Building a Company Inside of a Movement: Interview with Filmmaker, Entrepreneur, and Live2 Founder, McClain Portis
McClain Portis is an entrepreneur who finds himself, serendipitously, at the forefront of a revolution in the music and entertainment industry as the founder of Live2. Vast in both its ambition and approach, McClain himself finds it hard to define: “Putting together an untraditional thing that no one else understands, and the craziness of me having to sit on the edge of my bed and draw this bubble graph on a whiteboard, is part of my experience” (whiteboard pictured below 🙂).
Put simply, Live2 is an ecosystem of divisions all aimed at breaking out emerging artists. These divisions include ANA projects (artist development division), a broadcast network (the engine behind Live2 shows and series), Live2 films (a video production company), and Live2 events (an events company).
What truly separates Live2 is not the tools they use, but rather their approach. McClain sees it as much a movement as a company. Like any movement, Live2 is mission-led with an ethos that rejects content creation and competing for attention. Instead, the Live2 movement centers on telling stories that elicit emotion, authenticity, and connection. As McClain wrote in the Live2 Manifesto, “When someone loves a Live2 artist, they will love them because it feels overwhelmingly and undeniably real in a time where we as people are drowning… art is what makes humans human, and it is dying. It’s about time there was a revolution. This is about more than us, it’s about saving the fucking world.”
I stumbled upon McClain’s story and Live2 through a fortunate adventure down an Instagram rabbit hole. I wondered about the person behind those words. I wanted to know: What is it really like to pursue a dream that is so expansive and hard to define? What kept him from giving up in all the years before he saw success? What’s it like to build something that feels like both a company and a movement? How does he stay true to himself?
We spoke about all of that and more throughout a two-part conversation:
Part I covers the story of Live2
Part 2 dives into McClain’s experience
Note: The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. While every effort has been made to preserve the integrity of the conversation, please be aware that the quotes may not be verbatim but reflect the essence of the dialogue.
PART I: THE LIVE2 STORY
Beginnings in a USC Dorm Room
I’ve always been entrepreneurial but never really driven by money. I’ve always been driven by the desire to build something that makes people stop and stare. Something that makes them stand in awe of something. I don’t know why I’ve been obsessed with it - that’s something I haven’t fully figured out, but it’s there at the roots of who I am. It’s taken many different formats. In high school, I started making trick-shot YouTube videos. I was obsessed with the idea that anyone with a camera and a laptop could tell whatever stories they wanted and build whatever they wanted to. I didn’t really find the thing that I wanted to be building until I went to college. I learned that I was good at building teams around something just out of pure passion for it. I’m not really a type-A leader. I’m terrible at giving motivational speeches, but I’m so quietly passionate about whatever I’m working on that nothing is going to stop me, whether I have a 20-person team or it’s just me. Eventually, I’ll look up and there are 7 people around me who want to work on it with me. I think that’s been one of the biggest advantages of how I’m building Live2. We don’t have outside funding - the budgets are really low. Everyone who is part of Live2 is there because it’s built around their purpose in life.
Anyway, I graduated high school in 2018 and moved out to Los Angeles to go to USC. I went to film business school there, which ended up being really interesting because in my first couple of years, as I was getting into the beginnings of Live2, I rejected the industry side of things. I would say, “This is stupid. There’s so much irrelevancy that is being pushed. This is a dying Hollywood. I don’t understand why so many people are obsessed with it.” That came back around once Live2 got further along. I realized that even though the old industry was dying, a lot of the old practices still apply to the new industry. This new industry is taking from the old way and adding in new variables. As a freshman, I said, “Screw that. I’m not studying all this bull shit. I’m going to do my own thing.” I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder - I don’t need anyone to tell me how to do something, I’m just going to do it and learn from it.
I came to LA as this filmmaker and self-proclaimed storyteller. Even early on, I was already becoming frustrated with how difficult it was to break through the noise online. I also realized that there were lots of people who were even better than I was, and they weren’t even getting seen! That was an eye-opening, daunting realization. The internet was becoming so prominent. I got this hunch that stemmed from my own frustration. I noticed that the algorithms were starting to control everything and that it was a very frustrating thing to be an artist who feels like they have something to give the world, but feels like they are at the whims and mercy of the algorithm. No one seemed to know how to rise above it unless they got lucky, or found a way to do something unique in a world of 8 billion people competing for attention. I decided to start this thing that wasn’t about myself but about other people’s stories. I decided to find other, completely unknown artists and try to make stories about them. That’s what the whole brand was going to be about. I would be this side character on a quest to figure out who the dopest unknown artists are. That’s where Live2 began in my dorm room in 2018. It started as a clothing brand. I was making films and releasing a piece of clothing with artists. These were photographers, filmmakers - anyone doing anything that I thought was cool. I couldn’t figure out how to get anyone to care. I was trapped in this cycle of, “No one cares about Live2. No one cares about the stories I’m telling. No one cares about the artists that I’m telling them about. How do I get anybody to care?” I realized that I had to find a story that was good enough to be captivating to get someone to care about the artist and Live2. It took me about a year before I found the right thing - it was right at the very beginning of TikTok.
TikTok, Chase Paves, and Learning How to Break the Algorithm
In 2019, I started posting videos on TikTok and put the idea that I’d been trying to do on YouTube on the platform. It was easier to make a video every single day that was 45 seconds long instead of 8 minutes long. Around that time, I was taking photos for a professor in this music class, and I walked in one day and an artist was performing on stage. It was this guy named Chase Paves. During his set, he said, “I’ve never released my music before. I don’t know where to begin. When I do, I want to make sure that people hear it so I’m holding on to it until I can figure out how to do that.” A lightbulb went off in my head. I had just started figuring out how to make TikTok videos do well and showcase how I wanted to tell stories. I went up to him after class and said, “I don’t know if you’ve heard of this thing called TikTok.” He hadn’t even heard of TikTok yet so I told him what it was, told him what I was doing, and we ended up meeting up. He showed me his unreleased stuff and that week I made a video called “Making a Sensation.” The idea was to show a musician who knows nothing about the music industry, show a filmmaker who knows nothing about the music industry (myself), and tell the story of figuring out how to break someone into the music industry. That video got over 2 million views overnight. I saw the raw power that a video getting that much reach had. The platform was so new that the music industry really wasn’t even on it yet. Old Town Road had broken off it and a couple of other songs, but no one knew what to do with it.
After that video broke, Covid started. It made the project difficult because I had to go back to Nashville and Chase stayed in LA. It was crazy to see that 10,000 people a day were listening to a song that we made a video about two months prior. It was the first time I felt real success and I knew I was on to something. I didn’t understand how big it was yet, or what problem was occurring in the music industry that this was kind of potentially going to be able to fix. When I moved back to Nashville, I wanted to continue doing this around musicians. Slowly I came to terms with the fact that Live2 was going to discover musicians which is perfectly in line with my story. When I was a kid, I loved coin collecting, metal detecting, and finding things underneath the ground. I liked finding the diamonds in the rough and the things that people had walked over and forgotten. Discovering musicians was exactly that.
In Nashville, I started to scour the internet. At the time 40,000 songs were being uploaded every day to Spotify. Since then, that has tripled to 120,000 songs a day. I was scouring anything I could find. I wanted to find artists with less than 5,000 monthly listeners. People whose parents maybe didn’t even know that they made music. Because of the video I made, I also had hundreds, if not thousands of musicians dming me to listen to their unreleased songs. I would find people and then sometimes without even telling them, I would make a video about them. I’d go through their Instagram, try to figure out their story, tell their story the best I could, and then use their song in the video to try and help them. Several of those videos did really well, and I started building this playlist called “Art not Algorithms.” The idea was that artists shouldn’t have to figure out how to break the algorithm - I’ll do it for them. That idea caught on and the playlist grew really fast. I was chucked into the music industry accidentally without really meaning to. I became friends with the people that I made videos about. They were from all over - Omaha, Nebraska, Kansas City, and towns throughout the world. Through making videos about them and starting to help them a bit with their own videos, I got to watch as a lot of them got managers and label deals over the next year or two. At first, I thought, “Okay this is great,” but then I watched a lot of them kind of get screwed over by a system that didn’t know what to do with developing artists anymore.
A New Way to Develop Artists
Over time, I started to pick apart why that was and how the traditional entertainment industry has been losing its ability to control the attention of people since the rise of the internet. There are now 8 billion mom-and-pop entertainment companies. Everybody has an iPhone and everyone posts things. The big guys still have a lot of pull and attention, but not as much as they once had. There used to be 5,000 artists putting out records that appeared on shelves physically and now 40,000 songs are being uploaded every day. They just lost control and became investment bankers - investing in projects and hoping they would work. They were still overpromising based on the culture they had created during the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. These artists grew up hearing about, “Oh you need a label.” They would then take a deal during the first three years of their career, be trapped in it, and then come out the other side finally understanding, “Oh, I don’t really need that.” I came to that realization around the time that I was starting to dive more into artist-owned pages. I realized that if I structured the stories correctly on their pages, it was worth a lot more to them than a one-off video on my page.
I found this girl named Em Beihold in the summer of 2020 and she was the first artist that I really went all in with. I didn’t know about dealmaking, I didn’t know what a master was, I didn’t know what publishing was. I had no idea how music made money. I was trying to simultaneously figure out how to do deals that wouldn’t screw anyone over, while also trying to build the business and break the artists. The big thing anyone trying to do anything untraditional in the music industry has to deal with is jumpstarting projects that get taken from you very easily. I became really close friends with Em Beihold. We released three songs together over the course of a year and they progressively got bigger and bigger, to the point where she had a couple million monthly listeners. She had no manager, lawyer, or label. She had nothing besides what we were doing together. Right after her third song came out she ended up getting a lawyer, a label, and a manager. They turned around and looked at us and were like “Who the fuck are these guys? Why are they involved?” We got pushed to the side and had to swallow the pill on that one. Off the back of the success of that, we had proven to the people who were watching us, that in a time where no one understood how to develop an artist, we could develop an artist. People said, “They called their shot, picked one artist, and developed that artist.” Even though we lost the artist, it was still a big deal. Around that time, I met Shav Garg, the co-founder of Indify, a platform that connects artists with investors and other partners that can help them grow their careers. I started doing deals on Indify with our artists, rather than just doing handshake deals. The company has grown from there.
PART 2: MCCLAIN’S INNER EXPERIENCE
As we’re sitting here talking there’s a nice linear story that comes together, but I know from personal experience that it often doesn’t feel like that at the time, especially when you are doing something unconventional. What kept you going through the six-year period of building Live2 when there were a lot of unknowns and you didn’t quite know what it was becoming?
I came from a home and a family of entrepreneurs who found success in what they were building over multiple generations. There was a large level of intelligence around what it means to have wealth and what to do with it for the good of people. While the beginning was about telling people’s stories, as I’ve met these artists and become friends with them, I realized that a lot of people didn’t have as fortunate of an upbringing as I had. I realized that Live2 is my version of trying to build that home for other people. The number of conversations that I’ve had with artists, who have said that they’ve never felt so at home somewhere before, has really kept me going. I can feel how much purpose it gives people. If I didn’t have Live2, I wouldn’t know what life was about. It gives me a purpose and gives other people a purpose. That’s the whole thing.
You seem to have an unconventional approach to building the team and the company. Can you talk more about your approach and what makes it different?
It’s come together very naturally. As a documentarian and storyteller, my story is the story of building this company. This is my art. While I’m telling the artist’s story, I’m also trying to tell the story of building this thing. Recently, I’ve started filming for the documentary I want to make in 10 years. By that being so forward-facing and me being so passionate about it, other people started hitting me up to work on different things. The first iteration of building the team I failed at. I tried to bring on a very smart childhood friend, a friend from college, and a friend who knew about the industry. It fell apart because it wasn’t natural. They didn’t want to be a part of it from the beginning - I had to sell it to them. What I learned from that experience is that Live2 is a big enough concept that it can reach into a lot of different places: the film production world, the YouTube network world, the artist development world, and live events. I can find people that are passionate about something and I can find a lane for them inside of what we’re doing. I’ll work backward. I’ll talk to them, hear what they are most passionate about, and then wait until I have the perfect opportunity. Live2 should be like a rocket ship that anyone can attach their wagon to. I don’t try to have a top-down view that says, “I know what Live2 needs to be,” and force it to be that by finding the right people to do it. I find the people first and hear what they are passionate about, and then find a way for Live2 to grow in the direction around what they are passionate about. While we don’t have funding and it’s all still so malleable, it has definitely led us in cool directions with a whole lot of passion behind what we’re doing.
You talked about being driven by passion first, rather than money, and having the mission be driven by art and a sense of purpose. That said, it can be really easy to get stopped from pursuing a dream or something you’re passionate about out by the fear of “how will I make money?” What’s your perspective on that?
I’m really trying to figure out this question for myself. I know that I come from a background that has a very privileged side of this. I see what we’re building and I can’t take credit for it alone. I have to look at the people who came before me in my family who built things that worked. Someone had to start from nothing but it wasn’t me. Live2 is cofounded by everyone who came before me. The best way I know how to build Live2 and the reason that it works is because I’m able to be very empathetic towards people, step into their shoes, and feel what it’s like to be them. That usually comes from shared experiences. I’ve never had to have a 9to5 to make ends meet while also trying to build this. I went to USC and I was a student but that wasn’t something I had to stress about. Anything that builds something from the ground up and manages to succeed, which includes a few members of my team who were waiters and building their thing on the side, is someone I look at with so much respect because I know how difficult it is to build something, without even having to do that. I would say that if you’re obsessed with something, let the obsession run. Maybe that’s the equivalent of what it felt like when I was in school and hated doing homework and wanted to be working on Live2. I gave everything to Live2 and got Cs in my classes because of it. If you’re truly obsessed with it, play into that, but it does become more serious if you have to make your rent at the same time. It’s a frustrating state of the world to be in.
One thing that struck me as you’ve been talking is this strong sense of a person that has stayed very true to themself. Oftentimes, that requires a lot of courage to stand alone. What mindsets and practices help you stay true to the north star inside yourself?
I’ve always had a mindset of “I know I can figure it out.” Even in a meeting, or if someone pitches me something in a way that doesn’t feel like me, I’ll literally get a pit in my stomach. It’s like I need to prove to people that even though I might not be right yet, I know I can be right. There is a north star that I can’t tangibly put my finger on, but I know that when things feel right, they don’t put a pit in my stomach and they make me excited. When things feel wrong, I literally feel like I want to throw up. I do the things that don’t make me want to throw up! It’s like we know what we’re supposed to do and what our purpose is. Even though it’s very hazily defined far off in the future, you can tell whether or not you are on the right path with each decision you make.
What is this life that is uniquely yours starting to look like as you continue to build Live2?
It’s gotten really cool over the past couple of years as the artists around me have also grown up. Several of them are living full-time off their music now. It’s cool to know that I got to play a part in that. The core of Live2 is something difficult to define and something I’m working hard to define. It’s more like being a member of what we’re doing, a member of the movement, that is separate, even from what it might appear to be on the outside like a label. Sometimes we work with artists who are not technically Live2 members, but there is a core group of people and artists who have been here for so long, and whose stories are so intertwined with ours. Pretty much all of our employees are artists, whether they are musicians or filmmakers. It’s only myself, a friend from back home who helps with some of the financials and accounting, and my mom who helps with legal and taxes. The people I work with every day in the office, which is a garage converted into a studio, are filmmakers and musicians. Last night I went to dinner with two filmmakers and two artists who all consider themselves members of Live2. It took so long for people to consider Live2 a real thing. It took three years before anyone looked twice, and now there are people who think of it as a large part of their lives - it’s so incredible. They are working on projects that come from my brain and their brain and are a part of this thing - it’s so cool.
It’s funny that you say all that because the thought that I had as I was preparing for this interview was that it felt like you were building a movement rather than a company. It sounded very different than a corporate structure.
Sometimes they are at odds with each other, but I think there is a beautiful connection between the two. I think businesses can be built inside of a movement but a movement can’t be built inside of a company.