I've spent twenty years inside the music business. Now I'm building technology around the decisions it still struggles to make.
I came to data and technology through radio, artists, audiences and creative work, not the other way around. Most of what I'm building now sits under MASVX.
14 years
iHeartRadio
Programming, content, audience and strategy.
2020–Present
Luke Combs
Creative Director, through Black Label Creative.
~2 billion
Social views
Across work and campaigns I've been part of.
Today
MASVX
Building Sorvo and The Liner Lab.
What I keep thinking about
Twenty years of this mostly taught me which questions are the hard ones.
Artists and audiences
- Why artists move, and why some songs connect when others do not.
- What attention is actually worth once you have it.
- The difference between a moment and a career.
Data and decisions
- What a number tells you, and what it quietly does not.
- How much context disappears between a dashboard and a decision.
- Who in the building actually knows why something happened.
AI and technology
- Where it genuinely helps, and where it just makes more noise.
- What is worth building rather than automating.
- How to tell the difference before you spend the money.
Radio
- How programming decisions actually get made, and how fast.
- Why one market behaves nothing like the next one over.
- Why radio still matters in ways people routinely get wrong.
What I'm building
MASVX is where I turn some of those questions into products.
It's the company everything I'm building sits under. Right now most of that work is Sorvo and The Liner Lab.
- SorvoPrivate beta
- Music intelligence for people working around artists, songs and audiences.
- The Liner Lab®Launching
- Technology for getting artist audio and media where it needs to go, and keeping track of it.
Have something you're trying to figure out?
Most of my time goes into building MASVX. I still work directly with a small number of artists, managers, labels, radio teams and music companies when there's a problem where this particular mix of background is actually useful.
Sometimes that's AI or data. Sometimes it's audience, radio, creative or workflow. Often it's some combination that doesn't fit neatly into any of them.
Every so often I write about music, technology, audiences, creative work, and what I'm learning while building companies inside the music business. No schedule. No spam. Just things worth sending.