The Story of Crescendo

Crescendo didn’t start as a “company idea.” It started the day I got tired of watching artists quietly get screwed.

The first spark was seeing musicians pull their catalogs from Spotify, not as a performative act but because they felt cornered. That led me down a rabbit hole of how streaming economics actually work… and it was worse than I expected. Then I found Subvert.fm, and suddenly I could see the outline of a different world: one where artists weren’t just content suppliers for algorithms, but actual participants in the system.

That’s when it clicked. I didn’t want to just critique the system or post about “artist empowerment.” I wanted to build something that fixed the underlying power imbalance. Something that wasn’t about replacing one gatekeeper with another but giving communities their own leverage.

Crescendo is the result of that shift, from frustration to responsibility.

I built it around one core question:
“What would a creative ecosystem look like if transparency wasn’t optional?”

Not transparency as a buzzword, but as an infrastructure.
Not another platform, but a blueprint artists can build on.
Not “community” as a marketing phrase, but as shared governance, shared upside, and shared truth.

This project became my way of making a real contribution instead of another abstract opinion. It’s my attempt to help artists, local scenes, small collectives, and cultural workers operate with more agency—because the work they create already carries the culture. They deserve systems that don’t undermine them.

I’m still early in the process, still refining, still learning from people actually doing the work. But the mission stays the same:
use design, structure, and transparency to give creative communities more power than the platforms they depend on.

That’s the beginning of Crescendo, and the part of the story I want people to understand when they see where it goes next.

Learn more by viewing the Concept Brief here.