Music
Twenty years in music.
I started in radio and spent fourteen years at iHeartRadio working across programming, content, audience and strategy.
Since 2020 I've worked as Creative Director for Luke Combs through Black Label Creative.
Along the way I've spent a lot of time thinking about how artists grow, how audiences move, why some songs connect and others don't, and how this business decides where to put its attention.
That eventually led me into technology and the companies I'm building now through MASVX.
I'm in Nashville and most of my work has been in and around the country business, though not all of it.
Radio taught me how decisions actually get made.
I came up through it in the mid-2000s and stayed across different markets and formats.
A lot of that time was also spent building campaigns around artists. Station activations, releases, tours, the things a label or a management team needs radio to actually do rather than just agree to. A lot of it was country, which is a format where radio still moves things, and that matters for how I think about the rest of it.
A lot of what I understand about audiences came from sitting in those rooms and watching decisions get made every day. Which songs, which markets, what goes on the air and when, and what an audience will actually sit through.
I also came out of it with a fairly specific sense of how information moves in this business. Who has it, who needs it, how late it usually arrives, and how much of it lives in one person's head.
Radio is still a big part of how I think about music, and it's one of the reasons some of the things I'm building now make sense to me.
Artists taught me how different a career looks up close.
Since 2020 I've been Creative Director for Luke Combs through Black Label Creative. The work has included creative direction, campaigns, album and tour work, photography, film, content, and a lot of things that don't fit neatly into a job description.
Work I've been part of has done somewhere around two billion social views. The part I value more is having spent years close to one artist's career and watching how audiences, creative decisions and momentum change over time.
Working on one artist over that length of time means you see a whole cycle more than once. A record gets made, it goes to radio and to streaming, it goes on the road, it works or it doesn't, and then you do it again with everything you learned the last time.
I still shoot and I still care about the creative side of this business. I'm not taking on shoots though. I spend most of my time now on the systems and the information around the work rather than the work itself.
Technology started with the things I couldn't answer.
I kept running into the same thing. There was more information about an artist, a song or a market than there had ever been, and it still wasn't answering the questions people actually had to decide on that week.
That led me into AI, data and software, and eventually into building MASVX, Sorvo and The Liner Lab. More about that here.
Sorvo is music intelligence, built for people working around artists, songs and audiences. The Liner Lab handles artist audio and media, and the job of getting it where it needs to go without it going missing on the way. Both of them come fairly directly out of things I watched not work.
I'm still figuring a lot of it out. That's part of what makes it interesting.