Lisnin

Nobody who has spent years making music has ever wished they could skip the process of making music. I keep coming back to that as I watch the wave of AI music generation products launch. The best products tend to come from founders who lived the problem first. Beats exists because Dr. Dre told Jimmy Iovine that cheap plastic earbuds were destroying the feeling of the work he'd spent his life on. Iovine's version was blunter: Apple was selling $400 iPods with $1 earbuds. Two men who had spent decades in studios built the thing they wished existed. Shopify exists because Tobi Lütke was trying to sell snowboards online in Ottawa and every e-commerce tool available was terrible, so he wrote his own. Neither of those companies started with someone scanning a market for an opening. They started with someone who had lived inside a problem long enough to get sick of it. I've spent years in the independent music world. Managing artists, marketing, PR, branding, helping people figure out how to actually earn a living from their work. I watched talented artists lose momentum because releasing one song meant juggling a dozen disconnected platforms, and because nobody ever told them their publishing royalties were sitting uncollected. So when AI got good enough to actually operate software, what I wanted to build was obvious. Not a machine that makes the music. A system that handles everything around it. Because the bottleneck was never the songs. There have never been more good songs than there are right now. The bottleneck is that a working artist has to be their own label, publisher, marketer and manager, and the tools for that are fragmented, confusing and gatekept. I'm not against AI in music when it's sourced and used ethically and creatively. I'm building with it. I just think where you point it says a lot about whether you've ever sat in the room while someone made something they cared about. Curious what others think: when you see a new product in your industry, can you usually tell whether the founder has lived the problem? 👇

The Listeners Club will forever continue to grow at its own pace Thanks to those still listening