks atop the UK Singles Chart, a record for a female solo artist.

Regan Lethbridge, co-manager of Tones and I

By 2019, radio was a rounding error. The new apex predator was Spotify. The playbook had shifted again.

Regan Lethbridge barely mentions radio in his account of breaking Tones and I. The engine was Spotify.

“It’s hard to pin it down to one thing but I would have to say Spotify,” Lethbridge told The Black Hoody. “It started to pop out of the Nordics and it grew from there through Benelux and eventually around the world.”

Think about that trajectory for a second. An Australian busker from Byron Bay breaks globally because an algorithm in Scandinavia started serving her song to listeners. No radio programmer in Stockholm made that call. No A&R rep in London championed it. The platform’s own discovery mechanics identified the song’s appeal and pushed it outward, from the Nordics through Benelux and then worldwide.

Lethbridge was quick to credit the artist. “It doesn’t hurt when you have an artist with a work ethic like Tones. It’s truly unmatched in how she goes about her work.”

But his strategic philosophy is what separates this era from everything before it: “Everything we do is to keep things independent for as long as possible, position globally from day one, get partners emotionally invested early on the journey and keep them engaged, build a tight team around the world with similar ethos and drive, and keep our heads down and work as hard as possible.”

Position globally from day one. That sentence would have made no sense to a manager in 2005. Back then, you broke your home territory first, then maybe got a shot at one international territory if a label liked you enough. By 2019, Lemon Tree Music was thinking globally before a single song was released.

There was still a triple j element. The early buzz there, combined with breaking the attendance record at Splendour in the Grass’s amphitheatre and busking videos doing the rounds, created the initial velocity. But the global breakout was platform driven.

Lethbridge’s closing observation stayed with me: “No one can sit and claim the success of a song or an artist. Our job is to set things up and stand in the shadows. When songs take on a life of their own, it’s because they are connecting on an emotional level and have the element of something you can’t explain.”

In the gatekeeper era, you could explain a hit. Someone championed it at the label, someone added it to radio, it landed a sync.

In the platform era, a hit runs on emotional connection between artist and audience that no algorithm can predict in advance, only amplify after the fact.

Era 5: Connor Price (2023/2024)

• Manager: Breanna Price

• Artist: Connor Price

• Breakout year: End of 2023 into early 2024

• Key stats: Connor went from under 100,000 to nearly 8 million monthly Spotify listeners in roughly a year. The “Spin the Globe” series amassed over 300 million views across platforms. Both “Spin the Globe” EPs charted in Spotify’s top 10 on their debut weekends. As of April 2025, the first Spin the Globe EP alone has surpassed 480 million Spotify streams. Connor now averages approximately 60 million Spotify streams per month and earns up to US$240,000 monthly in royalties, entirely independently.

Breanna Price, manager of Connor Price

Connor Price represents something that would have been incomprehensible to every manager in the previous four eras: the content format itself is the distribution strategy.

The “Spin the Globe” concept is simple. Connor spins a globe, his finger lands on a country, and he collaborates with an artist from that country. The format simultaneously serves as entertainment, music discovery, and international expansion. All in one video.

“Creating his ‘Spin the Globe’ series on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts was definitely the driving force behind the global breakout,” Breanna Price told The Black Hoody. “It was a viral short form series that amassed over 300 million views across platforms, and led to both ‘Spin the Globe’ EPs charting on Spotify’s top 10 their debut weekends.”

It was not an overnight success. “We initially gained views by remixing popular hip hop songs that were already in the algorithm, having Connor go bar for bar with the original artist,” Price explained. “This was unique because most remixes or covers inserted a verse. Connor, however, went back and forth with the artist, showing that he could keep up with anyone.”

Then came the pivot. “Just before he would be established as a ‘remix guy,’ we took the attention he had and pivoted to marketing his original songs in a similar format.”

Once the original music started gaining traction, they created the “Spin the Globe” concept. “He was quite literally getting into algorithms around the world by collaborating with international artists,” Price said. “Global collabs are by no means a new thing. However, having the global collab be the entire hook of a viral video series was, and I think that’s why the world reacted so strongly to it.”

Price also noted Connor’s background as an actor: “Connor also took his skills of acting from a 20 plus year long acting career and used that talent to film and edit skits that ultimately would lead to promoting an original song at the end of the video.”

No radio. No label. No relocation. No playlist pitching. No sync placements. The content is the marketing, the format is the international strategy, and the entertainment is the distribution.

One episode featuring a Zambian artist reportedly garnered 72 million views on TikTok and YouTube Shorts. That Zambian artist went from 189 monthly Spotify listeners to over a million. Connor Price changed someone’s life with a content format.

The Next Era: The AI World

Every era in this article removed a layer of infrastructure between the artist and the audience. Radio, then labels, then geography, then the entire traditional marketing apparatus.

AI will remove every other layer imaginable.

I wrote about this in October 2025 when I published The Most Dangerous Music Company Ever, a piece about Suno AI.

• In 2010, the question was: how do I get gatekeepers to expose my artist?

• In 2024, it was: how do I create content formats that are the exposure?

• In 2030, it will be: how do I prove my artist is worth caring about when anyone with a laptop can generate a song that sounds just as good?

The answer is probably hiding in the data from this article. Look at what survived across every single era. It was never the distribution channel. Radio died as a hitmaker. iTunes died as a store. Vine died as a platform. What survived was the emotional connection between a real human artist and an audience who believed in them.

Live performance will survive AI. I am confident about that. The best chess player in the world cannot beat a computer, but chess tournaments still sell out and attract millions of viewers online. Humans want to watch humans do remarkable things, even when machines can do it better. The live music industry will grow, not shrink, as recorded music gets commodified by AI.

But the recorded music business as we have known it? That is in serious trouble.

The managers who break artists in the AI era will need to build something AI cannot replicate: identity, community, narrative, and a reason for audiences to care about a specific human being making music.

Connor Price is already closer to this model than anyone else in this article. His content format, his personality, his on-camera presence, his relationships with international collaborators, none of that can be generated by a prompt. The music isn’t the product; it’s just the top of the funnel.

The successful artist in ten years will look less like a traditional recording artist and more like a creative director. Their music will be the connective tissue for fan communities, content arcs across platforms, live experiences, and virtual worlds. Record labels will serve as investors in those worlds, like gaming studios funding their flagship titles.

If that sounds extreme, consider what has already happened in the fifteen years covered by this article. Danny Rogers moved his entire life to London to get his artist on BBC Radio 1. Fifteen years later, Connor Price changed a Zambian artist’s life from his bedroom with a TikTok video. The pace of change has only accelerated, and AI will accelerate it further.

Every manager reading this should be asking one question: if the cost of creating music drops to zero, what is my artist selling that a prompt cannot?

Of the five managers I spoke to, every single one credited the artist’s talent, work ethic and emotional connection with audiences as the foundation for everything else. The tools change every few years. Audiences responding to artists who make them feel something real has never changed and probably never will.

The playbook will be rewritten again. The managers who survive will be the ones paying close enough attention to recognise the next shift while it is still forming.

This scene is no longer unusual. A new wave of pop-up comedy producers are selling out shows in unconventional, non-traditional venues, from barbershops to auto repair shops to candy stores, dismantling the friction of the traditional comedy club model that rely on two-drink minimums, and a reliance on specific entertainment districts to survive.

The movement has scaled rapidly.

Don’t Tell Comedy, a pop-up stand-up company founded in 2017, has grown from roughly 35 shows in its first year to 5,500 shows in 2025, operating in over 250 cities globally. Comedy Underground Overground (Comedy UO), founded in New York in 2021, has produced more than 330 shows across 85 venues, built a waitlist of 35,000 people, and recently signed with WME.

Both companies have done it with minimal traditional advertising, relying instead on word of mouth, social media, and the simple appeal of watching live comedy in a place you are not supposed to be.

Together, they represent two distinct models of pop-up comedy, one scaling wide, the other going deep, and both are generating growing revenues while expanding the audience for live comedy in ways traditional clubs have not.

The Don’t Tell Model: Scale Across 250 Cities

Don’t Tell Comedy founder Kyle Kazanjian-Amory started the company after growing frustrated with the costs of traditional venues. “Stand-up felt inaccessible,” Kazanjian-Amory told The Black Hoody. “It was expensive, there were two-drink minimums, and you had to go to very specific neighbourhoods. I wanted it to feel like a fun night out, not a transaction.”

Don’t Tell Comedy founder Kyle Kazanjian-Amory

The first show was in a coworker’s friend’s backyard in Silver Lake, Los Angeles.

Thirty-five people attended. Sam Jay, who went on to write for SNL and record HBO specials, performed.

From there, Kazanjian-Amory burned through his savings and eventually liquidated his retirement account to fund the expansion.

It paid off. Don’t Tell’s growth trajectory tells the story:

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How the Business Works

Unlike traditional comedy clubs, Don’t Tell generates no revenue from food-and-beverage minimums.

Revenue comes from three sources:

1. Ticketed live shows

2. Digital content distribution

3. Brand partnerships

Tickets typically range from $20 to $40 depending on the event type and market, with an average show size of 55 to 60 people.

Combined, the company generates approximately $10 million in estimated annual revenue: $8 million from ticket sales across its thousands of shows, plus approximately $2 million from brand sponsorships and digital content revenue.

Note that Don’t Tell Comedy didn’t disclose this $2mil number, this our back of the envelope maths based on their CPMs from their online views + average sponsorship rate on their show volume.

Dr. Squatch serves as the presenting sponsor for all digital stand-up content, and national campaigns.

Unit Economics: Inside a Typical Show

A typical Don’t Tell show in a mid-sized market illustrates how the model works at the individual event level. Take a recent show in Portsmouth, New Hampshire:

Don’t Tell Comedy — Unit Economics (Portsmouth, NH)

A 23% net margin per show is healthy for live events, but the picture is more complex at the corporate level.

Don’t Tell now employs approximately 18 full-time staff, more than half on the live-events side and carries a six-figure annual insurance policy that enables shows in non-traditional venues such as retail stores, boats, and fine art galleries.

More than two full-time employees are dedicated solely to customer service and producer support.

The organisational structure reflects the scale. “After 2022, a real game changer was hiring more people,” Kazanjian-Amory said. “Every city has somebody boots-on-the-ground putting on local shows. We have a head of live events and regional leads, who were some of our best producers that we elevated into those roles. They really get what makes a Don’t Tell show fun and how to keep the standards high as we scale.”

A Night Out, Not Just a Show

The pop-up format solves a problem that has plagued live comedy for decades: friction. Going to a comedy club can feel like going to the movies, you arrive, pay for expensive snacks and drinks, sit in the dark, and leave. The social dimension is an afterthought.

Don’t Tell inverts this. Shows take place in spaces that are inherently interesting, surf shops, recording studios, art galleries, and the experience is designed to feel like a night out with friends rather than a transactional exchange.

“From the get-go, it’s all about the experience,” Kazanjian-Amory said. “If people leave saying, ‘That was awesome, not just a great comedy show, but a super fun night out,’ the word of mouth from that goes a long way. I still believe word of mouth is the best form of marketing.”

That approach also draws a different audience.

“We get a lot of people who haven’t been to a lot of comedy shows,” Kazanjian-Amory said. “That’s why I don’t see us as competitors to comedy clubs. We’re a really great foot in the door, something that’s less intimidating than a club and feels more like a fun night out with friends or a date.”

On average, Don’t Tell audiences skew younger than traditional clubs, primarily the 23-to-35 demographic, though in suburban markets the age range extends into the 40s, 50s, and 60s.

Locations of Don’t Tell Comedy Shows.

The Comedy UO Model: Going Deep in One City

David Levine and Ethan Mansoor, co-founders of Underground Overground Comedy, at Zabars in New York.

If Don’t Tell Comedy is the wide play, hundreds of cities, thousands of shows, a lean producer network, Comedy Underground Overground (Comedy UO) is the deep play: a single-city operation in New York that has turned scarcity and intimacy into its competitive advantage.

Founded in April 2021 by David Levine and Ethan Mansoor, childhood friends who met on the chess team at elementary school on the Upper East Side, Comedy UO started almost by accident.

Mansoor met a comedian performing in a hotel lobby during COVID and asked how to book them for a friend’s rooftop. When agents wouldn’t return their calls, Levine improvised.

“I started lying, saying I booked all their friends in the past. I told Sam Morrill’s agent I booked Mark Normand. I told Mark Normand’s agent I booked Sam Morrill. Somehow we got both of them. Thankfully, they’re at different agencies.”

— David Levine, Comedy Underground Overground

Four and a half years later, Comedy UO has produced shows at more than 85 different venues, laundromats, candy stores, scuba diving shops, thrift stores, and iconic New York institutions including Katz’s Deli, Zabars, Economy Candy, Peter Luger’s, and Russ & Daughters.

Comedians who have performed include Bill Burr, Leslie Jones, Eric Andre, Marcelo Hernandez, and Mateo Lane.

Comedy UO’s New York Focus

Comedy UO’s growth has been slower than Don’t Tell’s, but the trajectory is steep:

Comedy UO — Annual Show Volume

But the show count only tells part of the story. Comedy UO’s revenue growth has been explosive, with the company reporting the following year-over-year increases:

Comedy UO — Year-Over-Year Revenue Growth

The pattern is telling. Explosive early growth in 2021–2023 as the post-COVID appetite for live experiences surged.

A normalisation in 2023–2024 as that novelty wore off. Then a near-doubling in 2024–2025 as tapings and private events kicked in as a second growth engine.

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The Waitlist as a Business Model

Comedy UO does not advertise. Not in the traditional sense, and not even in the Facebook-and-Instagram-ads sense that Don’t Tell employs. Instead, demand is driven almost entirely through Instagram and a waitlist system where Levine personally sends direct messages for ticket drops.

“You sign up for the waitlist and then we get to you chronologically. I’ve sent probably 400,000 DMs. We have about 35,000 people on our waitlist.”

— David Levine, Comedy Underground Overground

For the first three years, almost all tickets were sold exclusively through Instagram DMs. More recently, the company has paired that personal outreach with Shopify-based ticket drops to allow for scale. For larger events like the Big Small Business Tour, Comedy UO uses a sneaker-drop model: “We’ll announce the tour, hype it up, and then tickets will all drop Monday at 7:00 PM,” Levine said. “Everyone on the waitlist gets an email blast saying, ‘Here’s the link.’”

The results speak for themselves. All eight dates of Comedy UO’s Big Small Business Tour from January 12–16 across New York City sold out in advance. A separate show at Margaritaville Times Square also sold out. Tickets range from $40 to $75 for standard shows, with some premium events exceeding $150 per person.

It is worth distinguishing between the two companies’ approaches to audience acquisition. Don’t Tell actively advertises through Facebook and Instagram ads and email marketing, Kazanjian-Amory acknowledges that paid social is one of their primary sales channels. Comedy UO’s genuine zero-advertising model, built on DMs and word of mouth, is rarer and arguably harder to replicate.

The Hospitality Play

Where Don’t Tell positions itself as a scalable live-events platform, Comedy UO increasingly frames itself as a hospitality business that uses comedy as its vehicle.

“People don’t see comedy as a social event. They see it as sit down, go to a show, shut up and leave. What we like to pitch is this is an event. We’re in the events business. When you walk in, you talk, socialise for 30 minutes, we can get you food, drinks, whatever you want. The show is tight, 70 minutes, shorter than your standard show. And then there’s an afterparty where you can hang out more. We can have musicians, magicians walking around.”

— David Levine, Comedy Underground Overground

The pricing reflects this positioning. Comedy UO’s higher ticket prices, often double or triple a standard Don’t Tell ticket, are offset by no drink minimums, included food and beverages at some events, and a curated atmosphere that justifies the premium.

“Those logistical demands can make the business expensive to run. The standard costs are the venue, the comedians, staffing, and the cost of production. Our weekly shows are very labour-intensive. It’s expensive. It is not easy.”

— David Levine, Comedy Underground Overground

Levine estimates that 10–20% of Comedy UO’s audience are experiencing live comedy for the first time, people who discovered the shows through social media and had never set foot in a comedy club.

The crowd skews heavily local: New Yorkers who live in the city full-time, not tourists. “That’s been a big, very attractive thing to a tourist-heavy business,” Levine said.

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The Digital Flywheel

Both companies discovered that filming their shows created something more powerful than marketing material, it created an entirely separate business.

Don’t Tell Comedy saw its inflection point in 2022 when it began filming and distributing high-quality stand-up sets online. The company now has over one million followers on Instagram and 2.3 million subscribers on YouTube, plus a substantial presence on TikTok where clips regularly go viral. Some top-performing videos reach millions of views on YouTube.

“We’re putting out two new 10-minute sets on YouTube every week, and a new short-form clip across our social channels every day. That’s still growing and performing really well, and it creates a lot of value for the comics whose sets we tape.”

— Kyle Kazanjian-Amory, Don’t Tell Comedy

“Our intention with digital marketing was we wanted to showcase emerging talent and bring more people to live shows. We didn’t realize it could become a business on its own.”

— Kyle Kazanjian-Amory, Don’t Tell Comedy

The strategy has filled the gap left by Comedy Central’s retreat from short-form stand-up content. “There’s a gap now that Comedy Central isn’t really doing what it used to,” Kazanjian-Amory said. “A lot of people are self-distributing, but what makes our stuff special is that we’re doing it at a really high quality. We’re trying to shoot Netflix-level sets. I think that’s been part of the secret to our success.”

Don’t Tell’s online content has become as well known as, if not more than, its live events, even as live shows still generate the bulk of revenue. Don’t Tell has also licensed content to Hulu and other distributors, and produced Hannah Berner’s Netflix special as a production company.

Comedy UO has followed a similar path, though at an earlier stage. The company now tapes short sets, signing licensing contracts with comedians and distributing clips across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, where some videos have reached 150,000 views.

“What these tapings are is we sign licensing contracts with the comedians, we pay them for their set and we do 10-minute tapes. We do five comics on a show, tape their sets, and then we clip it up on our Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok and collaborate with them. And that’s been a huge way to boost the account as well as get ad deals on that side of the business too.”

— David Levine, Comedy Underground Overground

“With digital, it’s unlimited,” Levine said, contrasting the scalable economics of content against the labour-intensive reality of producing physical shows.

Pop-Up Comedy vs Comedy Clubs

Both Kazanjian-Amory and Levine are careful to position their companies as complementary to, not competitive with, traditional comedy clubs. Kazanjian-Amory frames Don’t Tell as a gateway that introduces new audiences to live comedy who may then seek out clubs.

Levine differentiates Comedy UO as a hospitality business rather than a comedy business.

The data supports this. When 10–20% of Comedy UO’s audience has never been to a live comedy show before, that is genuine market expansion, new customers being created for the entire industry, not just for one company. These are people who were not previously spending money on live comedy at all.

That said, the growth of pop-up comedy does surface questions about the economics of live comedy that club owners are already grappling with.

Pop-ups operate with almost no fixed overhead. There is no permanent lease, no year-round staff, no liquor licence. Don’t Tell’s producers source venues on a show-by-show basis, paying only when there is a confirmed event.

Comedy UO negotiates individually with each venue, often bringing foot traffic that the business would not otherwise have. This asset-light model allows both companies to experiment in markets where a permanent club would never be financially viable, and that is arguably good for the industry as a whole, because it grows the overall audience for live comedy in cities that currently have no comedy infrastructure.

The drink minimum is another area where the pop-up model has surfaced a consumer preference worth paying attention to.

For decades, comedy clubs subsidised performer pay and kept ticket prices lower by requiring patrons to spend $15–$25 on drinks. Pop-up audiences have shown a willingness to pay higher upfront ticket prices, up to $75, in exchange for eliminating that friction. Whether this represents a generational shift in how audiences prefer to pay for live entertainment is an open question, but it is a data point that every live comedy operator should be watching.

In our recent conversation with Comedy Cellar owner Noam Dworman, he stressed the importance of keeping his prices low, at $25 per head maximum despite turning away 20k people per week.

WATCH: Comedy Cellar owner Noam Dworman

The logistics of pop-up comedy, however, illustrate why the club model endures. Every pop-up show requires bespoke arrangements for sound, lighting, power, seating layout, temperature control, and insurance. “A warm room is death for comedy,” Levine said. “The room cannot be above 68 degrees when you have 80 people in there.” These operational challenges create a natural ceiling on quality control as both companies scale, a problem that a well-run club with purpose-built infrastructure simply does not have.

The Black Hoody went deep into what it takes to build a great comedy club with Emilio Savonne, the owner of the NY Comedy Club.

WATCH: New York Comedy owner Emilio Savone

The most likely outcome is not that pop-ups replace clubs, but that the two models coexist and push each other to improve. Pop-ups are proving that comedy audiences are larger and more diverse than the industry assumed and maybe acting as a top of funnel for the traditional clubs.

What’s Next

Both companies are expanding beyond standard stand-up, and both are being taken increasingly seriously by traditional industry infrastructure.

Comedy UO signed with WME in 2025, a signal that the agency world sees pop-up comedy as a legitimate and scalable business. The company is expanding into magic shows, “2026 will be the year of magic,” Levine said, partly because magic carries lower perceived risk for corporate clients who worry about the unpredictability of stand-up. Private events, where profit margins are higher, are scaling to Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

Don’t Tell is pursuing a different kind of vertical integration: building a platform that supports comedians across their entire careers. “We’re trying to figure out how we can continue to provide value to comedians across their whole career from doing their first Don’t Tell show, to their first taped set, to maybe a half-hour special,” Kazanjian-Amory said. “We’ve already shot a Netflix special as a production company. So the question now is: what’s the next level after that?”

Internationally, Don’t Tell has tested shows in London, Manchester, Paris, and Barcelona, all English-language for now, and sees significant room to grow before needing to explore other languages. Comedy UO’s ambitions are more localised: Levine’s stated dream venue is the Empire State Building.

The Bigger Picture

Pop-up comedy is the proof case. Two companies, one scaling wide across 250+ cities with a lean producer network, the other going deep in one city with a 35,000-person waitlist and $75 tickets, have independently arrived at the same conclusion: there is a new market for live comedy outside the comedy club.

A note from Luke Girgis

This is the first original guest post on The Black Hoody, and I want to thank Paul for the contribution, and Kyle and David for their transparency in their interviews. It is inspiring to see such success in both of their businesses.

I will be back in Los Angeles and New York next week filming more podcasts for our show. If you have any guest suggestions, please reply in the comments. Both the Comedy Cellar and Barry Katz episodes came from reader suggestions.

Also, for a bit of fun, we have partnered with American Apparel to make Black Hoodies. If you are a subscriber to this newsletter you can get one for free, so stand by for the announcement and check out the design below.

Today, the greatest comedians in the world like Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Louis CK, and Bill Burr pop in at the cellar regularly to test new material and refine their craft before taking it to the world.

In this episode, Noam pulls back the curtain on his comedy empire and reveals:

• How he built the Comedy Cellar into a legendary institution

• The rigorous standards comics must meet to perform at the Cellar

• The unique culture that makes the Cellar an irreplaceable launching pad for comedy

• His history as owner of the iconic New York music venue Cafe Wha?

This is episode three of The Black Hoody Podcast with Luke Girgis, interviews with entertainment executives, agents, artists and managers building remarkable businesses.

If you have guest suggestions for future guests, email me: contact@theblackhoody.com

In this episode, we discuss how he spots talent before it breaks, the negotiation strategies that built comedy empires, and the brutal realities of artist management (including how to survive getting fired).

This is episode two of The Black Hoody Podcast with Luke Girgis, interviews with entertainment executives, agents, artists and managers building remarkable businesses.

If you have guest suggestions, email me: contact@theblackhoody.com

Two decades ago, we fretted over pirates like Napster and Pirate Bay, who robbed the music industry in broad daylight.

Then came Spotify, who infuriated artists swapping sales for streams.

Then came the dominance of Live Nation, a titan accused of squeezing every cent from musicians and fans alike.

The thing all these companies had in common? They need musicians to exist.

Now, a new company emerges, Suno, and they’re unlike every controversial company before them. Why? They’re not here to steal or to squeeze, but to erase musicians from existence. And they just raised $125 million to do it.

This isn’t a disruption to the recorded music industry; it’s an extinction-level event.

Pirate Bay, Spotify & Live Nation Look Like Angels Now

Napster/Pirate Bay

Napster and Pirate Bay looted $12.5 billion from the US economy, obliterating 71,060 jobs per year.

Metallica’s legendary 2000 lawsuit against Napster ignited a two-decade war for control over music’s very essence. Yet, in their fight, Metallica became public pariahs, inadvertently paving the way for Spotify’s free-tier that would follow.

Crucially, even as these digital buccaneers plundered, musicians still needed to exist to create the music being stolen.

Spotify

Spotify pays artists roughly $3 per 1,000 streams.

A payout that ignited the fury of giants like Taylor Swift, who famously withdrew her music from the platform for a period of time. Thom Yorke with a poet’s bite, branded Spotify ‘the last desperate fart of a dying corpse’.

Yet, no matter how you view it, Spotify merely angered musicians over their earnings; it never threatened to kill their existence.

Live Nation

Live Nation controls at least 80% of the ticketing market at major concert venues and 60% of the promotion market.

In May 2024, the Justice Department and 30 states filed a lawsuit against Live Nation for monopolisation, alleging the company uses its control to lock up artists in exclusive promotion deals and venues in long term exclusive ticketing deals.

Yet regardless of how trapped artists feel, Live Nation still needs artists. Without them, Live Nation sells tickets to empty venues.

• Pirate Bay stole from musicians

• The critics accused Spotify of devaluing musicians

• Live Nation have a clear monopoly and control of musicians

• Suno deletes musicians entirely

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You’re Worried About Your Cold When You Have Cancer

The majors are suing Suno for copyright theft, and Suno admitted in a court filing that they trained their AI model on tens of millions of copyrighted recordings, claiming it was legal under fair use doctrine.

But the majors have brought guns to a chemical war.

These legal skirmishes distract us from the true AI tsunami coming, a wave of annihilation poised to engulf the whole recorded music industry.

It’s not about theft, it’s about death.

The Prompt That Changes Everything

I ran an experiment that will send shivers down the spine of every working musician.

I took lyrics from viral rapper Connor Price’s ‘Up’ and fed them into Suno with a simple prompt:

“Craft a soulful, old school blues song rooted in the 1940s Delta blues tradition. Feature a raw, gritty sound with mournful slide guitar, steady harmonica wails, and a slow, shuffling rhythm. Centre the track around a powerful, emotive male vocal delivery, rich with pain and longing, evoking themes of heartbreak, struggle, and resilience. Keep the production sparse and authentic, with a haunting, timeless feel.”

The result? An undeniable, emotional, and beautiful track that sounds like it was born from a 1940s Delta blues legend. Listen for yourself:

How can most artists compete with this?

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Even If Suno Loses Every Lawsuit, It’s Over

Even if Suno loses every single lawsuit, the grim reality remains: the technology is out there.

If not Suno, then someone else will build it, find the legal loopholes or simply be re-created and evolved by a Chinese or Russian actor.

The genie can’t be put back in the bottle.

This is a $60 billion recorded music industry about to be disrupted by technology that reduces production costs to nearly zero. Suno or not, it’s an AI inevitability.

The most dangerous music company isn’t dangerous because it breaks copyright law, squeezes margins or charges exorbitant fees. It’s dangerous because it makes musicians optional.

And $125 million in venture capital agrees.

What would you do if you were Mikey Shulman?

Suno CEO Mikey Shulman is making the claim that Suno did not steal, but trained their model under “fair use”.

Whether that’s true or not is irrelevant, he knows if he lays down his arms, his company will lose and another company, domestic or foreign will replicate their model and dominate.

It’s a lose/lose for the industry. There is NO way for the music industry to stop this wave.

Even if they stop Mikey, they won’t stop AI.

So my question is, what would you do in Mikey’s situation?

Would you fold your company knowing someone else will take your place? Bowing out now would leave the fate of the industry in someone else’s hands.

What Survives: Live Performance

Here’s some good news: live music is bulletproof. Yes, hologram touring will continue to rise, but we only need to look at Chess to have confidence it will never surpass the popularity of humans wanting to watch humans live.

The best chess player in the world can’t beat a computer, but chess tournaments still sell out and get lots of live streamed viewers. Why? Because humans want to watch humans do remarkable things even if computers are better.

Live performance will not only survive; it’ll become more valuable as recorded music becomes commodified.

Scarcity drives value. And the one thing AI can’t replicate is a sweaty, chaotic, transcendent live show.

What Is A Musician In 2035?

So what does a “musician” look like in 2035?

They won’t just be musicians. They’ll have to be world builders, creative directors.

Social media meant artists couldn’t just be artists; they had to become content creators. AI means that musicians can no longer just be content creators; they now have to become world builders and creative directors too.

When you can create genuinely incredible music and content with just a prompt, great music and content won’t be good enough anymore.

The musician as we know it is dead.

This means artists will need to develop comprehensive artistic visions that extend far beyond just the music itself. They’ll be responsible for crafting entire universes around their art, much like a film director or a game developer. This includes everything from visual aesthetics and narrative arcs to interactive experiences, characters and fan communities.

Are artists already doing this? There are some that are ahead of their time, one that comes to mind is Damon Albarn and Gorillaz.

Albarn pioneered the concept of a virtual band, creating an entire animated world and elaborate backstories for his characters. Gorillaz isn’t just about the music; it’s a multimedia experience with a rich narrative and distinct visual identity.

The successful musician in 10 years will simply have their music as the connective tissue for:

• Immersive fan communities

• Content arcs across social platforms

• Live experiences and events

• Virtual worlds, fashion and identity

They’ll evolve into creative directors, much like those at gaming studios, designing entire worlds and identities around their fan communities.

Record labels will serve as the investors in these worlds, much as gaming studios fund and develop their flagship titles.

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The Gaming Model

The labels will transform into what gaming studios are today: infrastructure that funds creative directors (who we now call “artists” or “musicians”).

The gaming industry is worth an estimated $455.27 billion in 2024, and is projected to grow to $625.64 billion by 2028. It employs millions. But the real money and power sits with a few hundred creative directors and the studios who can build and own the worlds people want to inhabit.

The silver lining to this new music industry is that as the cost to create worlds, music and IP is approaching zero, so maybe creative directors and musicians won’t need record labels and gaming studios anymore to fund them?

If I were a record label or gaming studio, I would recognise that when the cost of producing intellectual property approaches zero, the only path to future success is to control the marketing and distribution platforms. At present these platforms are owned by big tech.

Without owning access to the audience, you will have no competitive advantage to gain reach and visibility. Previously, the labels and gaming studios competitive advantage was the ability to create expensive IP (recordings and games), which soon, anyone can do with a laptop. So what will their competitive advantage be?

If labels can’t figure out how to own or control the marketing channels, they’re in big trouble.

Global Backlash Won’t Matter

GEMA’s CEO stated: “Human creativity is the basis of all generative AI. But this market has so far lacked basic principles such as transparency, fairness and respect. AI providers such as Suno Inc. use our members’ works without their consent and profit financially from them”.

The Music Workers Alliance declared: “We believe the ingestion of our recorded work without our consent, credit, and compensation by Generative AI systems to be a violation of our copyrights, and a threat to the livelihoods of countless musicians”.

The International Confederation of Music Publishers called it “the largest IP theft in human history,” claiming these apps rip “tens of millions of works” by musicians and artists every day.

They’re right. And it won’t matter.

This is a chemical war that the music industry think they can win with guns.

They'd tell you about their lucky numbers, maybe their pre-purchase ritual. All completely worthless information dressed up as wisdom.

Successful artists suffer from the same problem: a sample size of one. They can only tell you what worked for them, but they’re blind to the thousand variables they'll never recognise.

Ask any successful artist for career advice and you'll be misguided, especially when they get specific.

Specific Advice: The Survivor's Delusion

Celebrities offer advice that worked for them, expecting it to work for everyone else.

The Weeknd: "Once you've changed who you are or who you've portrayed in your music, the fans, they'll catch it... Once I feel like the world knows me for anything else but my music, then I feel like I failed."

Dave Grohl's advice: "Just play live... I just know that when you walk into a club and you see a band that blows you away you are going to follow that band; you are either going buy their CD; or, you're going to find them online".

Dave Grohl's advice to play live and build a following through clubs is like telling someone to invest in Manhattan real estate. That ship has sailed.

The infrastructure that made his path possible; a thriving club scene, strong listenership at local radio stations, major label A&R scouts in every city has been bulldozed and replaced with algorithms and playlist curators.

Read: You are not Rick Rubin

The Times They Are a-Changin'

Artists who built careers when MTV actually played music videos can't comprehend why you can't just "make great art and get discovered."

Those who went viral on TikTok in 2019 with a 15-second clip don't understand why the same strategy yields nothing in 2025. Now, the platform is saturated with 34 million videos uploaded daily and an algorithm that's moved on to newer engagement mechanics.

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When You Should Listen to Celebrities

Here's the plot twist: Successful artists can teach you about craft, not career.

Ed Sheeran on skill development: "I did 312 gigs in 2009. That's almost a gig a day. You can't do that many shows and not improve."

Jerry Seinfeld on writing: "There’s no writer’s block. There’s lazy. There’s scared. But there’s no writer’s block…. Just sit down and realise you're mediocre and you're going to have to put a lot of effort into this to make it good. That's what writing is."

This advice is replicable. It’s about deliberate practice and hard work.

Any artist can commit to daily practice and hard work. Not every artist can replicate being discovered by Scooter Braun on YouTube in 2008.

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So Who Can You Get Career Advice From?

Want actual career advice?

Find a talent manager who's built careers across multiple decades and genres. Not the one-hit wonder manager who confused being in the right place with being a genius, but the battle-tested veterans with scar tissue and pattern recognition.

WATCH: NY Comedy Club Owner and Comic Manager on The Black Hoody Podcast

Why? Because managers touch and influence every part of an artist's career, and therefore see patterns better than anyone else in the industry.

Unlike artists who only know their own journey, experienced managers have a dataset. They've watched 50 artists try the same thing and can tell you why five succeeded and 45 failed. They understand market dynamics, not just artistic vision.

The Songwriter's Paradox

Even hitmakers writing #1s routinely give terrible career advice.

They'll preach about "authentic storytelling" while cranking out 300 songs annually, knowing 295 will die in a hard drive somewhere.

Songwriters are surgeons, not hospital administrators. They perfect one skill but most remain clueless about artist development, playlist politics, tour routing, or brand partnerships, AKA the business that determines whether anyone hears their "authentic song”.

What you can take away from successful songwriters is their work ethic and how they perfected their craft. I don’t know a single successful songwriter who doesn’t write hundreds of songs a year.

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The Advice They Should Give

Here's what successful artists should actually say:

"I won the lottery. I'm talented, but so are thousands of others you'll never hear of. I had advantages; timing, geography, luck, you probably don't. The industry has completely transformed since I made it. The path I took has been demolished and paved over. You probably won’t get famous despite doing everything right. But if you're genuinely talented and work obsessively, you can build a sustainable living from your art without fame."

Not exactly Grammy speech material, but it's honest.

The Bottom Line

Stop searching for the secret formula. There isn't one.

Build your craft obsessively. Study the business like your life depends on it. Find managers and industry veterans who've seen every permutation of success and failure and learn as much as you can from them.

Create your own path based on current reality, not someone else's nostalgia.

Enter Emilio Savone, who spent twelve years on Manhattan streets selling comedy tickets before building a vertically integrated comedy empire. He owns 5 comedy clubs, a record company, a ticket platform and a management firm.

This is the first episode of The Black Hoody Podcast, I hope you learn as much from Emilio as I did.

The Black Hoody Podcast will be interviewing entertainment executives, agents, artists and managers who are doing unique things in their creative businesses. If you any suggestions for guests please email me; contact@theblackhoody.com

Here are my from episode with Emilio;

The Economics of Comedy Clubs

When Emilio finally bought his first club in 2014, he had to learn unit economics fast. Here's what he revealed about running a successful comedy club:

Comedy Club Revenue breakdown:

• Ticket sales: 40%

• Drinks: 55%

• Private events/other: 5%

The most surprising thing? Successful comedy clubs typically operate at a 20% margin, significantly higher than restaurants who have 3-5% margins.

"The two-drink minimum is crucial," Emilio emphasised. "Death, taxes, and drink minimums. In New York City, the rent's insanely high, staff isn't cheap, and you've got to pay for talent."

The Vertical Integration Strategy

What makes Emilio's business fascinating is how he's vertically integrated multiple revenue streams:

The Ticketing Platform: Custom-built for comedy clubs, it keeps customers on the venue's website rather than redirecting to third-party platforms like Eventbrite. "When we switched to our ticketing platform, our ticket sales jumped 3,000%," he said. The platform now serves over 100 clubs nationwide.

The Record Label: Every show is recorded, and comedians get clips the next day. Popular sets get submitted to SiriusXM, where "normal everyday comics can make $2,000 to $3,000 a month just by putting stuff out."

Management Company: Using data from their ticketing platform, they know exactly where each comedian's audience comes from, making touring decisions more strategic.

The Relationship Game

Unlike other industries, comedy clubs have two customer bases: ticket buyers and comedians. Emilio's success comes from understanding this dynamic.

"We have two customers. We have the people that come in and buy tickets, and we have the comics," he explained. "I want to treat them like they are our customer."

This philosophy extends to practical decisions like allowing comedians to watch shows from the room (most clubs don't allow this because it takes seats from paying customers) and investing $60,000 in camera systems so every comedian gets professional clips.

The payoff? When established comedians like Bill Burr or Andrew Schultz want to work out new material, they choose Emilio's clubs.

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Common Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)

For Club Owners:

1. Cutting corners on staff and management

2. Not spending enough on marketing ($10,000 per week per club on Google Ads)

3. Not listening to comedians' feedback

4. Trying to copy other clubs instead of finding your own lane

5. Getting too complicated with food offerings

For Comedians:

1. Not performing enough (Emilio wants to see 20-30 sets per week minimum)

2. Being arrogant about getting "passed" at other clubs

3. Staying too comfortable at one venue

4. Cancelling last-minute for "better" opportunities

The Bigger Picture

The comedy industry faces the same disruption as music, with traditional gatekeepers losing power to creators who can build direct relationships with audiences. Emilio's model, providing multiple revenue streams, data insights, and genuine career development represents what the new intermediaries need to offer to stay relevant.

"We're not just running a comedy club," he said. "We're selling tickets, and I want to sell tickets for the sake of the comic too."

In an industry built on relationships and reputation, Emilio has created a sustainable competitive advantage by genuinely caring about his comedians' success. The financial returns have followed naturally.

His advice for anyone building in the entertainment space? "You gotta eat what you kill," but make sure everyone at the table gets fed.

Last month I published a story titled "The Entertainment Jobs AI Will Kill." The punchline was that the future of the entertainment industry belongs to professionals with taste and strategy, not the project managers, or process driven workers in social media, PR, agencies or law firms.

Although this is true, it's created an extreme view in the other direction that anyone with an opinion will become a creative god with AI. That is complete bullshit. You aren't Rick Rubin.

AI plus mediocrity still equals mediocrity, just faster and at scale.

As someone who's spent two decades in the music industry, I've watched the Rubin mythology grow to absurd proportions.

Every music industry head, tech bro, and AI evangelist seems to think they're one prompt away from becoming the next barefoot guru of creativity. They're wrong. But more importantly, Rick Rubin was never what they think he was in the first place.

The creatives of yesterday were products of a specific cultural time that was built on gatekeepers. That's the time that allowed a figure like Rick Rubin to thrive.

In the gatekeeper economy, everyone cared about Rick Rubin's opinion. Today, no matter how good your taste is, if you can't execute, you're nothing, even with AI.

Why? No one cares about your opinion, they care about your results.

The entire ecosystem has fundamentally changed. We aren't living in a Rick Rubin world anymore. As I wrote about recently in my piece on how the Australian music lost it’s global relevance, we're no longer operating in a world where a handful of tastemakers control the cultural narrative. That era is behind us.

The following piece was originally published on Hot Takes. If you like what you read, I recommend subscribing to their newsletter.

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In the gen AI art discourse, where people believe creativity is being ‘democratized’ by software that reassembles and regurgitates, Rick Rubin has become something of a patron saint. A man who, according to legend, sits barefoot in a room and wills great music into existence through sheer presence. In tech circles his name is spoken like summoning a creature from Magic The Gathering, usually to justify the idea creativity is less about skill and more about taste. That being the right kind of observer with the right kind of aesthetic (which almost no one even has) is all that’s required. But here’s the truth: you are not Rick Rubin. And more importantly, Rick Rubin isn’t even Rick Rubin in the way you think he is.

Rubin was a product of a mass culture era, a time when the right gatekeeper in the right room could shape the trajectory of an entire creative industry. He had taste, for sure. But more crucially he had access. He had the ability to say yes when yes meant something: distribution was scarce, media was centralized, a record label’s executive decision could set off a chain reaction leading all the way to platinum sales. Rubin was part of an ecosystem where discovery was still dictated by a handful of tastemakers at the top. In 1984 when he co-founded Def Jam the music industry was a walled city, and he was inside holding the light. The world has changed dramatically since: the internet blew up the pop star factory, pop music is now demoralizing slop, most people don’t have a serious interest in the art form, and dismal MBAs run the show. The era Rubin led for (mass) culture was in my opinion better. I wonder if some of the AI nerds or modern music execs ever sit and think deeply enough about why that might be.

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What’s also forgotten in all this AI-era hero worship is that Rubin was not a lone mystic, he was a highly connected individual with institutional backing. He met Russell Simmons at NYU. He built his legend in an industry that, at the time, was defined by a series of hierarchical decisions. And even then, he wasn’t exactly working against the grain, he was channeling and amplifying existing cultural currents, not creating them from scratch. Hip-hop was already bubbling up in New York, heavy metal was already finding its stride. Rubin wasn’t the source, he was the conduit. Of note I respect the game and don’t dislike him at all.

Fast forward to today, and the creative landscape has fragmented beyond recognition. The mass culture model has shattered into many niches, and the idea that anyone can be a tastemaker in the same way Rubin was is pure misplaced nostalgia. AI evangelists want to believe in the myth of the Rubin archetype because it suggests all you need is a good enough filter, good enough prompting, and you too can be the sage. But that’s not really how it works here. The levers of culture have shifted. Curation is commoditized in an era where everything is already being endlessly curated by algorithms tuned for engagement. And also, literally everyone is a curator of their own music preferences and playlists now with or without algos. Maybe you can get really good at making mixes or playlists (I make many here, it’s fun) but the point is no one is doing this at scale for the entire culture any longer.

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Aside from curation, you also can’t really prompt your way to make anything actually interesting or unique. So no one will be Rubin through prompt-based music. If you can’t compose, the best you can do here without knowing anything else is curate. That’s great, I love that people do this. Still, eventually anyone serious about music wants to create original works. Anyone could get a copy of Ableton which provides a full studio at your fingertips and actually do something unique. This software has existed for a long time (decades) and I honestly think if you wanted to make anything yourself by now you’d be doing it already. Literally nothing stopping anyone but will, the barriers are gone. There aren’t hordes of people sitting around thinking “oh if this was slightly easier I would do this.” It’s already very easy. The non-prompt tools are infinitely better than the prompt tools, making any music of consequence requires fine-tuned controls.

The Rubin model worked in a pre-streaming era, a world of scarcity, mass culture and hits that actually had substance. What matters now (if you just wanted to make money, which is all anyone in that industry wants) is someone that can be marketed and sticks against a culture that’s mostly nihilistic, dumbed down and demoralized about the art form (without really knowing why). It’s honestly more about the person than the music here, because we live in a Debord-esque society of spectacle, and craft is mostly an anachronism. Rubin could do what he did with great artists because the cultural moment allowed it. That moment is gone. It doesn’t mean people aren’t still making great works, many are, it’s just part of niche cultural movements and communities you have to seek out.

Anyway, you are not Rick Rubin. And even if you wanted to be just like him, it wouldn’t help now.

My friend Buster Scher, founder of The Hobby Letter, has run multi-million dollar marketing campaigns for some of the biggest record labels in the world, and he tells me he’s never seen an opportunity quite like Whop.

If you're like me, you probably had no idea what Whop was until very recently.

Launched in 2020 as a Discord/Patreon competitor allowing creators to host communities, Whop has quietly become one of the most important marketing platforms for the music industry, paying out over $1 billion to creators and clippers despite being relatively unknown.

To help The Black Hoody’s 3,000+ entertainment industry executives, managers and agents get across Whop as quickly, we teamed up with The Hobby Letter to co-write this article.

What is Whop?

At its core, Whop is a platform where artists can pay people to create and share content featuring their music. Simple as that. But the execution is what makes it revolutionary.

Here's how it works:

You create a campaign with a total budget and set specific parameters, namely;

• Which platforms you want content on

• Who can apply (follower count, location, niche)

• What percentage of the video needs to feature your artist

• How much you'll pay per thousand views (CPM)

CPMs on Whop range from $0.60-$2.00, which is absurdly cheap compared to any other digital marketing channel.

For context, the average CPM for Instagram ads is $7.91, while Facebook sits around $8.60, and YouTube ranges between $7-$10 for skippable ads if you’re targeting western countries. TikTok CPMs typically start at $10, and music-specific influencer campaigns often command $15-25 CPMs. Even programmatic audio ads on Spotify average $15-25 CPMs.

As you can see, attention is the currency, and right now Whop is giving away Lamborghinis for the price of a bus ticket.

Who makes content for you?

Once you start your campaign on Whop, two types of people apply:

• Creators: People making original content featuring your song

• Clippers: People reposting or repurposing existing content featuring your song

You approve or deny each submission, and the platform handles all payments automatically.

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Music marketing at scale

For years, the labels and managers have been manually engaging influencers to try and get as many accounts to post videos with their songs as possible. Whop now automates this marketing strategy to allow anyone to do it at scale.

With Whop, you can flood social media with hundreds or thousands of videos featuring your artist's song, making it feel like it's everywhere.

Here’s how The Hobby Letter explains it;

Whop makes it cheaper, easier to get high quality UGC (user generated content), with greater reach, and more authenticity. It offers;

• $2 or less CPM (unbeatable price)

• You only pay based on content performance, which means you pay more for the content that gets results and less for the content that doesn’t.

• Because there are plenty of different campaigns to choose from, clippers and creators will self-select campaigns that their audience would be most interested in, making it easy to reach your target market.

Consider This: Once your Whop campaign is running and videos of your song are all over social, other creators are going to start using that song outside of your campaign.

If it looks like everyone is making content using your song… then everyone else will start making content using your song.

Rule of Thumb: Good content compounds and bad content goes nowhere.

• While Whop can be the spark, it’s much better to be used to fan the flame

• The success of your campaign is dictated by how good the song is

• If a song starts to work organically, creators and clippers can amplify that success… but they can’t pour gasoline on a fire that isn’t there

CASE STUDY: One artist who has already jumped onto Whop is Russ

• Russ has paid out a little over $20,000 USD in the last 30 days to fans to clip and promote his music.

• This $20K was spread out across 13 separate campaigns, each with a slight twist.

• Across these 13 campaigns there were over 1,000 submissions from creators and clippers all over the world.

• The results? More than 50 million views on content featuring his new song MOVIN.

• That’s a CPM rate of $0.40*

The marketer who wins isn't the one with the biggest budget, it's the one who understands where consumer attention is underpriced. Russ knows where.

Zoom In: Russ set the parameters for his campaigns to only be eligible to creators and clippers in specific niches that he knows love his music.

^{*Calculated at 50M views and $20K spend}

Other Brands: In addition to participating in Russ’ campaigns, The Hobby Letter has also worked on campaigns for brands and celebrities like:

• The Kid Laroi

• Michael Jackson

• Murda Beatz

• Rich the Kid

• Shaq

• HBO

• GaryVee

• Logan Paul

• Jake Paul

• Druski

• Fanatics

• Autopilot

• + Dozens more

ZOOM OUT: This is still an incredibly early opportunity for artists and clippers alike.

• Despite being a relatively niche platform, Whop has already paid out over $1 Billion to clippers and creators

• The people on Whop so far are primarily professional (or aspiring) clippers. What happens when an artist’s fans become aware of the opportunity?

• Imagine what will happen if someone like Taylor Swift or BTS throws down a $100,000 campaign to promote a new single and links to it on an Instagram Story? That song will be EVERYWHERE

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Russ has figured it out

Russ spent just $20,000 across 13 different campaigns in a single month. The result? Over 1,000 submissions generating more than 50 million views on content featuring his new song "MOVIN." That's a CPM of $0.40 - literally unheard of in digital marketing.

The best part? Because Russ targeted specific niches that already loved his music, the content felt authentic rather than paid.

Advice from The Hobby Letter when using Whop;

1. Set different CPM rates: Pay more ($1.50-$2.00) for content showing faces and less ($0.60-$1.00) for faceless content. Authenticity sells.

2. Set reasonable thresholds: Establish minimum view counts for payment, but keep them realistic. Set maximum payout caps to prevent one viral video from eating your entire budget.

3. Include usage rights: Make sure your campaign terms allow you to reuse the best content on your own channels.

4. Don't manage it yourself: Just like most aspects of management, outsource this. There are professionals who specialize in Whop campaign management.

5. Use it to amplify, not create momentum: Whop works best when the song already has some organic traction. As one of my artists used to say, "You can't pour gasoline on a fire that isn't there."

The opportunity is massive

Despite having already paid out $1 billion to creators, Whop is still in its infancy. Most major labels haven't caught on yet, but they will soon.

The Hobby Letter predicts we'll see a $100K campaign from a major label by the end of 2025, a $1M campaign by 2026, and a Billboard #1 hit powered primarily by Whop clipping by next year.

But the real question is: what happens when an artist like Taylor Swift throws down a $100K campaign and announces it to her fans on Instagram?

Whop would explode overnight.

P.S. I’ll be in New York this month

I'm in New York this month on Simone Giertz business. If any subscribers want to meet up while I'm in town, please reach out.

Also, I'll be attending The OOO Summit - For Owners, Operators, and Outliers. Highly recommend getting a ticket if you're in the city on May 15 and 16.

"All the value is about to go to the thinkers... AI will take away a lot of the jobs that … (build) a fucking excel sheet." Gary Vaynerchuk

Since 2012, I’ve managed artists and ran various businesses. I’ve witnessed first-hand how technology, namely the internet, actually increased jobs in the entertainment industry with Social Media Managers, Distribution Managers, Influencer Marketers, etc.

But what technology has given, it will take away. AI will be an extinction-level event for a lot of roles within the music and comedy industries.

The AI Endgame

If you're not making creative decisions in the business, if you're not the person with taste determining what gets made and how it gets made, you will likely lose your job.

In an ecommerce business I currently run, I've reduced the size of the marketing team by 60% over the last 3 months. Why? AI tools can execute simple tasks, build out plans (under voice directive), create basic imagery, draft promotional copy, and analyse campaign data more efficiently than a room full of mid-level marketers.

The members in the team who stayed got raises, their productivity has increased by 10x.

Taste + High Productivity = Survival. Everything else = roadkill.

The Operating System Jobs vs. The Creative Decision Jobs

When I look at the music and comedy industries, I see two distinct categories of work:

Operating System Jobs: Chasing assets and 3rd parties, data entry, administrative work, project management, booking travel, scheduling social media, buying ads, etc.

Creative Decision Jobs: A&R, creative direction, innovative marketing strategy, artist management etc.

If your job falls primarily into the first category I would be looking to upskill into a creative job ASAP.

According to a recent McKinsey report, approximately 60% of administrative tasks in creative industries could be automated or aided by AI. That's not speculative; that's based on AI capabilities that already exist today.

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Jobs That Will Disappear

1. Junior Publicists and PR Coordinators

The stark reality is that AI can already write simple press releases, personalise emails, create media lists, and track campaign metrics. A good PR director with taste and relationships will remain valuable, but the army of juniors who used to handle the grunt work? Gone.

2. Social Media Managers (The Executors, Not The Strategists)

If your entire job is posting content, scheduling it, and doing basic community management, you're already being replaced. The person in your team who has all the creative social media ideas will be using AI to execute them, not you.

According to a 2024 Hubspot survey, 74% of social media professionals are already using AI tools to handle at least part of their workload, and we are only in the first innings.

3. Data Analysts

When I ran Rolling Stone Australia last year, I would often send a request to my head of data, who would take a day to send me back a report with some insights. If I had further questions, it would take a few more hours to get me what I needed.

Now, I don't have anyone who is a data analyst in my team. I upload all my raw data into the various AI platforms and get detailed analysis in minutes.

What used to require a team now requires a prompt.

Where We Win: Taste as the Ultimate Differentiator

The one thing AI cannot replicate is true taste. The ability to identify what's cool before it's cool. The intuition to understand what will resonate with an audience on a deeper level. The vision to see where culture is heading, not where it's been.

This is why top A&R executives will remain valuable, on the other hand the A&R who just looks at streaming and social trends to sign the next big thing is done for.

I’m certain that creative directors and artist managers with strategic and creative minds won't be replaced.

As a manager, I believe the most valuable thing I offer isn't scheduling or admin, it's the ability to see something in an artist that others can't yet see, and to build a strategy around that vision.

Lawyers & Agents

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There's a key group worth examining: the negotiators who deal with artists' rights and IP. But the impact on them won't be uniform.

The top-tier lawyers and agents, those with deep industry relationships, proven track records, and strategic minds will likely become more valuable than ever. However, the mid-level and junior professionals in these fields are facing a serious threat.

Think about it: Why would an artist manager hire a junior lawyer at $400 an hour to draft and review a standard sync licensing agreement when they could use Claude or another AI tool to do the work for zero of the cost and instant action?

Why bring in a new booking agent with limited connections when an AI tool could identify optimal tour routing and even handle the initial venue outreach?

I'm already shifting to this with my own management company. See my tech stack here which I published in September last year.

However, the most elite negotiators will survive and thrive, the lawyer who can understand how to best influence deals, the agent who can piece together a complex global tour strategy with personal relationships and insight. But the rank-and-file professionals who handle routine contracts and bookings… They're toast.

According to an analysis by LawGeex, legal AI tools can already perform contract review tasks with 94% accuracy in 20% of the time. Humans doing the same test did it at 80% accuracy. The implications for the entertainment law field are obvious.

The Big Four & law firms are already using AI for contract management, citing “notable time savings” as per the Financial Times.

My prediction? The headcount at major entertainment agencies and law firms will drop by 60-80% over the next five years. But, those who remain, the elite negotiators with genuine strategic value will likely earn more than ever before, as firms eliminate junior roles and invest more in their true experts and innovators.

What This Means For Your Career

If you're early in your career in music or comedy know that technical skills alone won't make you valuable. Building taste and developing your creative judgment is now more important than ever.

Some concrete steps:

Develop opinions and the ability to articulate why something works (or doesn't): Can you explain why a particular album resonates while a similar one falls flat? Can you identify what makes a comedy special memorable versus forgettable?

Look for roles that involve creative decision-making: Even if it means taking a pay cut or a more junior title, positioning yourself in jobs where you make creative or strategic calls will future-proof your career.

Embrace AI as a tool, not a threat: The most successful creative professionals will be those who use AI to handle the mundane so they can focus on the creative.

A More Creative Industry?

If AI can handle the operating system of the industry, and the only people left are the creatives who can run their businesses cheaper and more efficiently, it will allow more energy and resources to be poured into art.

The music and comedy companies that thrive will be those that use AI to cut costs on administration and reinvest those savings into creative development, into finding and nurturing unique voices.

The Human Touch: Why Some Roles Are Safe

There's a critical category of jobs that will remain solidly human: those that interface directly with artists.

Tour managers, personal assistants, on-site production crews, and others who provide direct, in-person support to artists aren't going anywhere. The personal touch, understanding a talent's mood before a show, knowing exactly how they take their coffee, providing emotional support during a grueling tour… these human elements can't be replicated by AI.

The Bottom Line

The future of music and comedy belongs to those with taste and strategy.

If you're just taking meetings, entering data, sending emails, or booking travel, start evolving your role now.

When I look at my roster of companies and talent, I've already successfully acted on this shift with incredible results. I now only hire and promote people with taste and vision or who can utilise AI tools to 10x their productivity.

If you take just one thing from this piece, hear this: those in the creative industry who aren't creative and aren’t productive will be out of a job, surprise surprise.

From court jesters roasting kings (and somehow keeping their heads) to Lenny Bruce hauled off-stage by cops during a daring standup in buttoned-up 1960s America, comedians have taken the responsibility of saying what most of us can't or won't.

Lenny - Arrested for Obscenity Scene

Over the last five years, we’ve lived through the most intense wave of culture-driven censorship in my lifetime.

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Kevin Hart stepped down from hosting the 2019 Oscars after an old tweet resurfaced containing homophobic slurs. SNL fired Shane Gillis for comments deemed “offensive, hurtful, and unacceptable” made in past podcasts. The list goes on.

Kevin Hart addressing the Oscars

Even with a loaded gun aimed at artists who commit thoughtcrime, comedians like Dave Chappelle stood their ground. He took on risky topics that most avoided. Chappelle famously joked about transgenderism, facing major backlash, but he didn't back down.

NBC NEWS: Chappelle Backlash Continues Over Transgender Jojes

Bill Burr chose "women" and the "MeToo" movement as his forbidden topics. Burr appeared on Conan and declared, "Women are overrated," and provocatively challenged the "Believe all women" mantra.

“Believe women? All of them? How about 85%? I’ll give you 87%, alright? But that last 13% that keys your car, lights your shit on fire and puts a family pet in a pot of stew……”

Bill Burr Thinks Women Are Overrated

Predictably, the Left hated comedians like Chappelle and Burr, while the Right embraced them.

But what happened to the comics who refused to challenge culture and merely echoed what was safe to? Comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert have had their viewership decimated to audience sizes most full time YouTubers would be embarrassed with.

Have you seen a clearer example of a comedian embracing culture, instead of challenging it, than Stephen Colbert dancing for vaccines?

This isn't "go woke, go broke." It's "follow the culture—and die."

Compare this to the growth of Bill Burr over the same time period;

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The comedians who have a backbone, have an audience.

Now the culture has flipped

As soon as Trump was re-elected in 2024, the cultural tides shifted overnight. Issues that previously sparked endless outrage — even in blue states — now barely raise eyebrows. Maybe we're exhausted, or perhaps we've collectively moved on, it doesn’t matter, the only thing that matters for comedians is realising the culture has changed.

This leaves comedians who championed free speech and unpopular conservative ideas over the last 5 years suddenly in a new position. The once-taboo topics they courageously addressed are now mainstream. It seems they've won; but what's next?

Bill Burr is the first comedian with the answer

Burr has adapted to the 2025 cultural pivot faster than anyone. With zero allegiance to any political tribe, Burr is now ruthlessly roasting those currently setting cultural standards.

On the Tonight Show Bill Burr went after Billionaires;

“(Billionaires) got people wearing adult diapers driving 18-wheelers trying to get Crocs to the box store on time. They’re horrible, heartless people!

“And then, for some reason, if you say that, you’re like a communist.” he went on.

“And then they try to politicise everything you say, and it’s just like, I don’t know, shouldn’t you pay your workers?”

How is the Right responding? Now they hate him, too. The popular Valuetainment podcast recently melted down over Burr’s takes on Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

“I personally don’t know what happened to Bill Burr, maybe it’s his wife, maybe it’s something else” Vinnie Oshana of Valutainment said reacting to a Bill Burr podcast clip, “You’re so stupid and gullible, you think (Elon Musk) is going to do the Natzi salute twice? That just shows how stupid Bill Burr is, that’s how gone he is. I guarantee you he was one of the BLM posting the black squares and all that shit.”

Bill Burr TORCHED Over Elon Musk Natzi Contraversy - Valutainment

And Ben Shapiro lost it over Burr’s take on Billionaires too.

“Bill Burr is a morale and economic idiot” Ben Shapiro claimed, “because you miss understand economics, (billionaires) need to be killed because they’re suddenly centralising all the resources? Please, name the person from whom Elon Musk has stolen money….. From whom Bill Burr has stolen his money? Bill Burr has a net worth apparently of $20 million”

Bill Burr’s INSANE Take On Billionaires - Ben Shapiro

Are you a comedian?

If you’re a comedian who finds their audience nodding and clapping to every joke, newsflash: you’re not a comedian, you’re a preacher.

Bill Burr is a comedian; a cultural slap to the face at precisely the moment it hurts the most.

Burr’s pivot to roasting the Right, after years of enraging the Left, isn't flip-flopping or opportunism. It's clarity. It’s honesty. It’s comedy.

New York Comedy Club Owner Emilio Savone told The Black Hoody that, “We are always living in absurd times and a comics job is to poke fun and to challenge. A great comic will walk into a room and if it’s a room that’s thinking one way, they’re duty as a comedian is to challenge it and break down the walls so we can all find the humor in all of it. Bill does that better than anyone else. He’s our modern day Carlin.”

If the comedians who challenged the Left when they were in power don’t challenge the Right now, their careers could suffer. They might end up just like those comedians who only followed trends over the past five years.

Burr is a case study on incredible art, and as a by-product, great business.

Artists no longer have to beg music supervisors to have their songs played in ads, movies, shows and sports - artists can now create sync themselves.

That’s what artist NXCRE has done, and it 10x’d his career. 

This case study challenges the traditional "quality over quantity" mindset in content creation. NXCRE posted over 11 Shorts per day - a volume that would make most artists break out in hives. Yet the numbers are undeniable: 525 videos with over 1 million views each. That's not luck; that's marketing via algorithm.

This article was originally published in The Hobby Letter, one of the most insightful social media marketing newsletters I subscribe to. You should follow the founder Buster on socials, he’s a social media genius.

The Timeline

NXCRE posted his first Short on January 4, 2023. He didn’t post his second one until August 14, 2023. It took an entire year, before this strategy started to work. He made two changes in his approach that allowed his channel (and music) to to take off:

• He changed from doing Shorts of vintage WWE compilations to more general pop culture and sports videos that had already gone viral on other platforms.

• He drastically increased his posting rate.

• From August 1, 2023 - July 31, 2024 he posted 95 Shorts.

• Since August 1, 2024 he has posted 1858 Shorts.

• That’s posting more than 11 times per day.

via Social Blade

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YouTube Shorts Performance

Some of NXCRE’s top performing Shorts have between 25M-75M views each!

• Out of the 1858 Shorts that he’s posted, 525 of them have at least 1M views.

• Since August 1, 2024 his channel has amassed over 3 BILLION views.

• This is getting his music in front of hundreds of millions of people who had never heard of him

• And it took him less than six months!

Screenshot via NXCRE YouTube

The Results

Since the revamp in his strategy NXCRE’s social metrics have only done one thing… go up and to the right.

• On YouTube, he went from 17.1K subscribers to 1.01M.

• He’s grown to close to 800K monthly listeners on Spotify.

• His songs have gained millions of views on YouTube and Spotify.

• Not to mention the billions of listens he gets through including them in YouTube Shorts.

Fan sentiment

If you click on NXCRE’s recent videos, some of the top comments are people saying how they are there because of YouTube Shorts:

• “After hearing it on a million shorts, I decided to check out the full song. Well done gentlemen, killed it.” — 49K Likes

• “Bro harassed us on shorts enough to where we had to check it out😂😭” — 24K Likes

• “Who came from YouTube shorts” — 23K Likes

• “the marketing of these guys with the shorts is crazy” — 7K Likes

• “The amount of YouTube shorts I’ve skimmed through watching someone do something bad ass while this song plays in the background is absurd. But instead of hating the sound bite, I started to love it.” — 3.3K Likes

• “Whoever came with the idea of advertising this songs using the meme in yt shorts, seriously needs a raise” — 876 Likes

• “bro, I found this gem watching a shorts video, finally something a short is useful for, crazy world we live in.” — 803 Likes

• “Dude, I randomly found these songs on several shorts and I have to say THEY GENUINELY ROCK WITH THESE SONGS” — 743 Likes

• “Bro became a YouTube shorts legends and now he lives rent free in my mind” — 370 likes

This case study was first published on The Hobby Newsletter.

Her evidence? Her award-winning band couldn’t afford to buy a house in Sydney.

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The issue is, data is not on her side. Music is now bigger than the entire global movie industry. Recorded music jumped to a staggering $45.5 billion in 2023, which makes it 38% larger than cinema. 

While the critics were writing music's obituary, it was busy outgrowing Hollywood.

There is more money in music now than there has ever been in human history

Not being able to buy a house in Sydney has nothing to do with the music industry; most people in most professions can’t afford a house in Sydney. 

And just because an artist with a lot of awards isn’t rich, it doesn’t mean there isn’t money in music; it means most awards aren’t correlated with commercial success.

Plenty of artists have a trophy room full of awards and a bank account full of IOUs.

I know multi-millionaire artists who've never won an award and several Grammy winners who live paycheck to paycheck. 

The lesson here is, if you want to stay broke as an artist, make winning awards your number one goal. 

There is a lot of money in music now; it should be the most optimistic time to be working in this industry than ever before. 

Let me break it down into terms of then vs. now. For context, then = pre-streaming and social media.

1. Global Superstars

Then: Private jets

Now: Private jets + billion-dollar empires. Taylor Swift’s net worth is $1.6B, the first musician to hit billionaire status primarily through music.

2. Middle Tier Artists

Then: Comfortable living 

Now: Very rich (with a favourable record or distribution deal), not so rich if you’re grossly unrecouped on a record deal where you only get about a 20% royalty. 

3. Long Tail Artists Without Mainstream Support

Then: Day job required 

Now: Potential six-figure income. 

Let's run the numbers: An independent artist with 10M monthly streams on Spotify generates:

• Streaming revenue: $600,000 ($0.005 x 10M x 12)

• Less distribution & collaborator costs (35%): -$210,000 = Net annual: $390,000

There are thousands of artists you've never heard of making real money. No fame is required, just fans.

Artists making $100k a year might not be able to afford to buy a house in Sydney, but they can make a living without fame. This wasn’t possible before the streaming era. 

In the clip below, Canadian artist BBNO$ explains that he generates $5k USD / day from his 10 million monthly listeners on Spotify. 

That means your favourite smaller artist, whom few people have heard of, is making a living. 

If we look at two artists that I love below, and assume they get five streams for every monthly listener they have, and that they keep 65% of their revenue, we can make the following assumptions:

• Marlon Craft (1.5mil monthly listeners) - $292,500 net annual Spotify revenue 

• Brother Ali (300k monthly listeners) - $58,500k net annual Spotify revenue 

Note that these revenues are just from Spotify alone, you can probably double these numbers when you account for revenue from all other platforms such as YouTube, Apple Music, Amazon and SoundCloud. 

Most people reading this article wouldn’t have heard of Marlon Craft and Brother Ali; they’re not famous but make incredible music, and have found an audience and a living.

 4. ‘No Fanbase’ artists

Some things haven’t changed. Previously, no fans meant no album sales and now it means no streams. Talent alone has never been enough—it needs to find an audience. 

No person is entitled to money despite how talented they are. Artists need to find people who actually want to buy what they are selling. 

Reality is a harsh mistress.

Geography is Dead

Emerging markets are becoming serious players for the first time. For instance, Mexican artists earned $350 million in the US market in 2023—that's $200 million more than they would have earned on the same streams back home. 

No longer is your market your own country. Australian artists like Vacations and Dope Lemon are far bigger in the US than they are in their home country, despite not living abroad. 

Before the streaming era, breaking into an international market often required relocating there. The new music industry doesn't care where you live - it cares where your audience is.

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If you aren’t making money now, you likely wouldn’t have made money then

The old music industry sold records, the new one prints money.

There have never been more artists living off of their music than right now. 

Paid subscriptions to streaming services have exceeded 500 million globally, driving consistent revenue growth; while long-tail artists are making more money now as a collective than ever before. 

Does this mean every musician is rich? Of course not. But it does mean there are more paths to a sustainable income thanks to streaming. 

The fact the music copyright market is now worth nearly double what it was in 2014 ($25 billion then vs. $45.5 billion now) isn’t just a statistic—it’s a clear indication that money is flowing into music at unprecedented levels.

It’s time to rewire your brain to the new massive opportunity in music.

• Artists: Focus on audience building, not award-chasing.

• Managers: Ensure your artists can make a living off their music even if they only achieve moderate success. This is all about the types of deals you sign and the business plan you develop. 

While the pessimists blame streaming for their failures, the optimists who are focused on growing their audiences are collecting checks.

Stop saying there's no money in music. There's never been more of it; you just need to find an audience. 

Talent Management Is A War On Your Time

It’s the only business I’ve run in which I find it impossible to work “on the business” rather than “in the business.” Most talent management firms that scale either don’t work on strategy with their clients (they basically become a brand or booking agency) or they open up other services that can scale, like becoming a record label. 

Artists and creators pay their managers a commission of all their earnings in exchange for their brains at each moment, so a manager must be across everything. Talent managers respond to most emails, attend every meeting and are on every call. This is why talent management is nearly an impossible business to scale if you want to do the job well. 

You can indeed hire day-to-day managers to help with the emails, calls, and follow-ups, but that’s hardly “scaling” by any other industry standard — it just frees up the manager’s time a little bit. 

I’ve spent nearly two decades running my management firm with a lean roster and strong margins, and only since the invention of AI, do I feel like managers can actually start to win the war on time. 

Simone Giertz, inventor on the Be Like Children roster

Here is the tech stack and some use cases I have implemented at Be Like Children to show how you can finally win the war on time:

Superhuman - $33 USD / Month

The first battle in the war on time - your inbox

Superhuman is an email client built for speed. I pay US$33 monthly for this thing, and I’d pay double if they asked. Here’s why:

1. Speed: If you master the Superhuman keyboard shortcuts — which are easy and intuitive —  you’ll shave hours off your inbox time every week. 

2. Snippets: About 30% of emails are low-IQ, repetitive emails that hit your inbox multiple times a day asking or enquiring about similar things, so you shouldn’t waste more than a few seconds on each.
   
   Enter Snippets.
   
   Superhuman lets you save pre-written responses — essentially templates — for those inevitable, repetitive emails that hit talent managers’ inboxes. In two clicks, you select the Snippet, it populates the email, CCs the right people, and you’re done. No brainpower or time is required.

Here’s the kicker: using these ‘canned replies’ for sponsorship enquiries actually increased my close rate on deals. As it turns out, a proven formula outperforms all those time-sucking “personalised” responses I used to think were charming.

Here are two examples of Snippets I have:

1. Public speaking request

And here is Simone on stage at Config 2024

2. Here’s the template response, or Snippet, for inbound sponsorship requests

As you can see, I did actually add one line about Christian’s experience with this particular category for context.

And here’s a hilarious video of Christian regretting taking on this partnership:

3. Reminders: Set it, forget it. Automate your follow-ups so you can stop mentally flagging every email that needs a reply or follow up. Superhuman’s keyboard shortcuts make setting reminders fast and easy. 

4. AI Search: Superhuman has AI search. Watch this demo, and then tell me you’re not willing to pay for faster, smarter inbox searches:

Claude AI - $20 USD / Month

Win the war on time and legal expenses

Here’s a little secret: I no longer use lawyers for deals under $20k. Why? Claude AI. 

This tool reads legal documents like a seasoned paralegal, highlights what you should push back on, explains complicated clauses, and even drafts responses for you. It’s not just a time-saver — it’s a cost-killer.

Of course, all the talent on my roster have approved of this practice, and I’ve saved them tens of thousands in legal fees over the past few months alone. You know that small $5k deal you passed on because the legal costs would swallow your margin and take too much time to review? Claude makes those deals possible again.

Check out an example prompt from my Claude account below:

You often need to go back and forth with Claude several times per agreement — asking it to clarify details, fix formatting for easier copying and pasting, and so on. I advise you to keep engaging with it and experiment with different ways of phrasing your requests as the model improves.

Note: If you’re a new manager with just a few years experience, I think you should still use a lawyer. Lawyers are the best teachers and they’ll help you learn and understand contracts, if you ask them. The first 5 years of my management career were a legal education; I treated our lawyers like my legal tutors. 

But that’s not all Claude is great at. It’s also a surprisingly good creative partner. Check out how health tech founder Presh Dineshkumar used Claude to build his personal website (and yes, full disclosure, I just invested in his company):

Mind blowing 🤯

In another example below, journalist and analyst Cherie Hu called Claude 3.5 sonnet “actually CRAZY”:

Chat GPT - $20 USD / Month

You’re the dumbest person in the room — here’s how to fix that

John Watson — who is in my view, Australia’s best artist manager — nailed it: “As a manager, you are always the dumbest person in the room”.

The label knows more about records than you do. The promoter knows more about touring. The publisher knows more about publishing. Your job is to manage them all without being the expert in anything. Enter ChatGPT.

Every manager should have a paid ChatGPT account on their phone’s home screen and desktop. It’s the easiest way to get complex ideas explained to you in simple terms and it offers answers to questions that I otherwise would have had to call an experienced industry friend to understand. 

It also helps me with:

• Building out draft business plans or helping me plug holes in established ones

• Pitch decks

• Spreadsheet analysis

• Creating charts and visualisations from spreadsheets
  

Perplexity AI - $20 USD / Month

Too good to be legal? 

Let’s not kid ourselves: Google is an ad engine that occasionally provides search results.

I didn’t realise how time-consuming Google was with each search before I started using Perplexity AI. Scrolling past ads, clicking in and out of pages until I found what I was after… Perplexity cuts all that out. 

Perplexity doesn’t just answer questions, it gives you the receipts, e.g. references, links, summaries, and sources. It has the ability to ask deeper follow-up questions too. Google search can’t compete.

The power of this tool might not last forever, though. In fact, it’s probably too good to be legal, as Morning Brew pointed out in their sketch: 

Todoist ​​- $9 USD / user / month for the plan I’m on

Not (much) AI, but will save your brain

Do you receive constant group chat notifications and endless SMS pings from talent? They don’t just drain your time — they chip away at your mental health.

As a young manager, I thought being available 24/7 was the key. I jumped into every group chat, ready to respond to every half-baked idea or random thought that popped into a band member’s head. It was chaos. My day became a reactive mess, and I was getting nothing done.

Then I found a better way: Todoist.

Here’s the system I built:

• WIP Board: Any topic we need to discuss goes here. Whether it’s me or the talent, it gets added to the board and we hash it out during our weekly meeting. This stops the never-ending ping pong of messages and prevents me from jumping on every minor issue during the week.

• Activity Board: Every gig, content plan, or media appearance is tracked here, with contracts and details attached. No more “What’s next?” or “Where’s this?” texts. 

• Project Boards: Each talent gets their own board for their individual projects, making it easy to see what’s in progress and where we need to focus.

Todoist isn’t about shutting out talent, it’s about setting boundaries so you can actually be a manager, not a reactor. 

Hubspot - pricing depends on the features you want; I pay AU$123 / month

Sales tracking the fastest, easiest way

HubSpot is a CRM. That’s it, that’s the headline. After trying a laundry list of deal flow tools, I landed on HubSpot for one reason: it’s the cheapest option that does everything I need. Done.

Bottom line: If you’re still managing talent like you did five years ago, you’re almost definitely losing the war on time. 

AI technology is no longer a fun toy or gimmick; we’re way past that. 

Win the un-winnable war, and invest in tools that save you time, money, and mental bandwidth.

If you have any questions about how I use these tools or want me to explain them further, please ask in the comments.

And, of course, if you recommend any tools not mentioned here, let me know.

Australia is the country that you used to know.

In 2017, Richard Kingsmill left his role as Music Director of triple j, the radio station responsible for kickstarting the careers of 15 of the 20 Australian global breakouts between 2011 and 2020. 

While he was in charge, artists which were added to high rotation got a lot of spins. Speaking to The Black Hoody, label sources reported that high-rotation songs received 120-140 spins ten years ago vs the 60-80 spins they get now. 

It could be argued that Kingsmill had the most influence on breaking Australian artists than anyone else in the country. The songs Kingsmill added would get massive support on triple j, cross over to commercial radio, then dominate the ARIA charts. 

Record labels could then carry that momentum and story globally, using it to join international tours, festival lineups, co-signs and press opportunities.

triple j was the flame to the bonfire. Was being the operative word.

A Country Built On One Radio Station

However, when Kingsmill left his post as music director, so did the flame. When triple j lost its curation, its audience followed. 

Unmade reported that between 2014 and now, the number of the station’s targeted 18 to 24-year-old listeners had fallen 55%, and now only 10,000 people are listening to the station at any one time. Think about that: most mid-tier artists will get more reach on their Instagram posts than a play on triple j. 

Whatever the reason for the triple j audience decline, the double blow of both a reduced audience size and songs getting less spins per week means it’s now near impossible for triple j to create hit songs by themselves. 

This reality has sunk the Australian music industry’s export capabilities, as most music festivals and major record companies previously built their whole businesses on triple j play.

The Death Of Australian Music Festivals

Most of Australia’s most prominent festivals; Splendour in the Grass, Groovin’ The Moo, Falls Festival, and Spilt Milk, have either folded or been cancelled.

These aforementioned festivals all had one thing in common: they were built on triple j artists and audiences. To make matters worse, at the same time triple j’s ratings fell, so did the Australian Dollar; a double blow for Australian music festivals.

The depressed AUD meant festival promoters couldn’t book international headliners anymore. Not only had they lost the radio station that built their artists and ticket buyers, they also lost their buying power (AUD) to import internationals. 

Festivals were stripped naked right before the snowstorm hit. 

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A rare exception to this rule is Laneway Festival. The touring festival across Australia and New Zealand has managed to build a business that is not dependent on headliners or triple j playlisting. 

Laneway’s festival co-founder and promoter Danny Rogers told The Black Hoody that, “Laneway was always primarily focused on trying to create a cultural event that prioritised future icons vs. artists that were already massive headliners.”

“A lot of people think you can build festival line ups on radio play and data,” Rogers added, “but that doesn’t create a culture, it feels homogeneous and pretty samey. We have passed on so many acts over the years which would have sold us more tickets but they didn’t fit what we were trying to say as a festival.”

When speaking with The Black Hoody, Rogers said he is grateful for triple j, who have been “important” partners to Laneway since its inception in 2005. However, he stressed they never let triple j’s playlisting dictate the Laneway lineup. 

“triple j was always an important partner but we didn’t let them govern what we did, for example, we booked The 1975 before triple j ever played them,” he said.

An Australian Chart With Few Australians

Last year, ARIA CEO Annabelle Herd acknowledged a problem: not enough Australian artists were topping their charts; “There are simply not enough Australian artists – let alone new Australian artists – breaking through with their home audience,” she said.

The ARIA charts have become consumption charts. They mostly chart songs people listen to rather than buy, a new phenomenon caused by streaming. 

For all of music history, we never charted how many times people played their new Eminem album when they got home from the record store, only how many albums Emimen sold. However, ARIA counts “equivalent sales” every time a track hits a certain number of streams — which is the same as counting a song every time it is played on your record player or a radio station. This is vastly different to actually buying a record. 

ARIA doesn’t differentiate between a stream that a fan seeks out to play, saves to their library, and actively spins regularly, vs. a song that is auto-played via the algorithm or on a massive platform-promoted playlist. It begs the question: how are they of the same value? 

Shouldn’t a passive stream (the auto-played / algorithm-fed play) be treated like a radio spin? And shouldn’t the active streams be treated like a purchase, or part of a purchase?

The ARIA chart system is weird and flawed, making it nearly impossible for Australian artists to compete with internationals who dominate the passive listening platform algorithms. 

Without Australians getting their fair shake at the chart, managers and labels lose a chart story to take to other markets.

How Did ARIA End Up Here?

This is where it gets curious. Herd, the ARIA CEO, is clearly frustrated, but ARIA is also funded by the major labels, who are all represented by local teams that receive bonuses tied to the success of local artists.

Local major labels should want the charts fixed as soon as possible, too, and they’re the ones sitting on the ARIA board. 

Everywhere you look, the ARIA board and the CEO are incentivised to fix the chart system, but nothing gets fixed. They continue to allow internationals to invade Australia and take all the opportunities from local artists.

My guess is that the local representatives from the majors on the ARIA board are hand-tied by their multinational owners. Perhaps the international offices at Universal, Warner, and Sony don’t want the ARIA charts to change as they favour their global stars. 

However, the problem gets worse. The few Australian artists who reach #1 on the ARIA charts no longer see any global uplift from that achievement. 

Andrew Stone, manager of Sheppard, (which broke out globally in 2014), and Lime Cordiale, (which secured two consecutive #1 Albums on the ARIA charts), told The Black Hoody that, “the impact of a #1 was much more noticeable domestically rather than internationally.” 

In fact, all the artist managers The Black Hoody spoke to said a #1 ARIA album no longer moved the dial internationally like it did 10-20 years ago.

ARIA is a local brand serving local record labels, but it needs to find global relevance to move the dial for Australian artists overseas.

Australian Major Labels Are Stuck

So, where does this leave the three majors in Australia? 

When triple j was at its peak in 2019, the Australian major label formula was simple: sign an artist, get triple j support, leverage the mass media spots and commercial radio, repeat.

Often, majors wouldn’t even sign artists until triple j supported them. Ten years ago, I managed an artist who was rejected by all the labels for the first five years of his career until he got his first bit of triple j play—then suddenly, there was a massive bidding war. 

No major label has managed to break a local artist globally since 2020. There have been a few moments like Masked Wolf, who had some global traction on TikTok when “Astronaut in the Ocean" became a sleeper hit in 2021. But he couldn’t maintain his momentum following his viral moment. 

Artist manager Andrew Stone believes this trend of flash-in-the-pan TikTok artists is because labels aren’t investing enough in the artist to capitalise when lightning strikes.

“If you have one breakthrough viral moment, you have to be ready with the next ten songs because that’s where you have the real opportunity to create history […]. If the next song you release after your viral moment is bad, then it’s going to be very hard to ever get the momentum back,” Stone said.

It will take one of the majors to think outside the box and create a new artist development and marketing method to break Australia's downward global export trend. Most importantly, it will take patience and support from the international head offices to allow them to continue investing, experimenting, and innovating. 

Without this continued local investment, the majors in Australia will turn into low-touch distribution companies and regional PR and marketing teams for the big international acts. This would be a commercial mistake for the majors, and leave the door open for a new player who figures out how to break Australian acts again. 

Reclaiming Australian Dominance

ARIA To Be A Global Pioneer

ARIA needs to fix its chart system to stop the international invasion, and quickly. 

It needs to do something no other major chart in the world does: give its local artists something meaningful when they get a #1.

Because the Australian population is so small and isolated from the rest of the world, ARIA should take on an export responsibility where they put together a “#1 package” for every artist who gets a  #1 spot. 

This package could include international opportunities, such as billboards in other markets (in the same way YouTube Music and Spotify does), radio spots, and international editorial support on platforms. 

Imagine if every artist who got a #1 ARIA album automatically got a billboard in Times Square or on Hollywood Boulevard, plus interview spots on radio stations and variety shows in the US and UK, and editorial support in other markets on streaming platforms. The ARIA charts would then move the dial globally for Australian artists with every #1. 

These are just some ideas, and of course, all are either very expensive or nearly impossible to pull off, but they’re nearly impossible, not impossible.

If ARIA were to create an “international wishlist” for this #1 package of 100 or so ideas, they would be able to pull off at least 4-5 of them with enough hard work and resources, and all you need is 4-5 good opportunities to move the dial for an artist. 

The issue is that the majors fund ARIA, which would require them to reach into their pockets to give ARIA more funds and resources to pull this off. And who knows if they would entertain that. 

If they don’t, however, the Australian majors may remain stuck. 

triple j To Get Back To Creating Hits And Celebrity Presenters

triple j must focus on picking and spinning winners and booking world-class, hilarious presenters who are born entertainers. Something their new Head of Programming, Ben Latimer knows a lot about.

Throwback to when Matt Okine took over the breakfast show seat in 2014

Picking music and hosts with too much focus on diversity and social agendas compromises the quality of the entertainment offering. 

Diversity is essential, especially for a public broadcaster. However, nothing should go to air (either presenter or song) unless it’s the best Australia offers. The listeners are switching off at an alarming rate, so continuing the current path will be the death of the station. 

The bottom line is, all radio stations now need a differentiated product from streaming. Why would you turn on the radio to just listen to music? That makes no sense. 

Unless there is something about the station that makes them culturally relevant, like a tastemaker on air with a big following or hosts like Matt and Alex or Kyle and Jackie O, there’s no reason to tune in. 

The playbook for triple j might not be complicated; they might just need to go back to what worked for them before, focusing on more spins for fewer songs and getting genuine stars as hosts:

In saying this, I’m very bullish on Emily Copeland’s hire at the ABC (triple j’s parent company). Emily was appointed Head of Music at ABC in May of this year and has an incredible brain for both radio and growing audiences. If given the empowerment she deserves, her vision could do wonders in the reimagining of one of the industry’s most beloved brands.

Turning triple j around might be the most challenging job in Australian music; enforcing cultural and editorial change fast enough at a government station feels nearly impossible. Unlike the private sector, she can’t just move quickly and replace staff who don’t buy in; government jobs are safe even if you’re underperforming, which makes leadership and change management all the more difficult.

Emily Copeland, head of Music for ABC

Majors To Go From Hit Machines To Career Engines

Like the big tech companies, which are investing in AI and VR to discover their new future, major labels in Australia must also invest in discovering their new future. 

What will marketing and development look like for Australian majors in a post-triple j era?

It is clear that spending more money on TikTok creators in this market is not the long-term answer; they need to find something new. 

“The old-school mentality of let’s sign it, try to get a hit and see what happens, doesn’t work anymore,” Andrew Stone said. “Now you don’t know if an artist is going to be a hit until you’re two records in. [...] So you need companies that think and invest long term; but it also means artists need to be willing to sign long term rights too.”

Majors must become Venture Capitalists: invest now for a payoff in 8-10 years. That’s a massive shift in thinking from the sign-but-drop-them-if-it-doesn’t-work model that the majors have adopted for decades.

Australian Music Festivals Will Be Back

I’m less concerned about Australian music festivals. They’re the fruit of the tree, but without the tree, there is no fruit.

Once Australian artists start breaking out again, the audiences will be there, and festivals will come back to service them, but we need to start planting trees first.