Interview: Jason Hollis

Jason Hollis is a music industry veteran with 30 years of artist development experience. He is also the owner of The Eighth Room, a historic venue and lounge in Nashville where he hosts HOOKED, an extremely fun live music competition series every Tuesday, with no cover. (Info)

I asked Hollis about the state of the music industry, what he loves most about working on HOOKED and we compared his industry advice to some from my favorite esoteric pop legends The KLF.

CAMELIA: From my perspective, many if not all of the institutions that were gatekeeping the music industry have failed and are largely hollowed shells of what they once were. As someone who has worked in music several decades, was there a particular event you saw as the nail in the coffin for the music industry?

HOLLIS: I didn’t step outside the industry safety net just to play it safe. I walked away because after decades in the trenches, I could see the old guard rotting from the inside out.

There wasn't just one nail in the coffin. They bought the whole hardware store. The fatal blow was the exact moment major labels realized they couldn't organically manufacture internet culture. They panicked, completely abandoned artist development, and morphed into terrified data-entry clerks trading gut instinct for spreadsheet math. They hollowed out their own infrastructure chasing algorithmic ghosts.

But here is the beautiful, weaponized truth. Their panic is your ultimate leverage. By abandoning the trenches, they left a massive vacuum for independent creators to bypass the middlemen entirely, own their data, and monetize their core fans directly. The gatekeepers didn't just die. They made themselves a punchline.

Stop asking for a permission slip from a ghost town. You are the CEO of your own empire. Operate with zero permission and dominate the feed.

What is your favorite part of working on HOOKED?

What do I love most about HOOKED? We brought old-school A&R out of the boardroom and back into the trenches. You get 60 seconds on the clock to deliver your absolute best hook under extreme pressure. Then I interview the artist, and a panel of heavyweight industry pros tears into the performance, delivering top-tier expertise on everything from songwriting and production to management, marketing, and direct monetization. My ultimate mission is simple. Force artists to understand the actual mechanics of the business they are entering. Cut out the middlemen. Build the empire yourself. I preach the 1,000 True Fans theory like it is absolute gospel.

I hammer this reality home because Spotify is a trap, and independent artists will never survive relying on it. Let’s run the brutal math. Roughly 99,000 new songs are dumped into streaming services every single day. That oversaturation destroys meaningful listening time. Spotify flexes about having 777 million active users, but out of the millions of creators feeding their machine, only 13,800 make over $100,000 a year. Worse yet? Nearly 87% of the music on Spotify doesn't even hit the 1,000 streams required to trigger a single royalty fraction. You cannot wait for a rigged algorithm to hand you a career.

We used to have real organic discovery like early Myspace, gritty music blogs, indie zines, and real magazine coverage. Now? Discovery is just TikTok influencers demanding a check for a fake viral moment. And do not get me started on TV competitions. American Idol, The Voice, and AGT are so sanitized and Hollywood that young creators view them as completely selling out. There is absolutely zero danger left on those stages.

HOOKED is the exact opposite. It is unscripted, high-energy, unapologetic, and dangerous. We operate strictly Artists First. Because of that raw authenticity, we aren't just a live show anymore. We are evolving into our own independent discovery platform.

That is why I built this, and it is why I love doing it every week. I want to see actual artists win. We are building a community and handing you the exact playbook to take back control. That is why we go live.

The general vibe of HOOKED and your upcoming book reminds me of The Manual by The KLF— they wrote a guide in the 80's on how to achieve a number one song in the U.K. It’s very funny, I’m extremely fond of it. Their first bit of advice was as follows; “Firstly, you must be skint and on the dole. Anybody with a proper job or tied up with full time education will not have the time to devote to see it through. Also, being on the dole gives you a clearer perspective on how much of society is run.” Do you agree with this advice? You seem to have a slightly more optimistic take on making a living off of music. 

I firmly agree with The KLF. We do not have the dole in the US, but the core principle is absolute reality. I have seen artists in the UK and Australia build massive careers starting exactly that way. My belief and a practice I continue to live by is simple. You have to be in it to win it. You cannot spend 80 percent of your day building someone else's corporation and expect to build your own empire with the exhausted 20 percent you have left.

If you are the smartest or most motivated person in the room, get out of that room immediately. Put yourself in highly uncomfortable positions and live completely beneath your means. You have to figure out the exact minimal dollar amount you need to survive, and then reverse engineer your entire life to buy yourself the maximum amount of time to execute.

When I started out in Nashville, I locked down the cheapest apartment I could find for $400 a month. I broke down the math and realized I needed roughly $1,200 a month to cover basic bills and eat. So I built a strategy. I was a runner for the music section of a newspaper in the mornings. I worked the mail room at a record company in the afternoons. On weekends, I bused tables at a major industry hotspot restaurant to earn tips and guarantee myself a meal at least twice a week.

Every single job served a dual purpose. They kept a roof over my head, and they kept me completely surrounded by industry players. Most importantly, that lean schedule allowed me over 60 percent of my week to focus strictly on building my network and interning. I juggled two studio internships a week and one direct internship with a producer. Literally everything I did was hyper focused on music.

I operated on almost zero sleep, very few meals, and absolutely no traditional social life. The only friends I had were grinding just as hard as me, and we leaned on each other for support. But it was the most exciting time of my life because I had total purpose. I became a master of networking simply by establishing an undeniable work ethic right out of the gate.

There is no easy way to do this. If you want it, you have to build a game plan, cut the excess, and go fucking get it.

Is there a release date for your upcoming book, “So You Want To Be A Rockstar”?

When I wrote "So You Want To Be A Rockstar?", I poured 30 years of artist development, brand building, and real trench work into actionable steps and lessons for the modern music landscape. I actually finished the manuscript before I ever had the idea for HOOKED.

Then I started taking meetings with book publishers, and I literally had to laugh in their faces. The traditional publishing racket is just as broken and predatory as the major record labels. They want print on demand setups with an insulting 70/30 split where they keep 70 percent. You have to buy your own copies, distribution is limited, and they expect you to do 100 percent of your own marketing and promo anyway. I looked at those contracts and thought: why on earth would I take a garbage deal like this instead of doing it all myself?

That realization was the exact catalyst for HOOKED. The entire foundation of the book is teaching creators how to operate with zero permission and build their own machine, so HOOKED became the living, breathing response to both the publishing world and the music industry.

Right now, I am delivering the core lessons of that book live on stage week after week. Even bigger than that, we are currently developing Hooked University. We are taking every single strategy from the book and turning it into short, high-impact infographic videos paired with 30-day action plans so artists can immediately execute in the real world. That will all be live soon on hookedsessions.com.

Building our media platform, producing the broadcast, and launching Hooked University demands all of my focus right now. Eventually, I will release the book independently on my own terms. But until then, the community gets the blueprint delivered live every single week.

I read that you used to work at a record store when you were younger—what do you think has replaced this relationship in modern times?

You are close, but there is a very important distinction. I actually started out in a music store, not a record store. My stepdad owned Zeagler Music in Baton Rouge, and I was working the floor by the time I was 14. I worked there all the way through high school, and that is exactly where I learned the real mechanics of the music community.

Local music stores are the original social network. That is where you go to pin a physical flyer to a corkboard because you need a killer bass player. That is where you talk gear and physically test your sound. I still get that exact same child-like excitement walking into a music store today because the raw energy is undeniable.

What replaced that relationship? We are rebuilding it at scale right now. HOOKED is working directly with Greg Glaser from Custom House by Guitar Center. We are bypassing the standard retail funnel and introducing Greg directly to our HOOKED artist community. Our artists walk in, get absolute rockstar service, and lock down artist-endorsed level deals on equipment. Together, we are engineering content that puts HOOKED artists in the studio with new gear to cross-promote and dominate networks neither of us could reach alone. That is how you manufacture real value.

We are also teaming up with Curtis Heath from the Guitar Center Music Foundation to put instruments directly into schools. I have championed this for a decade because I firmly believe there are enough instruments on this planet, and they need to be in the hands of kids who would never normally have access to them. You never know which kid is going to pick up an acoustic, get completely obsessed, and become the next Robert Johnson. We are bringing the Music Foundation straight into our ecosystem because I operate on a very simple rule. You have to give to receive.