music
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AM PR Group’s business is the next move
Vanessa Anderson’s Los Angeles agency works where celebrity, commerce, and culture meet. Its relationship with Issa Rae offers a useful lesson: the next opportunity may require a different job description.
Sony’s Quiet Trick: Own the Camera, the Console and What Plays on Both
Sony spent decades assembling a strange collection of consoles, cameras, songs, films and sensors. Now the collection is becoming a system - and its smartest lesson is knowing when the pieces truly reinforce one another.
Live Nation Entertainment
It books the band, owns the room, prints the ticket and sells the beer sponsorship. Inside the $23-billion machine that moves 150 million concertgoers a year - and the antitrust fight over whether one company should do all of that.
Mass Appeal
Mass Appeal is a New York-based media and content company that calls itself the elevated voice of hip-hop. Founded as a graffiti fanzine in 1996 and revived in 2013 by rapper Nas, CEO Peter Bittenbender and the late journalist-filmmaker Sacha Jenkins, it spans a record label, film and TV production, digital series, a creative agency and direct-to-consumer commerce. The company is best known for the Hip Hop 50 initiative marking the genre's 50th anniversary, Grammy- and award-winning documentaries, and a music catalog built around legacy artists and their new work.
indify
indify is a New York music marketplace that connects emerging independent artists with the partners they need to build a career - funders, managers, marketers, lawyers and creatives - without a traditional record deal. Founded in 2015 by three childhood friends, it started as a data tool for spotting breakout talent early (it flagged Billie Eilish, Post Malone and Khalid before they were famous) and evolved into a platform where artists strike transparent, per-release deals, keep their masters, retain creative control, and keep at least 50% of profits after an investor is repaid.
MixerBox
MixerBox is a Palo Alto-based super-apps company building a constellation of daily-essential mobile apps - from OnePlayer and FreecableTV to AlarmTunes, NewsDash and a suite of AI tools that became the largest single developer on the ChatGPT Plugin Store. Founded in 2012 by Taiwanese-Australian Harvard alum John Lai and backed by Y Combinator, the company has crossed 300 million downloads worldwide.
TeachMe.To
TeachMe.To is a marketplace for booking in-person private lessons - golf, tennis, pickleball, music, yoga, and more - that matches beginners with vetted local coaches and handles scheduling, payments, and reviews in one place.