HearHear founder Adam Offitzer believes in the magic of concerts
Adam Offitzer loves concerts. He’s been to almost 400 shows in his life and he’d be the first to tell you that his favorite nights of the year are spent at a live show.
“Concerts and music bring people together. It’s a great unifier in some ways, but also life-affirming to go to a great concert,” he said. “I know more people who feel that way, even if they’re not music obsessive. I do think it’s one of the only things that are providing joy right now.”
I met Adam when we both worked at Knock Twice, a small marketing agency in New York. We bonded over music tastes before we made the risky transition of becoming friends outside of work and eventually attending concerts together. Among the 20 or so shows we’ve shared, we’ve stood front row at LCD Soundsystem, gaped in awe at Lucy Dacus opening for Sylvan Esso, and scream-sang with Carly Rae Jepsen. My concert buddy and I have made some incredible memories, and he knows that countless others have also experienced the magic of a live show.
With that in mind, Adam and his brothers Jonah and Derek launched HearHear, a website where everyone can document the shows they’ve been to, share the memories they’ve made, and save the concerts they plan to attend. HearHear already has more than 1,000 users, including notable music journalists, concert photographers, and artists.
Read on to discover why Adam wanted to create HearHear in the first place, why it was important for him to develop the website with his brothers, and how he defines an amazing live show.
Can you tell me about the first concert you went to?
On HearHear, I think the first concert I say I went to was the Union County Music Festival in 2007 when I was 15. I was really into Fountains of Wayne and they were the ones that I was really excited to see. And there was this tiny indie band called The Old Ceremony that never went on to do anything, and I also got really into them. They were starting to make my tastes hip.
My dad and mom were hyped up that Chuck Berry was the headliner. To see this living legend still perform, this founder of rock and roll. That was a special day and I remember sitting on a picnic blanket and lawn chairs for the headlining sets, and zipping over to the side stages.
Earlier that year in April, I convinced my dad to take my brother and me to see The Format at a venue called School of Rock East in South Hackensack. It was an all-ages show, which I was really excited about. I remember it was a little awkward to be there with my dad because there were a lot of high schoolers and cool kids there. That was special too, and I remember being amazed by watching a top-tier performer like Nate Ruess in that tiny venue with his voice and theatrics, and was really blown away.
Then in October, I asked my camp counselor if he could chaperone me and my camp buddy to Randall’s Island to see Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to call it a life-changing experience. I’m 15 years old; I’m with the camp counselor I look up to and my camp friend; I’m seeing this unbelievable show in this unbelievable venue. LCD, I tried listening to them before and didn’t like it. My taste wasn’t refined, but live, I was like, “This is the greatest band of all time.” And then Arcade Fire got up and I was like, “This is the greatest band of all time.”
In 2007, my dad took me and my brother to a club show, then the full family with a picnic blanket at a festival, and then just me and two other people under the age of 30 on a ferry to Randall’s Island. That was a formative year.
You’ve seen almost 400 concerts. What makes a great show?
Twin Peaks played nine nights in Chicago and I went to three of them. They were these kinds of jam-y, ripping, electric shows. But another I thought about right away was Robin Pecknold sitting by himself with a guitar at Bowery Ballroom. That was such a special show too. As I think about all of my favorites, all of them had a certain level of intention and care put into the front-to-back show.
I think there are some shows where I go, “Oh, that was solid,” or when a band goes on stage, plays through their songs, and it sounds good and they banter with the crowd. That’s a normal show and I’ve been to a lot of those. The shows that are elevated feel like there’s that extra level of intent and care. Twin Peaks so clearly thought through every night, every set list. How to make every one of the nine nights different and special. Bruce Springsteen, he’s playing the same show every night on his tour, but there is a script and a story and a reason too. It is theatrical in its own way, even though there are no sets or props. That Robin Pecknold show was very particular with what he was covering and why, which Fleet Foxes songs he was doing and why, and how it would work with just him and a chair.
I think that’s what separates the great show for me. That can be true across a tiny show in a basement, in a living room, or a big show at MSG.
Since I’ve known you, you’ve had a music discovery newsletter, which was once called The Note, then later renamed to Hear Hear. Can you talk a bit about that?
I wrote for a music blog in high school and college called Pretty Much Amazing. I got paid in high school to write about music, which was life-changing for me, and it set a wrong expectation that I could be a music journalist and have that be a full-time career.
Because of my writing for that blog, I got my first job in New York because two of the cofounders of Knock Twice wrote for Pretty Much Amazing. I credit my entire career to music blogging, even though I didn’t go into music journalism out of college.
The reason I bring that all up here is, when I got the job at Knock Twice, I missed writing about music. I started a Mailchimp called The Note and I think it got up to 400 subscribers or so. I wanted to make the email newsletter a version of All Songs Considered because NPR Music didn’t have an email newsletter yet.
When I launched the newsletter Hear Hear in 2020, I had the clout of being able to say that I worked at Spotify as my day job. [Editor’s note: After Knock Twice, Adam worked at Spotify for six years on the B2B side and was the Senior Content Manager of Brand and Creative.] “Here’s a new music newsletter from someone who works at Spotify.” Even though I wasn’t on the music side, I do think it gave me credibility, which I appreciated.
In the back of my mind, have I always had a secret desire to maybe find my way back into the music world beyond this in some way? Yes, but it’s not the reason I’m doing it. I am hoping that [the website] HearHear becomes that thing that I’ve been unintentionally working towards or searching for.
We’ve gone to so many shows together and heard stories from so many other shows. In the past, you’ve said you wanted one place where you can share all of these stories. It’s finally happening!
That is the vibe I get. As I talk to music fans, friends, and internet friends, I’m getting this feeling of, a lot of people want this to exist. I think a lot of the “Letterboxd for music” concepts I’ve seen are too focused on albums, songs, and playlists. Concerts are closer to seeing a movie or reading a book or going to a restaurant, to use Goodreads, Beli, and Letterboxd as the examples I’m aspiring towards.
Adam loves concerts so much, he proposed to his wife at the Brooklyn venue Baby’s All Right!
It’s interesting because concerts are such a social event, but your experience of it is your own. At a restaurant, everyone is in the same place eating from the same menu, but your opinion of the food is based on your own experience. What inspired the idea of the website HearHear?
My brothers and I have had this idea for a decade. We’ve always talked about having a website where we can track, document, and engage with all of the memories we have from our favorite concerts. As Letterboxd continued to blow up, I definitely had another “aha!” moment of, “Okay, building a business that’s focused on one obsession, one niche, one type of enthusiast could have some legs as a business.” There aren’t a lot of places on the internet that feel like that anymore—like real, vibrant communities engaging in a shared love of culture.
Part of it is also: I want this. I’ve been to so many concerts with you and we have no way to document those milestones together. I hate in conversations when people are like, “Were you at that show? Who did we see? Who opened?” It’s just so nice to have that memory board, as so many of our platforms have given up on that.
When did you finally pull the trigger to create the website?
The real thing that happened was, I finally just texted our friend Sean, who’s a designer, and asked if he would design three pages that we needed: a home page, a profile page, and a concert page in Figma. He did and when the vibecoding tools were sparking up, I uploaded his designs to see what it would shoot back. It shot back a real website—half-working but working enough that I was pretty blown away. Then I was like, “You know what, I think it’s time to really build this.”
I’m thankful for my brother Jonah, who was able to take it from Lovable and move it into real code. And my other brother Derek, who’s building this with us and has been giving a ton of product design and user feedback to make it stronger. It’s been amazing to see what we can do, the three of us plus Sean’s designs. I’m so excited about it and the response has been the best part. Seeing real music lovers with real clout in the industry or in the journalism world, getting into this, sharing it around, getting excited about it. That’s been really validating.
I’m looking at my email to see when we first emailed Sean… this was back in 2024. It’s actually interesting to think about what was happening in 2024 because that’s when Trump won again. I don’t want to make everything about politics, but there’s definitely a chance that in my despair and anger about that moment, I was looking for a way to build something that is fun and beautiful. I think I was feeling this itch to do something with this idea, probably because I was down about the election, honestly.
When you first started concepting the website, what were the three things you wanted HearHear to have?
I wanted individual show pages for every concert that ever existed, that could link back to setlist.fm or be created manually if there was no correspondence with a setlist.fm page. And then the ability, just as you can on Letterboxd, to mark that you want to go to a concert or that you went to the concert. Then you can add your note or diary entry, describing your feelings and emotions.
I’ve always wanted to have this ability to add the photos and videos you took at a show, so that everyone can see them in a way that you can’t access easily right now across Instagram, TikTok, Reddit. There’s no easy place to see the best videos from the Bruce Springsteen show I went to and now there is.
The other thing I was excited about that I knew the website needed to have was a sort of “your life in concerts” stacked card vibe. At the end of every year with Letterboxd, I love seeing my year in movies. I wanted that lifelong concert diary to be there for music lovers of all ages, so you could see all the shows you’ve ever seen, the artists you’ve seen the most, the venue you’ve been to the most.
Adam’s concerts card on HearHear.
Then the sort of “aha!” moment we had as we were building the site was “your first concert ever.” This sort of thing that everyone has that’s deeply personal but could be totally different from your music taste in a funny way. Someone who’s a huge EDM obsessive, maybe their first show was Radio Disney Live or The Wiggles. There’s a magic to it.
What has it been like working with your brothers on this?
Fun! They’d be the first to admit that, of the three of us, I’m the person who’s the most obsessive about going to concerts. I appreciate them letting me run with some of my ideas because they realized that I’m the ultimate customer of this product. We’re complementing each other’s skill sets really nicely right now, in a way that’s been really cool.
Anyone who knows me knows that my brothers are an incredibly important part of my life. It’s very important to me to build this as a family.
(L to R) Jonah, Adam, and Derek Offitzer at an Avett Brothers concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in 2018.
You’ve been working on HearHear for a while and you’re about to fully debut it to the public. What are your hopes for the website?
My immediate hope is to build prompts into the website where everyone invites their one concert buddy, tags them in the shows they’ve been to together, then it grows in that way. As for longer-term dreams, I’m very passionate about how corrupt the ticketing industry is and I would love for HearHear to be a place where people could buy and sell tickets for face value if they can’t make it to the show.
A real goal is to build this with artists in mind. It is a fans-first website, but one thing I’ve always loved about Letterboxd is that Martin Scorsese has an account, Ayo Edebiri has an account (although I think she deleted it). I like the idea that directors and actors, and music supervisors are on there and giving their takes, even talking about working on the movies. I would love for HearHear to have artists either using it to share their memories of concert-going or their current concert-going escapades, in addition to reflections on the shows they’ve performed.
The other dream is to find ways to amplify all of the people in the live music ecosystem. People who log into HearHear will see concert photographers, concert poster artists, merch designers, journalists. We’re hoping to feature all of the people who make the magic of a live show, so this becomes a sort of IMDB for all of the people who make a live show happen, not just bands.
With Spotify going all in on AI and Live Nation’s lawsuit, how does that make you feel about the state of live shows?
There’s a reason why concerts and live music continue to be sort of those life-affirming, meaningful things for a lot of people that cannot be replaced. There are a lot of things AI will replace and society will adjust to that, but it will not replace seeing a great musician play songs on a stage or in a coffee shop or in a dive bar. That is something that cannot be replicated.
Here are Adam Offitzer’s 12 songs:
"Free to Be... You and Me" by The New Seekers
Marlo Thomas' revolutionary 1974 TV special was timeless enough that it served as one of our go-to records for family car rides more than 20 years later, and I genuinely credit it with shaping my values and vulnerability.
"Any Dream Will Do" from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
Had to include a Broadway song, and while I could easily have gone with something from “Wicked”, “The Music Man”, “Pippin”, “Rent”, or “Little Shop”, my brain kept circling back to Donny Osmond's silky-smooth voice on one of my favorite childhood VHS tapes, which shaped my passion for stories told through insanely catchy melodies.
"Nowhere Man" by The Beatles
My two must-haves on this list were Broadway and The Beatles. "Nowhere Man" has always been a sneaky favorite, thanks to the memorable visuals from another family favorite VHS, “Yellow Submarine,” which has stayed part of my daily life through dorm room posters, commemorative beer glasses, and my favorite coffee mug. (Other contenders: "You Won't See Me" and "Yellow Submarine," thanks to the stellar live renditions I saw from 80+ year-olds Paul and Ringo.)
"Annie Waits" by Ben Folds
Cemented my love of piano power-pop—and Folds became an artist my brothers and I could "share" with our mom and dad, since we could all listen to 2001's “Rockin' the Suburbs” together on our drives through suburban New Jersey.
"Jesus of Suburbia" by Green Day
Alongside all the showtunes growing up, my dad often sang the praises of concept albums like “Tommy” and “Sgt. Pepper's,” so it was a thrill to hear “American Idiot” at age 12 and realize my generation finally had a classic of our own.
"Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” by Arcade Fire
On a summer camp trip day in 2005, my bunkmate Mikey let me pick from his impressive CD case to expand my palette and he specifically pointed out “Funeral” as an album I had to try. My 13-year-old ears were blown by the spiraling, ghostly "woo-hoos" of track one, which has always struck me as a rock-and-roll riff on Danny Elfman's “Edward Scissorhands” score. I ended up seeing the band in 2007 on Randall's Island, chaperoned by my camp counselor, and credit that magical show (with a stellar opening set from LCD Soundsystem) for my enduring love of live music.
"Jesus Walks” by Kanye West
I'll never forget the 2005 Grammys performance, which even my parents enjoyed for its Broadway-level theatrics. So it stung when my dad became a Kanye hater right as he became my favorite artist… and stung worse when Ye's Oval Office embrace and Super Bowl swastika t-shirts forced me to begrudgingly admit to my dad that he was right all along.
"Paranoia in B Major" by The Avett Brothers
Thanks to the defunct platform eMusic, a hipster iTunes alternative, I used credits to discover new artists and am so thankful that the Avetts caught my ear. Their music has led to countless concert memories with my own brothers over the years—taking Derek to the Mann in Philly, heading up to Port Chester with Jonah for the Capitol Theatre, and all three of us making the pilgrimage to Red Rocks, and then even to Broadway to hear John Gallagher Jr. sing their catalog in “Swept Away.”
"Call Your Girlfriend" by Robyn
The rare "never meet your heroes" moment that actually delivered. I was hosting my college radio show at the University of Maryland and got to interview New Jersey band Steel Train when they swung through to play DC9—and their quirky frontman, Jack Antonoff, had “Body Talk” playing in the green room. When I had the audacity to ask, "What is this great song?" he gave me homework to listen to the entire album, which indeed cracked open a new world of synth-pop for me. (And fittingly, the guy evangelizing it ended up shaping the next generation of pop.)
"Step" by Vampire Weekend
I almost picked "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa," which I remember soundtracking one of our family weekends on Long Beach Island—but "Step" is the better pick: its NYC-glorifying lyric video helped cement my post-college move to the Big Apple, and it even served as a walk-in song at my wedding.
"Rockman's Pier" by Del Water Gap
Derek sent me this from his Discover Weekly around 2014 and in a sea of folk-rock, you could tell it was something special. My wife and I have caught DWG's ascent from Baby's All Right to Bowery Ballroom to Brooklyn Paramount and beyond—it's been so cool to watch his sound and live set evolve. And as his newer stuff has shifted to pop, those folky roots still carry weight: I used "High Tops" on the PA when I proposed at Baby's!
"Divinize" by Rosalía
Since so many picks came from childhood, I wanted to close on something recent. As I hit my mid-30s, I can feel my taste settling into a standard blend of alt-rock reliables, so it was a wonderful surprise that my favorite album of 2025 came from Rosalía. “LUX” kept my ears fresh with completely new sounds, languages, and arrangements, and the show I just caught at MSG was an instant all-timer—proof we still have artists keeping theatrical, orchestral live shows alive.
Header photo courtesy of Liron Erel.
