A few concrete mechanisms that made this work (happy to expand):

  * “Host layer”: greeting newcomers + making it safe to arrive alone mattered more than we expected.
  * Curation as governance: coherent music changes how people behave in the room.
  * Offline outreach outperformed posting: visiting local businesses in person built trust faster than Instagram.
  * Scale changes the social physics; we stayed small on purpose.

> early on we needed Instagram content that could show music visually without filming crowds in a club. We started filming headphone-walk clips: one person, headphones on, walking through town to a track we chose.

Brilliant. Fantastic example of constraints producing richly creative results.

A few years ago, I started again to attend regularly to concerts, and often in small / mid size local rooms, with an audience from perhaps 50 to a few hundred people.

Those are much more meaningful to me than those giant stadiums where you watch the band on giant screens. These thoughts will seem obvious, but smaller spaces with a limited audience are really warmer. You feel much closer to the artists, you are sharing emotions, sometimes the artist comes playing or singing in the middle of the audience. Things happen! A guitar string breaks, a drum falls, the singer goes out of tune. This is real live music!

Might travel down from Stockholm in a couple of months. Too few nights like this in Sweden (Hosoi can be quite good though).

Not against AI, but I think you would find this post to be better if you didn't use AI to write it. They are not quite at the point yet where they generate something interesting enough for most people to want to read. Additionally, it goes somewhat counter to your stated goals. You (or chatgpt) said:

> People return when they feel recognised and when the night has a consistent identity.

But there's no identity to your post, because it doesn't feel like it was written by a person. Try writing it yourself! It’s boring, but it builds trust because it’s human, not algorithmic.

Anyway, congrats! I used to be a little bit into the DIY music scene in Chicago. Super cool to see other manifestations of it around the world