Tag: music

Revealed vs. stated preferences.

I haven’t been listening to music anymore. I used to love discovering new music, and sharing old favorites. I once saw a poster for an artist at a cool bar in Berlin, and proudly became their superfan, seeing my own non-algorithmic discovery perform ~10 times in concert in the next half-decade.

But podcasts have taken over all the minutes and hours from music. It happened at first slowly, and then all at once, as the saying goes. And for me, this is a fine trade. I love my podcasts. I love the hosts. The inside jokes. The reliability of schedule. The balance: some of them highbrow for learning, some lowbrow for blowing off steam. And my rotation! My rotation is perfectly tuned to fill up my workouts, showers, and commutes each week, with each show for the right moment, all summing to just the right total runtime.

So I do miss listening to music. And I keep saying I’ll get back to it. But, I’ve realized doing so will require another trade, music to substitute for something else. My podcasts aren’t going anywhere. The most likely option is replacing an hour of evening streaming services while cooking dinner. That’ll happen once I get my record player fixed, I tell myself. But it’s been like a year and we do have the Sonos … maybe for this consumer, podcasts have just won.

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.