Standards?

The difference between curation and compliance, one gig at a time.

I live in East Nashville, and one of my favorite parts of this neighborhood is how so many of the houses are different. You can walk down a street and see a dozen kinds of architecture, landscaping, colors of paint — it makes my many walks with my dog Nora genuinely enjoyable.

Contrast that with a modern development where every house is standardized. A cookie-cutter pattern. No personality, nothing creative, purely functional and totally boring.

I find the same dynamic in music. I like acts that are unique and not easily categorized — where you can hear the depth and diversity of their influences distilled into something true to themselves. That’s how art gets made. Commerce works differently. It seeks to standardize anything popular so it can be exploited for profit. It’s the cookie-cutter development applied to sound and entertainment.

A few weeks ago I told you about JamJuice, the platform I’ve started calling the Suno of booking. Since then, more musicians have reached out with their own stories. One of them shows exactly what standardization looks like when it reaches all the way into a live performance in real time.

I’ll call her Maureen. She was one of JamJuice’s most active artists — two or three shows a week at points - her primary income.

One night, mid-set, her phone rang. It was a JamJuice booking agent, calling to say the manager wanted a different vibe. Sit with that for a second: the manager was standing right there in the room. Whatever they wanted could have been a simple conversation between two people ten feet apart but instead of doing what should be done, the manager called in a complaint with the booking agency forcing Jam Juice to call the performer while she was singing a song and tell her to change it up and then go right back to being entertaining - just in the way they dictated. JamJuice’s own pitch is that they’ve made booking so convenient, in their words, “people have to convince themselves not to have live music.” Whatever that promise is worth to a venue, it’s the opposite of convenient, efficient or decent for the person who actually has to stop singing to take the call.

She adjusted, on the spot, mid-show. Afterward, she asked for feedback. There wasn’t any. Just silence.

Not long after, her bookings started thinning, down from several a week to a couple a month, then almost nothing at all. She wrote to ask why — was there a problem? Negative feedback? Anything she should know? The answer, in writing: “nothing negative on file. Booking demand grows as the platform grows, new artists are being worked into the mix, and it’s the slow winter season. This would ramp up in the spring and summer”.

Spring and summer came. She played exactly one show. She kept sending offers after that. They were neither rejected nor accepted. They just sat there, unanswered, for months.

When she finally checked her account status herself, it was no longer active. Flagged — unverified, for not having a YouTube video linked to her profile. Nothing in regards to anything that resembled feedback. A checkbox she didn’t know existed, applied with no warning, to a performer who’d been reliable enough to be one of the platform’s most active bookings.

I talked to another musician on the platform, a guitarist who picks up regular fill-in shifts downtown. His experience has been a bit more positive — he’s built a real relationship with a booker at one venue through JamJuice and he told me that the platform’s never told him to change what he plays. But he described something worth mentioning: every gig listing specifies the genres a venue wants, and every artist profile lists the genres they play. If yours don’t match, the app flags it before you can even submit. He doesn’t know if a flagged application gets buried, deprioritized, or treated exactly the same as any other. Nobody’s told him. A human never ever actually tells you anything at JamJuice by design.

That’s the same mechanism, running quieter. One artist gets a phone call mid-show, relayed through a stranger, telling her what to play. Another gets a silent flag he can’t interpret, attached to an application he’s not sure anyone will really read. Different pressure, same design: a system built to sort artists by a small number of things it can measure — genre tags, video links, whatever’s checkable — rather than the thing that actually makes a musician worth hiring - judgment, taste, professionalism... Knowing when a room wants energy or when it needs a ballad. Reading a crowd in real time, and adjusting because you decided to, not because someone in a call center told you to. None of that shows up as a field on a profile, so none of it counts.

I started this show after a study ranked Nashville the fourth least authentic city in the world. That ranking existed before tech platforms like this began deciding who gets to perform here and on what terms — before a phone call could override a room mid-song, relayed by someone who wasn’t even in the building, and before a missing video could end a year of steady work without a single word about the work itself.

Standardize the business long enough and there’s nothing left in this city that a tourist couldn’t get anywhere else. Keep letting that happen, and Nashville will soon take the top rank on the inauthenticity chart.

---

P.S. I wrote this piece after a band who was very prominent on the JamJuice circuit decided to quit instead of comply with JamJuice’s control. Check out Tyson Hanes band’s video and my reaction video. Also, JamJuice CEO Matthew Romero has reached out to me to sit down for a full length interview to discuss all these matters so stay tuned.

---

View From Nashville by Jay Bragg is a weekly dispatch from inside the music industry — Nashville as the case study, your industry as the thesis. Subscribe free to get every essay in your inbox. Prefer to watch? The video version of this piece is on Instagram and YouTube.