live-music
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GigFinesse sells the part of live music nobody applauds
A drummer’s unanswered emails became a business in booking, payments, and the thousand small decisions behind a good night out. GigFinesse’s wager: hospitality needs an entertainment department, even when it cannot hire one.
Prism.fm puts the concert business on the same page
A concert starts with a date and ends with a reckoning. Prism.fm connects the paperwork in between, giving venues, promoters and agents a shared view of the show - and its money.
Lark Theater learned to sell more than a movie ticket
Larkspur saved its Art Deco cinema. Keeping it alive took a second invention: one room with enough reasons for a whole town to come back.
Hazy Makes the Party Part of the Pitch
A custom bar, a camping-themed product launch, a room full of budtenders: the Los Angeles production company puts cannabis brands where conversations happen.
Tapped AI Tried to Be an AI Record Label. The Better Business Was Hiding in the Venue Spreadsheet
The New York startup began with a $50-a-month AI artist-services pitch, hit the cold-start wall of a two-sided marketplace, and rebuilt around a less glamorous asset: useful live-music data. Its most copyable idea is also its least theatrical - let one customer group improve the dataset for the next.
Aeronaut Brewing Company
Aeronaut Brewing Company is a Somerville, Massachusetts craft brewery founded in 2014 by three grad-school roommates who brought MIT and Cornell science backgrounds to beer. Known for propagating its own house-cultured yeast and experimental recipes, Aeronaut pairs adventurous ales and lagers with a Somerville taproom that doubles as a food hall, live-music venue and community hub. In 2024 it merged with Dorchester Brewing Company under a new parent, Tasty Liquid Alliance.
Smith
Smith is an Asbury Park-based hospitality group that grew out of a 1990s branding and design studio. Beginning in 2006 with Brickwall Tavern, its partners helped restart a stalled downtown, then built a collective of restaurants and bars - Porta, Pascal & Sabine, Homesick, and Lovesick - that pair scratch kitchens with art-filled rooms. Smith treats hospitality as an instrument of urban renewal, designing, branding, and operating each venue in-house.