Can indies save the music industry? You’ve heard it time and time again - the music industry is cooked. The majors are signing AI deals, indie labels are getting bought up, A&R’s are using tiktok to sign artists. Then you see it; a little glimmer in the distance… what’s that? Two life-long best friends from San Diego that started a music blog during Covid. What started as a quest to counterbalance the droves of white men starting their own podcasts (no small feat) bourgeoned into a music blog, then a marketing and PR firm, and finally, a boutique distro house that kinda does all three. I chatted with the founders, Kelsey Kahla and Ashley Alderson, ahead of Grrl Music’s first ever showcase in Los Angeles (this Saturday, August 15th at The Virgil) about the evolution of Grrl Music and the state of the industry at large. They gave me hope that there’s a light at the end of the AI music slop and major monopolies.
Ashley and Kelsey don’t come off as your run-of-the-mill music industry execs - and I say that as a huge compliment (I’m allowed to talk a little smack because I’ve worked in the industry myself for 10 years). Right away on our zoom, I could feel warmth and realness emanating from the screen, which is a stark contrast from some of the sterile, Balenciaga-clad label meetings I’ve been privy to. Before Grrl Music, Ashley worked in accounting and Kelsey, her more type-B-ish BFF of 30 years, worked the odd admin job and wrote about music she loved on Tumblr. That was the earliest iteration of Grrl Music as we know it today. When both of them moved back to San Diego in 2020, they could feel the need for community that we all felt while donning our red light masks and trying out sourdough recipes and TikTok dances, so they started a podcast and online community devoted to fangirling amazing indie music. It wasn’t long until they realized there was a major gap in services available for the indie artists they were interacting with and the Wonka Factory-esque system that is the major label industrial complex.
“Our whole thing has always been about supporting independent music, because what the artists have been asked to do and handle on their own is actually ill. It’s so insane,” says Kelsey. “They’re asked to run their entire social media, they’re asked to completely produce, sometimes they mix and master their own stuff. They’re asked to do, just like crazy things that…major labels have teams to help them with. And we were like, well, that’s not fair just because they don’t have millions of streams or whatever it may be. How is that fair that they don’t get the same, if anything, they need to be developed more than say Sabrina Carpenter, right?”
So, on top of their music blog & artist discovery platform, the Grrls decided to try their hand at artist marketing / PR and now, their latest and final iteration, music distro. The distro model combines their artist services like marketing and pitching with practical distro services to get the music out there. But this is no Tunecore or Distrokid. With a small, curated roster of 40 artists, Ashley and Kelsey promise high touch relationships to every artist they sign, which is evident in the community they’ve built and the opportunities they foster, including this weekend’s showcase.
“It’s like a little community within our own community. And that’s our ethos at the end of the day, human connection and artist development. That’s what we bring to our distro,” Kelsey explains. “We sit on meetings all the time and do release schedules. We talk about what they should be doing on social media…chasing virality is not your end goal. You need to build a fanbase, and it’s slowly but surely by doing XYZ.”
It’s certainly refreshing to hear the words “virality is not your end goal” from someone running a music company in 2026. Numbers, numbers, numbers is all you’ve heard if you’re an artist who has released music in the last ten years. And while the numbers have always mattered and still do, the artist development piece is what has really been missing. Major labels scroll TikTok for the flavor of the week and pluck them from whatever corner of the internet they are from, solely because ten seconds of their acoustic song got 30 million uses on TikTok. That’s not to take away from the talented writers and artists going viral online, many of them deserve the success and attention - but are they ready for it?
Once a viral artist is signed by a major, they’re expected to produce that same lightning-strike moment again and again with new songs, while touring and keeping up their online presence. That would be pretty jarring for someone who is used to singing songs in their room or performing at their local dive. And while it sounds like the dream for many, it can lead to quick burnout for the artist and disillusionment by the label that signed them. This was evidenced in what we’ve seen from artists like Lola Young and Chappell Roan, whose quick rises to fame were followed by mandatory steps away from the spotlight to tend to their well-being.
I think a lot of people in and outside of the industry are clocking this and yearning for the slow burn to stardom that trademarked the superstars of yesteryear. I’m not saying anyone should bring back the Mickey Mouse Club or Motown Revue, but maybe there’s a different, third thing that lives between the camps of instant internet superstars and long, grueling journeys to the top. Incubators like Grrl Music feel like the types of companies that can champion this model.
“I think on the industry side of things, it’s gonna be the indies that become a really strong, stable environment, because we’ve been stressed for so long, we have the building blocks, so to speak, of what’s true to the music industry,” Kelsey says. “The majors don’t have it right now, but we do. So I think industry indie is going to be super powerful within the next few years…The majors are just, they’re making AI music so that they can get money. I mean, it’s insanity. It’s insanity.”
And she’s not wrong! With the “Big Three” major labels - Warner, Universal, and Sony - all under contract with at least one AI company, the future of an artist-centric music industry is looking especially bleak. So, we can sit around and watch the ship hit the iceberg, or maybe, just maybe, we can look to people like the Grrls as an example of how to resurrect the scrappy, imperfect indie music landscape that so many of us romanticize and shape it into something that actually serves the artists.
“We’re seeing a lot of the CEOs of major labels come from tech or some other just far-flung industry, but…they’re not the fangirl. The fangirls are the ones that run the dang industry, okay?” Okay!
If you’re in LA, definitely come out to the first ever Grrl Music Distro showcase this Saturday, August 15th at the Virgil to see what they’re all about. If not, check out the artists that will be performing below:
