Rocketship opens public beta as first AI platform to identify
a song’s audience before it’s ever released

DALLAS, Texas — Today, Rocketship opens its public beta as the music industry’s first AI platform capable of identifying the audience of a song before it has ever been heard by the public. Built to level the playing field for the estimated 7 million independent artists worldwide who lack the data and tools to maximize their music’s potential, Rocketship delivers the kind of strategic intelligence once reserved for the largest labels in the world, now available to any artist with a song to release.

With more than 100K songs uploaded to a single streaming platform each day, artists are finding it harder than ever to get their music heard within an oversaturated market. Too much great music goes unheard. Too many talented artists walk away before they ever find their audience. Rocketship was built to change that by putting the power of data-driven A&R in the hands of those creating it.

Rocketship was co-founded by music executive Maxwell Zotz (known as “Zotz”) and tech entrepreneur Billy Rodgers. Over the last 15 years at the forefront of the music industry, Zotz has developed deep expertise across artist management, fan engagement, A&R and intellectual property, as a leader committed to elevating artists at every stage of their career. Zotz took his first endeavor, Verge Campus, from tech-driven startup to acquisition in five years, after solidifying it as a respected media platform known for branded national college tours featuring artists including Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper and Steve Aoki. Zotz most recently served as VP of Music & Brand Strategy at MAX.Live, where he spent the last eight years leading artist partnerships on behalf of Fortune 500 brands such as Ford, Dr Pepper, and McDonald’s, while championing the launch of innovative artist tools and platforms including SET The Set and SET.Live. Having previously collaborated on Rodgers’ fan engagement platform, Fanpage — a trusted tool for artists to engage directly with their audience — the pair went on to identify a critical gap at the intersection of music creation, audience identification and emerging AI. Their mission crystallized around a single idea: connect more artists with fans who will love their music, and build the infrastructure the next era of the music industry demand.

“For too long, artists have had to rely on gut instinct or feedback from friends and family to decide whether a song had potential,” shares Rocketship founder / CEO Zotz. “At Rocketship, we put leverage back in the hands of the musician by using AI to identify potential fans and provide a clear marketing blueprint built on quantifiable data and analysis.”

Once an artist has uploaded their song, Rocketship’s proprietary AI analyzes over 80 audio, lyric and contextual parameters, cross-referencing them against millions of data points from more than 250K of the most significant songs of the last five decades, ultimately delivering a complete audience profile. The profile’s analytics include total potential fans, genre breakdown, similar artists, demographics, geographic hotspots and the social platforms they use. From there, Rocketship builds a full end-to-end marketing campaign tailored to the artist’s release date and budget, housed inside an AI Command Center called Mission Control. Trained on each artist’s specific music and goals, Mission Control provides data-driven direction for each stage of a song’s life.

Following extensive legal validation conducted in coordination with Loeb & Loeb, one of the nation’s most respected entertainment and intellectual property law firms, Rocketship launches with a patent-pending process that makes it the only company with a legal, enforceable and defendable method to educate our AI on the most notable music of the past 5 decades, across all genres, in order to better analyze the audience and potential of an unreleased song.

While Rocketship is designed with the independent artist at its core, its capabilities extend across the full music business. Labels and managers gain a data-driven framework for deciding which singles to release and promote. Publishers can leverage Rocketship’s predictive song-to-artist matching to make placements. Rights holders can use the platform to uncover growth opportunities and map a clear path to higher long-term ROI on high-value song catalogues.

Offering underserved creators the ability to cut through the noise and find their audience without the need for a “lucky break,” guesswork and gut instinct are no longer the gatekeepers to scalable success, as a new era of music connectivity begins.