Audiotree

Audiotree is where the internet discovers its next favorite band — a Chicago-based live-session institution that turned the in-studio performance into an art form. The formula sounds simple: invite an artist in, record a full live session, film it beautifully. The execution is anything but — and the results have launched careers.

The origin story starts in Portage, Michigan. Adam Thurston and Michael Johnston grew up as teenage music obsessives in the late nineties, too young to get into bars and stuck in a town where the bands they loved only ever played in Detroit, Grand Rapids, or Chicago. They went to college, learned the production trade, and in 2010 built a company around a simple bet: that a perfectly recorded, beautifully filmed live session could introduce the world to its next obsession. Their first showcase happened at a Kalamazoo bar called The Strutt in 2011. The company took the name Audiotree, and the flagship series — Audiotree Live — started growing roots.

The sessions are the product, and the product is prestige. A full Audiotree Live set — performance plus interview, captured with the kind of audio quality that makes studio albums nervous — is a rite of passage for independent artists. Bleed’s full session is the perfect example: a band at full power, no overdubs to hide behind, playing like the cameras aren’t there even though they absolutely are. The archive reads like a “before they were huge” hall of fame, because Audiotree’s bookers have an almost unfair ear for what’s next.

What separates Audiotree from every other “live session” channel is the business model behind the art. The company splits profits 50/50 with the artists — a genuinely radical arrangement in a music industry built on extraction. Johnston put the tagline bluntly: “We Grow Music.” It’s not charity; it’s philosophy. Treat artists like partners, and the art gets better. Fifteen years of sessions suggest the bet paid off.

The company kept growing past the studio walls. In 2013 it staged its first full festival in the Wings Stadium parking lot in Kalamazoo — ambitiously headlined by nineties stalwarts Blues Traveler — and the Audiotree Music Festival became an annual pilgrimage to Arcadia Creek Festival Place, with lineups that by 2018 included Father John Misty, Local Natives, Real Estate, and Khruangbin. In 2015, Audiotree bought two of Chicago’s most beloved rooms outright — Schubas Tavern and Lincoln Hall — adding live concert booking, promoting, and streaming to the operation, and turned both venues into laboratories for livestreamed concerts broadcast to a global audience.

The numbers tell the scale: more than 750 bands recorded in the studio by the mid-2010s, an early-YouTube-partner account that climbed past 700,000 subscribers, and a publishing operation that shares revenue instead of hoarding it. Forbes called the whole thing a “music discovery platform,” which is accurate but bloodless — what Audiotree actually built is a machine for converting obscurity into devotion.

The Chicago studio itself is a character: warm wood, perfect light, and an intimacy that makes arena-sized bands feel like they’re playing your living room. In an era of bedroom livestreams, Audiotree proved that the room still matters — and built a whole aesthetic around getting it right. The interview segments that close each session do something the performance can’t: they let you hear the person behind the songs, unguarded, in a room built for listening.

The company weathered a genuine crisis in 2021, when co-founder Michael Johnston was removed as president and CEO following his arrest on felony unauthorized-recording charges, with the company publicly announcing his removal. It was the kind of scandal that can sink an independent operation built on trust. That Audiotree kept recording, kept publishing, and kept its 50/50 promise intact through the turmoil says something about how deeply the institution had taken root beyond any one person — the sessions kept coming, the artists kept showing up, and the discovery machine kept humming.

Why people watch: for the discovery high. Every session is a chance to hear your next obsession first, played live, with nowhere to hide. The 50/50 split just makes the goosebumps feel ethical. From a Kalamazoo bar showcase to Lincoln Hall to festival stages to your headphones, Audiotree built the internet’s most trustworthy ear — and proved that in the attention economy, the radical move is simply to pay the artists.

The discovery pipeline is the whole point, and the receipts are everywhere. Scroll the archive and you’ll find sessions from artists recorded years before the rest of the world caught on — the kind of “wait, they played here?” moments that have become a badge of honor for longtime viewers. The company’s alumni network functions like a secret society of the independently minded: bands that did the session, did the interview, took the 50/50 split, and went on to headline the very festivals Audiotree books. It’s a virtuous circle most of the industry can’t replicate, because most of the industry never thought to share the money.