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- The Club List, Issue #47: Surviving The First Wave
The Club List, Issue #47: Surviving The First Wave
Kodi McKinney
September 26, 2025
Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.
The Autumn Equinox has passed us, and it’s now officially Fall in New York. Yes, that means you’re probably going to see a lot of references to Halloween gigs here before too long, because that’s kind of a necessary part of the NYC fall experience. Early warning system: if you aren’t hip to Nightfall at Green-Wood Cemetery, you should try it out this year as it’s kind of the start of how New York does Halloween. I’ll be there on the second night of it. You should be too. It’s worth it.
Today’s issue finds me digging up one of the more visible talks I’ve given along the way and updating it, not just for a music audience but for anyone doing creative work. Don’t forget the one question this update hinges upon; it’ll help you with a lot of big problems.
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Surviving The First Wave
Back in 2016, I put together a panel for SXSW titled Surviving The Third Wave. That panel was about a repeated pattern I’d identified with label friends in how music genre trends work, which we constructed into an entire theory of how music is marketed. It goes like this:
First Wave: Innovative new sound develops with artists who sound wildly cutting-edge. These acts may or may not be commercially successful, but they’re always influential.
Second Wave: Artists inspired by these innovators become hugely commercially successful. They’re always great songwriters with an ear for pop-friendly construction, and they may even be making innovations of their own.
Third Wave: Labels and artists both rush in to capitalize on the new commercial trend. The ideas that inspired the first wave are often lost, and you get something watered down that tends to not be nearly as interesting.
This plays out in an incredible number of genres, and the Second Wave often reinterprets the First Wave for maximum impact on pop. It’s also easier to see in some genres than others, but if it’s a genre that’s in conversation with popular music to some degree, you’ll nearly always see it eventually.
One incredibly famous example lies in alternative rock: Pixies (First Wave) -> Nirvana (Second Wave) -> Candlebox (Third Wave, sorry Candlebox). You probably have several other examples in mind.
Well, that talk was in 2016. And as the streaming era pushes band after band to the margins and rewards both very pop and very niche artists, I’d argue that the First Wave now requires its own critical analysis to get past. Yes, in order to even get to the point where popular success has occurred and imitators have flooded the market, we need a cleaner understanding of how an innovative act finds their market in the first place. Such is the blessing and curse, in equal parts, of having access to nearly the entire history of recorded music from our phones.
There are real parallels to what a startup with a very innovative idea goes through, and so, I think it makes sense for every creative business - from professional illustrators and musicians to companies with 100+ employees - to ask one important question when trying to make something fresh into something that lasts.
This question is also something a well-established business would do well to remember.
And this question is possibly the most Harvard Business Review thing in my consultant repertoire, but it’s so simple and yet so easily skimmed over:
“What am I selling, and what are they buying?”
Think about that for a minute. You’ll see variants of this question in business texts, but I’ve used it to great effect over the years, and I’m not sure you’ll see it other places in as many words. It almost feels reductive. But it isn’t. And it allows for both concrete and abstract answers, which is how you know it’s got versatility.
What am I selling, and what are they buying?
When startups are in their early years, there is a lot of jargon-y talk about establishing product-market fit, which is just a fancy way of saying, “Let’s make sure the products we sell fit what the market is looking for.” Idea-market fit is the more foundational question at the core of most new businesses: does my business idea serve what the market wants? And as a founder, you create bridges between idea-market fit and product-market fit by asking yourself this core question repeatedly.
What am I selling, and what are they buying?
When you have a band, you’re selling some important things, and I don’t just mean merch or tickets. A band can be selling any of the following, and more:
A good time
Political solidarity
Emotional catharsis
A room in which to drink alcohol (now this is reductive and banal, but it’s important to understand - plenty of people see concerts as the key to having this, especially if they work venue-side)
Challenging ideas
Familiar experiences
Unique sounds
Places to find like-minded people (and not just at shows)
Historical perspective
Group unification
Religious dialogue
Fashion
Humans have been doing all of this with music since the days of holding drum circles around a fire for the rest of our tribe. It may feel a little odd to see it laid out like this, but it’s very real.
So…what are music fans buying? That can be any of the things a band sells above, and more beyond that. You’ll notice that we’re discussing this with more of an eye to what people personally connect to about a band, rather than literal items they’d wear or listen to. In my experience, artists who understand the importance of catering to how they make fans feel are always going to have more success than those who don’t.
And that’s because a whole lot of fans look to music as how they connect with other people, rather than communing with it in a way that starts and ends with the self. A lot of artists I’d view as First Wave from their respective worlds - the Ramones, N.W.A, Black Sabbath - were commercially successful, but were eclipsed in commercial success by the Second Wave they inspired - Green Day, Jay-Z, Metallica. That’s beyond definition of a sound and is the result of a cumulative culture around a sound. I find it’s less common for any potential fan to want to be first, and more common for fans to want to feel like they’re first.
Through this lens, we can reinterpret the Third Wave theory in a striking way:
First Wave: Lots of thought put into what is being sold to others, but with a slower-developing awareness for what people want to buy. Creatively pure, commercially at a frontier. Ahead of the curve.
Second Wave: What is being sold is what people want to buy. Creativity flourishes while building upon innovation, and commercially everything seems to work. Right on target.
Third Wave: Lots of time spent on what people are buying, and not nearly enough time spent on what is being sold to them. Creatively broken, and commercially broken soon follows because people can smell that something is off. Behind the times.
If you’re a Series B-and-up company selling a B2B SaaS product, you don’t want to be in the Third Wave of companies who do what you do. But the First Wave, where innovation lives most clearly, is also perilous. You’re going to want to spend a lot of time on understanding what people want to buy, and also on conveying to them that you have what they want. After all, I’m a staunch believer that a lot of the best products - in music as in life - are the ones people don’t even know they want yet.
There’s an education gap when you’re doing something truly boundary-pushing. And if you’re that kind of artist, take heart - in the modern world, people likely don’t even know they’re missing you so far. If your music is great and you believe in it, you won’t be alone in that. You have so much farther you can go, especially if you have your own inspirations and aren’t trying so hard to conform to a scene that you miss showing people your own spark.
How do you get past the Third Wave? You cut back on people-pleasing and ramp up the creativity.
How do you get past the First Wave? These days, I find that to be the more interesting question.
What are you selling, and what are they buying?
One Thing You Can Use Today
If you’re trying something new that’s creative but you’re older, you are likely to be put off at first by the fact that your efforts just aren’t very good.
This is what Ira Glass - yes that one, the guy who hosts NPR’s This American Life - refers to as the skill-taste gap. You know what you want because you have great taste, but your skill isn’t up to par with your taste just yet. You’ll get frustrated because what you want to make isn’t on the level of your taste yet. This is where many people stop.
And the trick to getting past this, honestly, is to just push through and find joy in the work itself first.
Glass has talked a lot about the skill-taste gap, and this interview with him does a lot more to define this and offer ways to address it. So, I won’t go into that too much more here. But I will point to a couple legendary bands and make a comment on how great music doesn’t have to be as complex as you’re making it.
Take a moment to listen to a Depeche Mode song of your choice. Nearly any one will do. Notice how prominent the keyboard sounds are, but also how minimal they are. You could probably make those sounds with the tiniest bit of rehearsal, even without knowing how to play a piano. But the way those sounds are assembled into their songs has made them a colossally successful band. If those keyboard lines were busier, it wouldn’t be the same band anymore. It adds atmosphere, even mystery.
If you listen to the first Van Halen record, you might get distracted quickly by how technically brilliant Eddie Van Halen was as a guitar player. That’s normal, how can you not? But “Runnin’ With The Devil” is one of the most famous “learning to play the bass” songs ever, and that’s because Michael Anthony barely plays more than two notes for the entire track. No, seriously, look it up. The same note locks in with the drums and doesn’t move for choruses, and then a different note locks in for verses. That’s it. But it’s one of the most recognizable rock songs of the 1970s.
You do not have to have complete and total mastery of what you are trying to do in order to do something great. You just need to have good taste, and then work to build around that.
Track of the Week
Population II - “La Cache”
Somewhere between psych rock, prog, and punk, you’ll find Montreal’s wildly impressive trio Population II. They’re playing Levitation this weekend as part of a tour with Frankie and the Witch Fingers, where they floored me so hard as direct support at their Brooklyn show that I had to hear their album Maintenant Jamais at length. “La Cache” is buried near its back end and opens with what sounds like a very angry printer before revealing itself as fuzz-laden rock in a way that’s incredibly specific to this band. Right now I can’t get enough of it, and you should try it.
Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…
