Rob Abelow is an artist manager, the founder of Roll Call Records, former co-founder of the web3 music discovery platform, Dopr, and now author of the excellent newsletter, Where Music’s Going.

After managing some bands in college, Rob Abelow, as a 23-year-old, approached one of the singers of the band Dispatch, which had just become the first independent band to headline Madison Square Garden, and convinced him, backstage at MSG, that he should become his manager. From there, Abelow would go on to start Roll Call Management and then Roll Call Records, and then, when he felt the urge to affect the industry at a more systemic level, he started Dopr, a suite of music discovery and modeling tools that folded at the end of last year due to conflicting founder perspectives about web3.

We chatted about all of this, as well as the power of on-chain identity, training ai music models on the notion of ‘optimal surprise’ to elevate our music discovery, and his love for world-building artists like Phish,