Turnstile Found a Cheat Code

The music industry built genres to sell records. Turnstile is proving you can build a much bigger audience by ignoring them.

I want to talk about my favourite band right now.

I’ve been digging through their older records lately and their evolution is so interesting to me. Their back catalogue is no different from any other hardcore band, but as they caught momentum and production technology has advanced, they’ve become one of the most commercially successful bands to ever come out of hardcore.

They’re called Turnstile.

Photo by Alexis Gross via Rolling Stone

A few weeks ago I got tickets to see their show in Toronto this coming fall. I pulled up the tour poster to take a look at who was opening. I had to double take and rub my eyes to confirm what I was seeing was accurate.

They booked sixteen dates across North America with sixteen completely unhinged lineups. Hip-hop legends Clipse are opening in Queens, hyper electro-pop princess Slayyyter has the spot in Kansas, Thundercat is on the bill in Pittsburgh, and Mall Grab is going to be spinning house music to kick off the night in Miami. In between these seemingly chaotic support slots you’ll find acts like Boy Harsher, Yves Tumor, Vince Staples, Pennywise, and Hatebreed.

For the last fifty years, what felt like an unwritten touring rule that wasn’t meant to be broken was this: you find a band to headline a show, and then you find three bands that sound just like them, put them on the same stage, and sell tickets to people who already like that specific sound. It was called “protecting the bill.”

Turnstile called it boring and went the other way.

And then this past Friday, they put out a release that actually made this tour poster feel like a conservative move.

They took the fourteen tracks from last year’s album and called up some of their favourite artists to rebuild them into 22 entirely new pieces of work. Elton John turned “SEEIN’ STARS” into a piano duet. Dying Fetus turned “BIRDS” into a death metal track, and Slayyyter turned that same track into a dance-pop anthem that makes you want to drive FAST. Four Tet is one of my favourite DJs — he turned a hardcore record into a club track. There was even a jazz interpretation made by Shabaka Hutchings.

How cool is that?

Why Genre Was Invented

So why does that matter? As I dug deeper, I started to realize how the concept of genres entirely are becoming less and less relevant.

Sometimes we talk about genre like it’s a way to hold onto our identities. If you ask someone what they listen to they’ll give you a couple that scratch that itch. It’s a way to categorize your taste and it’s defined by different lyrical themes and instrumentation. But it’s really not that innocent.

Genres were invented by the music industry as a way to sort its customers.

The American record business built its earliest categories to segregate demographics — Billboard ran a chart that filed music made by Black artists under “Race Records” until 1949 when they renamed it “Rhythm & Blues.”

Radio stations historically used formats as a way to bundle specific age groups and sell spots to advertisers.

And then came retail, where the physical architecture was pioneered. Literal aisles segmented by genres. Rock over here, electronic over there, hip-hop in that aisle, jazz in the corner.

As a customer, you’d feel like you belong in a certain aisle, and that became a piece of your identity. That’s how they wanted you to feel. Like you belonged to something, and steering away from that was some type of radical identity shift.

Genre was culture’s way of putting a fence around a tribe and selling ads to the people trapped inside it. That fence worked great when you had to drive to the store to drop twenty bucks on an album and pay for your music by the song.

But it’s different now.

Every single person has 100 million tracks at their fingertips, living within the same piece of glass that you can use to order tacos to your front door. Being able to talk about jazz and metal in the same conversation used to be rare. But someone with a wide spectrum of music taste is hardly even interesting anymore. Spotify will feed you Dying Fetus death metal and Faye Webster indie-folk back to back and you wouldn’t even blink.

Which is why Turnstile’s blending of genres on the tour and the album is, in a way, revolutionary.

Sonically, Turnstile’s opening lineups look like chaos, but the actual sound that comes out of the speakers is no longer what determines the tribe of consumers. There’s thousands of kids in the Turnstile pit that love folk music. And there’s Saya Gray fans that love hardcore metal.

Tribes are now being reorganized around identity instead of BPMs and instruments.

Booking the Tribe Instead of the Soundtrack

Another layer to this level of genius: the routing strategy here is actually something that makes me emotional. The curation is brilliant.

Let’s talk about what Elton John, Slayyyter, Clipse, Hayley Williams and Dying Fetus have in common. They’re rough around the edges and refuse to assimilate for the purpose of mass consumption. They are your favourite artist’s favourite artist.

They sound very different yet they stand for all the same things.

Hardcore ideals are similar to punk — sincerity is more important than polish. A tight-knit community is more important than being a superstar. These traits now live within dozens of different genres and Turnstile and their team understands that, and then put them all into a melting pot of cultural curation.

And then there’s the geographic layer of understanding what cities gravitate towards their respective scenes. Miami is a club town — so they booked a DJ in Mall Grab. Detroit owns electronic history, so Detroit gets HiTech. Toronto gets Canadian hero Saya Gray. And on the album itself, Baltimore club legend Rod Lee reworks the title track for the band’s own hometown.

This is living proof that Turnstile understands the actual culture instead of filtering their opening slots by just finding something that sounds similar.

The Tollbooths

Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images

In the past, any band that wins two Grammys goes corporate and squeezes every cent they can out of the project that brought home the hardware. They’ll go on a world tour and sell some T-shirts, and follow it up with a lazy deluxe edition with a few shitty B-sides and call it a day.

Turnstile went the other way and built some more tollbooths that all follow back to their business plan in three specific ways.

The Publishing Play

When Hayley Williams remakes a Turnstile song, there’s underlying publishing royalties going back to the band. Each interpolation is a multiplier for the publishing income that they bring in. That’s 22 brand new pay checks being created out of thin air without even stepping foot into a studio.

The Sync Goldmine

I’ve been absolutely dying to get a Turnstile song into a spot for commercials I’ve been music supervising lately. It’s basically impossible. A screaming hardcore track is tough to place in something like a high-end car commercial. But now, that same composition exists as a piano ballad and jazz record.

The IP is now infinitely more liquid.

The Audience Hijack

I like to call this “Digital Touring.” Turnstile picked their favourite artists and used their hard-earned cultural capital by spawning themselves into their respective fan bases. A couple dozen artists’ entire audiences saw a Turnstile song spawn onto their Spotify home page on Friday morning, causing a network effect and multiplying the ears on their music instantaneously.

Get Off the Shelf

If you’re an artist or manager, my biggest advice would be to stop worrying about what shelf you belong on. The shelf was originally built by a dead record exec so somebody could sell laundry detergent on the radio.

The fences and walled gardens that we used to call genres are burning down right in front of our eyes.

So don’t confuse the genre with the identity.

Instead of looking at how a band sounds, you should actually be looking at the people in the crowd, and figuring out what they stand for.