Tag: Chicago

Maggie is so cool.

Maggie Rogers is doing something cool again. As a reminder, her career launched with one of the coolest internet moments ever. As an undergrad at NYU, she got to attend a masterclass with Pharrell, and promptly blew his mind. Watch his visible, emotional reaction as he hears her song “Alaska” for the first time:

Several years and albums later, Maggie is about to kick off an arena tour. Like many artists, her reach (and ticket price) has outrun her fans’ perception of her. I think to many of her fans’, she’s still the quiet, indie, bedroom Taylor Swift.

Artists have struggled with ticket pricing in the streaming era. Touring and merch is now how anyone not named Taylor Swift makes money. But pricing tickets to maximize revenue can make your fans turn on you. Artists want to keep tickets affordable, but then resellers scoop all the tickets and capture the difference between the list price and the market clearing price. So for a few years there, some artists martyred themselves to their own image, by keeping GA tickets at $50 or whatever. They blamed the scalpers for the fact that no one at the shows actually paid that price.

The ticketing platforms slowly caught up, and have added price differentiation, or even launched their secondary markets where the artist is allowed to keep some of the resale value. But still, the only way to ensure your die-hards got affordable tickets was to do pre-sales via your email list, which can still be gamed.

So Maggie is doing something cool. She announced last-minute shows in major cities (Chicago is tomorrow at House of Blues, a mid-sized venue). Tickets will go on sale same-day, IN PERSON (9 AM for Chicago). Anyone who lines up at the box office but doesn’t snag a ticket for the intimate show tomorrow, can still buy a ticket for the United Center show in October, and I think some special merch.

I don’t know if Maggie is the first to do this, but I love it. It perfectly matches her image as a modern songwriting powerhouse with throwback indie roots. And it perfectly matches her desired relationship with her fans, while acknowledging her level of real-world of fame and success.

“If you’re gonna build a time machine into a coffee shop, why not do it with some style?”

I first fell in love with coffee and the cafe experience at The Wormhole, with it’s 80s nostalgia channeled through memorabilia small—Nintendo; Zelda figurines—and large—exact replica Janine Melnitz desk; actual Delorian mounted on the wall. Like many a hip spot on the Milwaukee corridor, it has aged out of its prime. The clever joke on the entryway, “Established 2015,” was an obvious Back to the Future reference … until 2015. The Wormhole will always hold a warm place in my heart, but it’s not quite as energetic as it was (then again, neither am I).

In Avondale, a few neighborhoods north on Milwaukee, I recently discovered The Wormhole’s spiritual sibling in The Brewed. Deriving its homophonic name from the David Cronenberg 80s movie, the space is overflowing with horror-genre memorabilia. I don’t think the two shops are actually related, though they do serve the same roaster’s beans.

Though I’ll never again spend months straight of Saturdays and Sundays alone at the Wormhole like I used to, it’s fun to see a new spot pick up where my favorite shop left off, and to see the younger clientele and baristas blasting music, joking around, and having fun at a space that feels like it’s there just for them.