Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.

Here we are - we made it to the busiest part of the entertainment industry’s season! I always enjoy the energy of September and October, and I’m looking forward to seeing my local friends out in it. Last week brought Nine Inch Nails’ tour through Barclays Center here in NYC; tonight alone, I’ve got intentions of trying to fit two shows into the same evening despite both having the same door times. (Scroll down about that, it’s a trip.)

Today’s issue is about the tension underlying every major period of tech advancement, and how I see it play out with musicians. Spoiler: it comes out well in the end always, if you’re willing to keep your curiosity intact. Curiosity itself is kind of a theme throughout, really. Let’s get into it!

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What Tech Takes (And Gives)

A programmer and longtime friend of mine made a disarming point to me about truly cutting-edge technology the other day, and I haven’t been able to get it off of my mind.

Here’s what he said about new tech:

“It empowers, but it also takes away.”

And our conversation got into marketing and music tech, as you might expect it to. We’ll get to that. But here’s how we got to this conversation in the first place.

A thing you may know about me, if we have been friends at length or you’ve seen me play live, is that I really enjoy guitar pedals.

I mean, I enjoy plenty of things that mess with the signal path of an instrument to a speaker. But there are a few things that have been consistent about me since my grade-school days, and one of them is that I absolutely adore something that allows me to step really hard on a light-up switch and cause the sound in a room to instantly change. As simple pleasures go, it’s right up there with that first sip of morning coffee and the sunlight on a beach day.

So I recently acquired a brand new combination fuzz/reverb unit from Spooky Circuits called the Wee-Bird, which makes a bunch of subtle and wilder sounds that are all extremely my jam. (They didn’t give me anything for this mention, but it’s the coolest pedal I’ve picked up in ages, and you should check the link out to hear it if that’s your thing!) And in the midst of spending half a Saturday falling down a big fuzzy reverb well, I started to have something click.

Guitar pedals, even analog ones, used to be insanely cutting-edge technology. You couldn’t get distortion pedals commercially until the 1960s, and the first ones were all primitive fuzz circuits that have since been expanded upon massively. That wah-wah sound you hear on a million funk records? The pedal that first did that wasn’t released until 1966. Rage Against The Machine’s famous “this guitar just turned into a turntable” sounds? Those come largely from a DigiTech Whammy, first released in 1989.

A lot of the most successful rock music of the last 60 years came from musicians with great foundations finding ways to harness new sound technology to their advantage. (I’m totally glossing over the history of synthesizers here, or we’d be here all day.)

Now here we are in 2025, and the barrier to making high-quality music as a new artist has never been lower.

Think about it for a moment.

YouTube has nearly every lesson you could want for almost any instrument. (It’s still best to learn with a teacher’s guidance, but you do you.)

Every MacBook comes with GarageBand pre-installed, which is good enough for making your own recordings that nearly anyone can build a listenable demo with it, and building a finished track is doable if you know what you’re doing (though I’d always recommend having a pro studio get it across the finish line). More advanced tech, like Logic Pro and Ableton, is available for reasonable cash.

Guitar amplifiers have evolved to the point that they don’t have to be on the stage any more unless you want them there; you can now use free open source software to get tones that are virtually identical to amps, speaker cabinets, and even - yep, you guessed it - guitar pedals.

Drum kits can be fully emulated - and blown out, and radically changed - in software and hardware forms, and people make free sample downloads of them constantly.

Digital synthesizers have evolved to the point that they can competently match any classic keyboard sound, and that’s if you choose to make a song using synth hardware rather than software.

And then you have AI-informed music apps, which (before you recoil in horror) are increasingly doing some cool things that are not meant to replace humans. For example, Moises lets you play an idea into its app, then will generate sample backing tracks for it to let you firm up your idea or practice with a “band” of “friends who get the feel but don’t really know you like that yet.” It’s a big confidence builder to hear how an idea could sound with a band, if you haven’t got one - and maybe that inspires you to start one.

I think I would have mostly finished a couple of albums in my childhood bedroom if I’d had access to all of this. It all presents a tremendous amount of opportunity.

It empowers.

But it also takes away.

In music tech, as it is with guitar pedals, we have two extreme camps of musicians that tend to emerge.

One camp is futurist, but lazy as hell about it. These people want to emulate good music without really making it, and I see a lot of similarities between the people who will use generative AI to record a song and pass it off as their work and the people in high school who would use a junky 90s digital modeler pedal and only try to play Green Day riffs with that. Yes, I see you guys posting in r/musicmarketing and wondering why your distributor keeps taking your song down, then getting mad when all the comments are telling you it’s an AI recording. The music industry is not a ChatGPT-assisted homework assignment, and you don’t have to be a plagiarist for us to spot a fake.

The other camp is reflexively anti-tech. These are the guys who always want their guitars to sound “warm” (whatever that means) and always want to play with all-tube amplifiers and vintage guitars, and any tech advancement of any kind is meant with distrust because that’s “not how the masters did it,” which is a highly convenient cover for not having to learn a new thing. Currently, some of these people are hiding amongst the hard-anti AI crowd but don’t have the progressive tendencies that underpin valid criticism of the industry. You can identify them by their khaki pants, worn spiritually or literally.

I try to avoid both of these groups at parties.

What is taken away here?

The anti-tech crowd pushes itself into obsolescence with newer generations, and with less opportunities to place themselves in conversation with pop culture. The too-tech crowd that didn’t actually focus on making something meaningful will show itself as hollow quickly, as everything it builds crumbles. Somewhere in the middle, well-intended musicians who just want to make dope art figure out how to use new tech to enhance what they’re doing, and that lasts. Over and over again. Less opportunity for the hyper-traditionalists, and less opportunity for those who go in hype-first.

(Have you ever heard a musician say they like to make records in a way that’s as close to analog as possible, then finish them digitally? That’s a pretty great example of the middle ground - there’s something to be said for using all the tools at your disposal and keeping as much humanity as you can in the process.)

It takes away.

But also, it empowers.

When the jukebox came along, it meant less work for musicians in bars and restaurants, but other tech was there to grow into over time. Synthesizers did not replace guitars, despite what felt like two generations of artists fearing they would; there is new music made by each, and also by both. Streaming music is a popular and understandable boogeyman for the struggles our current scene has with generating revenue, but revenue happens along multiple parts of the chain; there is also a movement going on to encourage direct-to-fan releases before going to streaming now, which recasts streaming audio as part of your marketing toolbox.

Yes, it’s harder to tour economically now. Venues are still struggling post-2020, inflation is not a joke and not leaving, and that gets passed along to artists. And in the midst of all this, the promo tools everyone was using the most a year ago feel a bit broken (hi Instagram!). Being a professional artist in the middle of all this is not for the faint of heart.

But it’s not all gloom in the music industry, all the time. If it were, the RIAA wouldn’t be reporting record highs in mid-year revenue. There has literally never been this much money in the music business; it’s just that getting your slice of it is the hard part.

Imagine how powerful artists might become once they get access to the same kinds of tools that quality startups have, like data that helps them plan out exactly the kind of social and marketing content their audiences want with full understanding of who their ideal customers are. I’ve seen that in action. It’s going to be more accessible to them and their teams soon. And that’s only going to add to the significant advances in direct-to-fan tech, which are usable even by new artists with a little guidance.

Imagine how much can be at an artist’s fingertips when some of the brightest music tech companies I’ve spoken to get all their go-to-markets in place. Healthy skepticism is reasonable with all new tech, but the people who show up and take time with their innovations are not usually focused as aggressively on wealth extraction as the people who are riding the hype around whatever’s buzzy, whether that’s blockchain or LLMs or something else entirely. You need a healthy music industry for music tech to proliferate. Startups know this.

And in a music world where creating complex work and releasing it has never been easier, it’s not hard to see how there’s room for major quality of life improvements for everyone as that level of innovation keeps spreading. It’s a great time to not shut everything out right away.

The music industry has never been easy. But the things that will make it easier are coming. Stay open.

One Thing You Can Use Today

Does optimism sometimes feel like too much to have?

Try curiosity.

Sometimes, this is the kind of reflex you only really pick up under fire. I had a difficult manager many years ago who would arbitrarily criticize anything I put in front of him one day, then be indifferent the next. Eventually, I thought to myself, “Why should I keep dealing with this guy?” And the answer, as oddly nihilistic as it might sound at face value, was: “Because I want to see what happens next.”

At the time, I stopped leaning on him for help and looked to other colleagues for support. Eventually, I was able to make enough of what I needed to do happen without him that he shrugged and managed other people instead. And if I was around for one of his strange blow-ups on someone else, I took it from a perspective of watching it as some kind of Shakespearean drama instead of a thing that had anything to do with me or them, because I’d realized it had nothing to do with anyone but himself.

I didn’t like working with him, so I grew around him, not under him. Eventually, circumstances changed and I didn’t have to deal with him anymore. But the things I’d learned from sitting people down and asking for advice, and reading up on what I was doing in the process? That all stuck. And then I kept building on it in future roles from there.

This is also applicable in anything you’re learning that feels like “too much.” If you’re not internalizing new information on a thing you want to learn, try leaving a YouTube explainer video on and hitting play on it, then just let your mind pick up what it can pick up on first watch. If you’re too distracted or your brain is too clouded with other things going on, that’s OK; let your curiosity be small.

Small curiosity still leads to picking pieces of new information up, and eventually, the odds are good that some part of that will get your attention and lead you in a good direction. Curiosity is sometimes like a volume knob that just needs to be turned up.

Even if you’re dealing with tough emotional times or real pressure, you may find it’s life-affirming to indulge your curiosity.

Change the order your pedals are arranged in. Tune your instrument down a little, or up a little. Do something off-script. People rearrange their furniture about this kind of thing.

And remember: not everyone is even a tiny bit curious. So anything you find in the process is yours now. Don’t just accept what’s in front of you this second. There is more.

When you find your own discoveries, you always have advantages in life over those who won’t look.

Track of the Week

Shepparton Airplane - “Forecast”

“I realize it’s all just nothing but a game.” The simple repeated chorus of their new album’s title track - words to live by if you were to ever pick them out! - pounds its way into your brain along with the bassline, and that’s how Melbourne’s Shepparton Airplane gets you. There has been a fair bit of ink spilled in the Australian press the last couple of years about how rare it is now to see a band fully break out from that country internationally (King Gizzard, Amyl, Royel Otis…who else ya got post-2020?). But for all those who remember how influential Total Control was on a lot of US punks, you’ll almost certainly decide that Shepparton Airplane deserves a similar glow-up - and they’ve got tremendous range, dipping into blown-out power pop and garage on the rest of the record effortlessly. The whole album’s great, but start here.

Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

List of Clubs

These are the kinds of clubs I’d like to be in around NYC! Wherever you might find music, art, or a compelling experience under one roof, that’s a club to me. I only list clubs I’d enjoy going to. If I list a client, you’ll know.

Friday, September 12 / Saturday, September 13 - Model/Actriz @ Warsaw
If you’re going, I’ll see you there. They’re also playing on Saturday, and while the first night is sold out, resale tickets have been pretty easy to find. Pirouette is easily one of my favorite records of this year, and hearing this band air it out in front of a hometown crowd with how much they’ve grown presents an irresistible opportunity.

Friday, September 12 - Levitation Room, Tilden @ TV Eye
If you’re not already hip to the new model of How To Make It Playing Music In New York, quite a lot of the bands around here end up spending touring time in Europe and doing well enough from that to power the rest of their activities. Tilden is no exception, with members doing time over there in other bands - but they’re all under a Ridgewood roof tonight, and LA’s Levitation Room are easy to want to stay around for. This one’s at the same time as Model/Actriz, but let’s see if I get the teleporter out.

Saturday, September 13 - The Triplets of Belleville @ Nitehawk Prospect Park
Do you like brunch? Do you enjoy animation for adults? Are you wondering where on earth to bring yourself back to life after somehow squeezing in two shows in the same night? Nitehawk’s noontime brunch series, which also happens in Williamsburg but with different films, is here to fill your prescription.

Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…

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