Apple Music just built a concert venue... pay attention

Yeah, THAT Apple Music. 

The company that helped put basically the entire history of recorded music into your pocket just opened a purpose-built, 600-capacity venue inside its London headquarters at Battersea Power Station. 

And yo… this isn’t just a room with a stage and some speakers. 

“Apple Music Hall” has a 38-foot-wide reconfigurable stage, a 48-speaker spatial audio system, 16+ cameras permanently wired for filming and livestreaming, recording and mixing rooms, and Apple Music Radio studios right next door. 

The idea is that artists can perform, record, broadcast, interview and create content from essentially one ecosystem. 

And when I read this this morning, I thought: 

ARTISTS BETTER PAY ATTENTION. 

Because I think this is another signal of where things are going. 

Making recordings is getting easier. Performing isn’t. I’ve been harping on this for YEARS. 

Long before GenAI entered the conversation, the barrier to making great-sounding recorded music was already collapsing. You didn’t need a million-dollar recording studio anymore. You didn’t need a label to distribute your music. You didn’t need to manufacture anything. A laptop, some software and enough time could get you remarkably far. 

And now AI is accelerating that trend exponentially. We’re entering an era where an effectively infinite amount of recorded music can be created, released and distributed. 

So I’ve been thinking about a simple question: 

When something becomes abundant, what becomes scarce? 

I think one answer is increasingly obvious. 

The human being!! The person. The performance. The experience. The reason somebody should leave their house, buy a ticket and stand in a room with you. 

A recording artist and a performing artist are two different things. 

This is something I don’t think emerging artists talk about enough. Being a good recording artist does not automatically make you a good performing artist. They’re different disciplines. Different skill sets. 

Dude, they’re almost different jobs. 

And your live show shouldn’t just be your Spotify page played at a louder volume. There needs to be a translation between your recording identity and your performance identity. 

What changes when the music enters a room? What can I experience there that I can’t experience through headphones? What side of you appears onstage that doesn’t exist on the recording? 

Most importantly: 

WHY SHOULD I SEE YOU LIVE? 

That’s a question every artist should be able to answer. 

Weirdly, I built my own artist career backwards. I actually woke up thinking about this today, lol. 

My entire career has been backwards. Most artists become artists first and eventually find themselves learning the business. I was a musician first, then spent more than a decade building a career on the business side of the music industry, and then came back around and went all-in on being an artist. 

And somehow I did RIŽIK backwards too. I’ve spent years obsessing over the live performance before building a large recorded catalog. I’m changing that now because I’ve developed an enormous appreciation for the power of catalog. Recordings matter. Songs matter. They give people something to discover, revisit and develop an emotional relationship with. 

But I also feel increasingly grateful that I spent so much time figuring out the other half. 

What does RIŽIK actually MEAN onstage? That’s ultimately where “TAME THE MACHINE” came from. 

I didn’t want electronic performance to mean standing behind a laptop and reproducing something I’d already made. 

I wanted the performance itself to communicate something. Hands on instruments. Risk. Improvisation. Things potentially going wrong. The audience being able to understand the relationship between what my body is doing and what they’re hearing. 

I wanted someone to walk into a RIŽIK show knowing none of my music and still have a reason to pay attention. 

Because here’s the thing: 

If you don’t have a hit, your live show matters even MORE. 

Once you have a song that millions of people love, the equation changes. There’s something incredibly powerful about hearing THAT SONG in the room with the person who made it. You’ve lived with it through headphones. You’ve played it in your car. Maybe it soundtracked a breakup, a summer, a friendship or some important period of your life. And now you’re standing 50 feet away from the human being responsible for it. 

The loop closes. 

But what happens before you have that song? What happens when nobody knows your music? 

Your performance itself has to make the argument. T

hat’s where I think about something I call “proof of work.” What are you doing that demonstrates another level of intention? Another level of commitment? Another level of differentiation? What’s the extra step you’re willing to take that most people won’t? 

Developing an actual performance identity can be part of that proof. 

You’re not only saying: “I made some music.” You’re saying: “I figured out what this music becomes when human beings gather in a room.” 

I’m thinking about this so much that I’m building a class around it! 

Yep, I’ll be teaching a class in January at UCLA Extension around this very idea: 

How do you translate your recording identity into a live performance identity? How do you develop your own performance ecosystem? How do you start building community around your shows? How do you begin positioning yourself as a headliner instead of waiting for someone else to decide you’re ready to become one? 

Because I think these are going to become increasingly important skills for emerging artists. 

Making the recording is only PART of the job. You also have to figure out what happens when the recording becomes real. 

Which brings me back to Apple. 

I don’t know that Apple built this venue BECAUSE of AI. Apple itself says the Hall is about supporting live music and creating deeper connections between artists and fans. 

But look at the larger environment. 

More music. More creators. Lower barriers to production. Generative AI. Infinite content. Infinite feeds. Infinite recordings. 

And one of the largest recorded-music platforms on Earth just invested in infrastructure designed around putting an artist in front of an audience and capturing what happens. 

That’s... worth paying attention to. 

Because maybe the next era of being an artist isn’t just about figuring out how to make more music. Maybe it’s about giving people a REASON to care that you’re the person making it. 

And giving them a reason to come experience you doing it. 

So... Apple Music didn’t build another playlist. 

It built a damn room! 

Pay attention.