A couple of years ago, I was standing in a live music venue in my hometown of Paris, France and tears started streaming down my face uncontrollably.
The artist on stage was Vicente García, a Dominican artist I’d met a decade earlier, before the Grammy wins, the sold-out crowds, still months from releasing his first album. We’d been friends, I helped book him a few dates in NYC, then life moved on. Since I live in Los Angeles, I ended up at that Paris show almost by coincidence. We were in the same city, so why not.
The room was packed, the crowd entranced, living in the moment. The band was impossibly tight and Vicente had everyone dancing comfortably in his back pocket. Electric stuff. But then something broke open in me. I stood there in the crowd, just overflowing with emotion.
Something similar happened to me on May 31st of last year when Paris Saint-Germain won their first UEFA Champions League title in Munich. As I stood in the stadium after the fourth unanswered goal went in, the same feeling broke open.
Today, I finally understand what it was and the possible implications for music.
What I felt in Paris was neither nostalgia nor an ego boost. It was the realization of a deep, personal, emotional belonging I had forged with Vicente’s music years before most of the world did. And frankly, I had no control over it.
Vicente García’s music is infectiously authentic and anyone could have noticed his talent back when I did. The difference is, I was compelled to do something about it. I’m the kind of person who uses music as an emotional language to connect with others. The kind that made mixtapes for friends in the 90s just because. It’s a spark that seeks human communion, connection, and shared experience through music. And I’ve had that itch for as long as I can remember.
Sports fans have understood this feeling longer than anyone.
In 1995, I was a ballboy at the Parc des Princes when PSG were knocked out of the Champions League in the semi-finals (standing behind the net at 0:24 in this video), and was fortunate enough to be in Munich thirty years later when they finally won it (pictured below). By the time that fourth goal went in last year, myself and those around me weren’t crying about football. We were crying about time. The accumulated weight of decades invested, the ups and downs, the emotional suffering. The historic win was the moment all of that finally had a place to go.
Psychologists call it identity fusion, when a passionate fan stops being a spectator and becomes, in some internal and very real way, part of the thing itself. We built entire infrastructures around this in sports: institutions that recognize, reward and perpetuate that passion across generations. In music, that infrastructure doesn’t exist. But the feeling is just as real. When will the system catch up?
Following an artist from the beginning is the same thing. Something draws you in early, you devour their music and tell everyone in your orbit. You go to shows. Music blends with personal moments that become hardwired into emotion.
These music fans typically know about their local music scene. Again, they can’t help it. Many of them share that pure, instinctive, uncontrollable itch the music ecosystem depends on for cultural signals, artistic quality and relevance. Not “superfans”. More like “pusherfans” where music is the drug and culture is the currency (love you, Curtis Mayfield (check out “Pusherman” here)).
Geoffrey Moore mapped this in Crossing the Chasm — the innovator creates, the visionary evangelizes. You cannot cross from obscurity to relevance without both. Venture capital understood this decades ago. But music?
Artists and songwriters are the innovators. Early fans are the visionaries. They evangelize. Like the great radio DJs and music bloggers before them, they move culture forward by putting their emotional credibility on the line for something unproven. How else do the millions of “lean-back” listeners on streaming platforms find the cool stuff? No algorithms needed there. It’s called “word-of-mouth.”
And yet there is no system for them. Streaming platforms control discovery through human curators or algorithms: both top-down, both decided by a handful of people. But what about the hundreds of thousands of passionate music lovers with real taste, real conviction, and real cultural influence? Those with the itch? The system ignores them, and the cost of that indifference to music culture is as vast as it is incalculable.
When an artist makes it — when the room is packed and reeling and the world finally gets it — where does that value go? To the label. To the streaming platform. To the ticket seller. To everyone who showed up after those early vital emotional connections were formed.
And like all the other kids in the 90s who made mixtapes for others just because: it was never about a financial reward. It was about belonging, community. A shared experience that no algorithm engineered and no marketing budget manufactured.
The question is whether the music industry sees that value and is finally ready to build something worthy of it. Something truly bottom-up. Because when 15% of the output sucks up virtually all the value, the other 85% needs champions and new models. Shoutout to you, Clayton Christensen. You called it. (“Clayton Christensen (1952-2020), author of The Innovator’s Dilemma.“)
After she joined Justin Bieber on stage at Coachella 2026, Billie Eilish could not stop crying from the emotional impact that moment had on her. Very real, deep-seated emotions forged over time through her passion for his music.
