🎸 It ain’t about the music anymore

Inside an old brick building in the leafy town of Haverhill, Massachusetts, you’ll find one of the last vestiges of a once-thriving industry.

Entering the six-story structure is like going back in time: Stacks of kiln-dried maple wood line the walls. Artisans carefully tinker with tuning pins and soundboards. A light tinkling of classical music rises above the whir and putter of 100-year-old machines.

Not long ago, piano factories like this were one of America’s largest and most formidable industries, employing tens of thousands of workers.

Today, only two active manufacturers remain: Steinway & Sons in New York, and this place — Mason & Hamlin.

Over the past century, nearly all American piano manufacturers have been eradicated by foreign competition, declining domestic craftsmanship, and the rise of competing technologies.

But Mason & Hamlin has endured largely by turning to the past, drawing inspiration from a bygone era of artisanry, and striking a chord with dedication to tradition.

Hey — we’re not advocating anything.

We’re not saying you should download these spreadsheets and present them as your own at your next big meeting.

That’s why they’re here, though. We use top models to keep business operations spick-and-span, and now they’re yours.

Ten essential templates for streamlining:

• Marketing budgets
• Blog and social content calendars
• On-page SEO
• Google Ads strategy
• Service-level agreements (SLAs)
• And much more

Next week on Zoom, Jimmy will unmute for the first time in months to say, “That’s an excellent spreadsheet.” We won’t say a word.

In 2017, Coachella became the first music festival to top $100m in annual profits.

It’s been quite the turnaround: Less than two decades earlier, the inaugural Southern California festival — meant to be an affordable, laid-back destination for alternative music fans — flopped.

With ~25k people in attendance, the October 1999 event wasn’t profitable, costing organizers nearly $1m.

So, what changed?

The music, for one — the alternative artists who headlined the early festivals were swapped out for mainstream pop and hip-hop artists, like Jay-Z and Lady Gaga, bringing bigger audiences to the main stage.

Social media, of course, is another reason.

When influencer culture and festival fashion exploded in the 2010s, both quickly became synonymous with Coachella, which experienced a stratospheric increase in attendance.

And here come the brands and influencers

The increased prominence of content creators and celebrities working with brands has nearly overshadowed what happens on stage.

Perhaps no company has used Coachella as a marketing tool as heavily as LA-based clothing company Revolve.

• Nearly 70% of the company’s sales come from influencers, making experiential marketing at events like Coachella a core revenue driver.
• Since 2015 at Coachella, Revolve has hosted Revolve Festival, an invite-only party for celebrities and influencers. The event has driven ~5B social impressions.

This year, Revolve again made headlines, collaborating with Kendall Jenner’s tequila brand and Hailey Bieber’s beauty line — just another part of the social-driven $1B+ marketing machine that is today’s Coachella…

… which is all surely a long way from its modest beginnings of Rage Against The Machine and Beck playing on a polo field.

📅 On this day: In 1998, an attempt to showcase Windows 98 resulted in the infamous “Blue Screen of Death” after an assistant plugged in a scanner. Bill Gates quipped, “That must be why we’re not shipping Windows 98 yet.”

👴 Haha: “Pokémon Go,” for grandpas.

🌲 That’s interesting: The “Torture Orchard” is where trees are put to extremes to test which ones could survive climate change.

📱 How to: Stop scrolling forever into the void.

😺 Aww: And now, a true “wait for it” moment.