Michael Jelen

Founder & CEO @ekho.music - building a fair music economy.
Working at the intersection of music, consciousness, and human connection.
Forbes 40u40.

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

Two years ago I set out to build a fairer creator economy.

I thought it would be in TV.

I ended up in music — because no creative industry on earth treats its artists worse.

Building something new. It's called Ekho (@your_ekho): https://t.co/7uQx2TzoJM.

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

@IcelandEclipse https://t.co/pKdtUwcBup

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

22 days to totality.

Aug 12 — Iceland at @IcelandEclipse

Artists + community, together, under a total solar eclipse.

An incredible lineup of musicians, scientists, astronauts, and people deeply committed to a better earth.

I'm honored to share Ekho.

Last chance to join. Code MICHAEL405.

🔗 https://t.co/202KgMMUyI

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

7/ Knowing your fans is infrastructure.
Choosing them is connection.
The first is finally being built — by many of us, and I'm glad.

The second is where the future of music lives.

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

1/ Fan data is quickly becoming AI-readable.

OpenStage plugged artist fan data into Claude, ChatGPT & Gemini this month. Ask your fanbase anything in plain English.

Big deal. And it proves something bigger. 🧵

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

6/ That's the layer Ekho is building.

Same raw material — fan signals from 25+ platforms. Different destination: a seat the artist chooses, that money alone can't buy.

Devotion recognized. Not retargeted.

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

Human-Animal communication has always felt close since we've been studying whale "songs" which in fact have similar construction to human songs, with verses, choruses, and evolving patterns as more whales join the chorus.

The universe has always been music.

We're finally remembering how to sing along. 😁

[Jay Anderson @TheProjectUnity]

What happens when we can understand the animals?

Because I think that's coming...

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

Full CBC News investigation here: https://t.co/ZKXLEqvXo6 — worth reading in full.
Credit to the reporters for pulling this from the public record.

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

SEC filings revealed this week that StubHub's CEO also runs a fund reselling millions in tickets on his own platform.

Disclosed. Legal. And proof of what we've said all along:
When money alone decides who gets in the room, capital beats devotion. Every time.

70–80% of tickets on resale platforms are controlled by professional resellers. Not fans. The people who love the music most get outbid by the people who love the margin most.

At Ekho, seats to the most intimate rooms aren't free — fans still pay. But money can't skip the line. Fans earn their seat through devotion, and the artist — a human, never an algorithm — chooses every name by hand.

Every seat is non-transferable. Unclaimed? It cascades to the next most deserving fan. Never to a resale market.

No flipping. No secondary market. Nothing to scalp.

We're building the alternative.

Human-chosen. Fan-earned. Scalper-proof.

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

https://t.co/Jn8AL6XmFX

DistroKid isn't the villain. Great product, 100% royalties, earned outcome.

But assets get optimized. That's the job.

1M streams ≈ $3,000. 1,000 true fans ≈ $100,000.

Reach was never the problem. Access to the people who already care was.

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

A PE firm just bought 40% of independent music distribution.

CVC now owns a majority of DistroKid — and controls Superstruct, 80+ festivals. TuneCore: Believe. CD Baby's parent: Universal.

Every "artist-first" pipe is now an asset on someone's balance sheet.

Artists own one thing: the people who chose them.

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

A song hit #1 on Spotify last week.

Not because anyone loved it — because someone botted 500,000 streams to win a $3M gambling bet.

A stream was never devotion. It's a data point you can fake with a script.

You can't bot a fan who's shown up for 9 years.

That's what Ekho is built on.
Wired Article: https://t.co/a2RpJrg0Qy

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

You can love an artist for 10 years — every release, every show, every shirt — and the system remembers none of it.

Your devotion lives in a dozen disconnected places.

None of it yours. None of it visible to the artist who earned it.

We're building Ekho on a simple idea: your history with an artist should belong to you.

Portable. Permanent. Real.

Would you want that?

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

Everyone has one artist they got in early on.

Before the algorithm caught up. Before the big rooms.

When you could've named half the crowd.

There's a specific pride in having been there first.

The fan who shows up early isn't just a listener. They're a founding believer — and almost nothing in music remembers they were there.

Which artist that you love did you find early?

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

Important point - though I'm certainly not suggesting everyone will be paying $5/month for dozens of artists, the math doesn't require that.

Only the deepest fans, the ones who already spend and are EXCITED to fund their favorite artists make this work. The top 2% spend an average of $113/month on musicians.

Right now artists get ~12% of that $113. This system removes the middlemen - which changes everything. No bots, no scalpers, no pitiful streaming revenue shares.

In fact, overall I anticipate fans paying less and artists getting more. There's plenty of money in the system, it's just not going to the artists.

That's the mission.

[Michael Jelen @MichaelJelen]

A number that reorganized how I think about music:
1,000 fans paying $5/month = $60,000/year.

The same 1,000 on streaming = about $960/year.

Same fans. Same year. 60x the income.

The difference isn't more listeners. It's a direct relationship instead of a metered one.

Most artists don't need to go viral. They need their first 1,000 true fans.