Andrew Recinos, President and CEO of Tessitura

Monica Holt: Welcome back to CI to Eye. I hope you had some time over the winter break to rest, to be with the people you love, and to experience art that reminded you why you do this work. The start to 2026 has been heavy, with some days feeling impossible to reconcile the weight of the world with the obligations in front of us. And each of us is experiencing that weight differently. As I grapple with my own grief and outrage, I find myself returning to this: I have never been more certain about the power of our arts community. Artists speak truth when silence feels safer. They bring us together when division feels inevitable. They give voice to what we can’t yet articulate. Watching the videos come out of Minneapolis, of communities gathered in song, finding a path forward, have made all the more clear that the work of the arts and culture sector is not optional work. It is essential. So keep making art, keep protecting artists, and keep building community. Keep going.

I’m so glad to be back with you all and I’m really looking forward to sharing our season ahead. To start, as we closed out our 2025, I had the opportunity to sit down with someone who’s been thinking deeply about how we move forward: Andrew Racinos, the CEO of Tessitura. Many of you know Tessitura well, but this conversation goes well beyond the nuances of running a member-owned tech nonprofit. Andrew spent 2025 visiting 103 arts organizations across 10 countries, and what he found gives me hope. Everywhere, people are rebuilding, re-imagining, and asking hard questions about what comes next. Andrew himself started as a musician—piano, trumpet, composing–before working his way up at Carnegie Hall and eventually leading the Tessitura Network, a global company. We talk about creative pragmatism, why everything being under construction right now may actually be a good sign, and his message to all of us:
Pay attention. I think you’re really going to appreciate this one. Thank you for being here. Now let’s dive in.

Andrew Recinos, welcome to CI to Eye. Thank you for being here. It’s so fun to see you in this context.

Andrew Recinos: Oh, thank you, Monica, for inviting me to be here. I’m absolutely honored.

Monica Holt: Well, I know everyone is used to seeing you on stage, giving us encouragement, talking about the field and what we can look forward to. But I think maybe folks might not have a sense of how you got into the arts at the very, very beginning. You have lived inside the arts most of your life as a musician, as a composer, now obviously in a very different role. But when you look all the way back to the beginning, what were your first impulses with art and music that drew you in?

Andrew Recinos: It’s funny because there’s a lot of folks sort of in my orbit who know me as the Tessitura guy, but most of my life, I’ve really started to find myself as a musician going all the way back to the beginning. I fell in love with the piano first and foremost, playing the piano and then later playing the trumpet, and then later writing my own stuff. And I’ve always found that music is a solace for me. It is an emotional outlet. I was so into music that I went to school for it. I have a degree from the Jacobs School of Music in Indiana, and Indiana had and has a really great arts administration program. And I met someone who was a performer as well who told me about it. And so that was when I learned about it. I ended up staying at Indiana after my undergrad and getting a master’s degree in arts administration, actually.

Monica Holt: My understanding is you started your career from there as an intern at Carnegie Hall, which… that’s a pretty great place to start. When you look back at those early days, what did you learn immediately about audiences and institutions that you still harken back to today as you’re navigating organizations of all sizes across the world?

Andrew Recinos: Yeah, it’s amazing how much I still think about what I learned there. I ended up staying at Carnegie for about eight years. I kind of worked my way up, but to me it was like postgraduate work. Spending eight years seeing really how one of the world’s most recognized arts institutions gets that way and stays that way was an incredible learning experience for me. And I think the first big thing that I’ve taken with me since is this commitment to absolute excellence. You can’t have Carnegie Hall be your product and phone it in. You can’t be good enough. You can’t have typos in your acknowledgement letters. There is an understanding from whoever’s on stage to whoever is opening the mail that you are absolutely at the top of your game. I think that excellence is kind of a charged word, right?

Monica Holt: It is. Yeah.

Andrew Recinos: There’s many different ways to define excellence, but I always like to think of it as, are you best fulfilling your mission? So for me, it’s something I’ve taken forward in my career that however it’s defined that we’re striving, that we’re pursuing that which is best.

Monica Holt: I would also go back to what you were saying about Carnegie being a great kind of secondary graduate education in its own right. I always felt that way about the Kennedy Center, but I’d really encourage anyone who’s starting in an organization early in their career for the first time of any size to treat it that way. Yes, you have your job to do, but you also just have immense learning opportunities all around you. And I think you and I are similar in our curiosity and lifelong approach to learning at every opportunity.

Andrew Recinos: I definitely agree with that. And I think where you have the time, embedding yourself in your organization, even if it’s outside the job that you’re doing. So when somebody said, “We need a volunteer to help put together packets for the board meeting that’s about to happen,” I’d raise my hand. That is something new to learn. One of my favorite weird stories about working at Carnegie Hall is I ended up, because of that, I ended up being asked to escort the late board members to the board meeting. And so I ended up escorting Oscar de la Renta to a board meeting as a 24-year-old kid who just moved there from Indiana, which was a pretty surreal experience. And he was very polite, I’ve got to say.

Monica Holt: We’re glad to hear that, certainly. Okay. So what came next after Carnegie Hall?

Andrew Recinos: Yeah, so I had worked mostly in development. I was the director of the Friends of Carnegie Hall, which is their membership program, for a few years, and they’re dealing with a lot of data. And so I became quite enamored with the systems that Carnegie Hall had in place at the time. And in fact, in my last couple of years at Carnegie, I moved out of fundraising and out of the development team and into the IT team, supporting their databases and that sort of thing. But along the way, I started working with one of their consultants, a company called JCA, who’s actually a great friend and partner of Tessitura, and I know of Capacity Interactive as well. And JCA offered me this job to be a consultant working with nonprofits and arts nonprofits in a more general way. And the first big project I got was being a contractor for this strange little company coming out of the Metropolitan Opera called the Tessitura Network.
And by 2007, 2008, the Tessitura board was talking about, what was the next generation of their technology going to be? And they decided that even then they needed to replatform. And to do it, they decided they needed to do more than the business-as-usual, ‘Let’s add a feature here and there.’ That they needed a big project. And then they called it the Next Generation project. And because I had kind of been around the virtual halls for several years making friends with the team and knowing a bunch of the members and having a pretty good solid understanding of technology, they actually asked if I would be the product manager for the Next Generation project. And I said yes. And that sort of naturally then moved to a point where our co-founder, Jack Rubin, asked me to be his second in command, which was executive vice president, which ultimately became president in 2017. And then I took over when Jack moved on in 2021 as CEO. So I’ve been doing that for five years.

Monica Holt: Yes. And actually I assume that most, if not all, of our listeners know what Tessitura is, but on the off chance there are some — I’m thinking of my family members who might be tuning in this week — could you just quickly explain what is Tessitura?

Andrew Recinos: Yeah, I’d be happy to explain what Tessitura is. So we provide a software which is combined ticketing, fundraising, e-commerce, CRM, and analytics, purpose-built for arts and culture organizations. So this is a party trick I do. If it’s people who I don’t know or I’m in a city I’m not familiar with, I’ll ask somebody, ‘Where are you from?’ And they’ll give me the name of a city and I will say, ‘Well, if you’ve ever bought a ticket at their opera or their orchestra or their art museum or their science center or their zoo, you have actually bought a ticket through the Tessitura system.’ And we provide technology, we provide services, consulting, and our sort of world famous and award-winning community.

Monica Holt: Yes, absolutely. And Tessitura is a nonprofit and it’s a member-owned co-op, which is all unusual in the tech world. How does the structure of being a nonprofit and member-owned change the way you might innovate as opposed to a company that I’m hearing about on the Acquired podcast or something like that?

Andrew Recinos: So yes, Tessitura is a nonprofit, member-owned co-op. We are a 501(c)3 charitable organization in the United States, and we have subsidiaries in several other countries. And we are the only tech company that serves arts and culture that is founded, funded, governed, and owned by the arts and culture sector itself. So let me sort of explain what that means. The original Tessitura software was the custom-built ticketing, fundraising, CRM at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. And it did something that no other system did at the time, which was: it was all in one system. The Met had solved a problem that was endemic throughout our sector, which is you had multiple systems that were storing and operating information about your customers. So you had fundraising over here, you had ticketing over there, maybe you had a membership system, maybe… The Met, I think, famously had six or seven different systems and none of them talked to each other.

Monica Holt: Wow.

Andrew Recinos: Almost as soon as Tessitura went live at the Met, there were other major American arts organizations that got wind about it and wanted it. And pretty quickly, the Met recognized that they did not want to be a software company. They wanted to continue to be an opera company, but they also wanted to be a good citizen. And so they convened a working group with other major arts organizations that wanted to get access to this software and ultimately decided a way forward, which was to create a new company devoted to supporting and improving this software for the sector. And so when Tessitura was founded in 2001, it was founded by seven organizations. Each organization had a member on the board that became the governing board. They hired the staff, and that is Tessitura today. We’ve gone from seven organizations to 800. We’ve gone from one country to 10.
And I think it’s fair to say in the communities that we operate in, we are the major player when it comes to ticketing, fundraising, e-commerce, and CRM in the arts and culture sector.

Monica Holt: That’s right. I do think that in this era of Ticketmaster and some of these larger for- profit entities who are looking at ticketing from a very specific viewpoint, let’s say, and how that can align with their other interests in live performance and venue management, I just think it’s all the more important to highlight the fact that Tessitura is also a nonprofit, the fact that it has a board that consists of members of all the organizations that it serves, feels really important in a moment where we’re keen to discuss values at every aspect of how we do our business and how we can all be better aligned with each other and working together.

Andrew Recinos: Yeah. I mean, it was very intentional that it was founded both as a nonprofit and as a member-owned organization. So by choosing this model, they were saying, ‘We won’t have a profit motive. Our mission will be to enable and inspire arts and culture organizations to achieve their goals.’ And as a member-owned organization, the sector itself will ultimately have agency over how the software is developed and managed.

Monica Holt: Yeah. And this is why the creation and cultivation of Tessitura, I think, is just such an interesting story as we talk about how we look at our field as a whole and how it’s evolved. I think the other piece of that is: the approach Tessitura has to innovation has a pretty significant impact on innovation in the field. Yes, mostly related to technology, but then with branches out into audience engagement more deeply, how we look at changing our organizational structures and making different choices for the organization as we progress. How do you cultivate a culture of experimentation and a love for innovation at Tessitura while still remaining the steady drumbeat that’s required as this large, mission-driven partner to our field?

Andrew Recinos: Yeah, I mean, it’s a constant balance. I had a composition professor when I was a kid, and she had all these funny sayings, but one of them was, “You are what you eat, so eat good music.” So she would encourage me to go to all sorts of different kinds of performances — modern music and early music and jazz and all this stuff — and to listen to all different kinds of music. And I think that that is a big part of how we think about innovation at Tessitura, is that we are what we eat, so we have to eat good ideas. The primary input to how we think about innovation is listening to our members. And we have all of these sort of structures in place and committees and groups and forums and ideas boards and sessions at our conferences, but that’s not our only input. We look at what else is happening in our marketplace. We look at adjacent marketplaces. We keep an eye on hotels and on travel trade and on commercial CRM and other areas like that. And I think that that balanced diet of eating all of that rich variety of food, all of the levels of the pyramid or whatever you want to call it, is what allows us then to be able to continue to innovate and serve the sector on the whole. I think the last thing that I just think is one of the coolest things about Tessitura is we have this spirit from the very beginning of egalitarianism. The majority of our organizations are smaller than $9 million annual budget. You think — often in the sector, you think of Tessitura and you think of the Carnegie Halls and the Metropolitan Operas and that sort of thing. But what we’ve learned is by having a much richer ecosystem — like, we are not a monoculture — that there are incredible ideas that smaller, more nimble organizations come up with first that end up helping the large organizations. And there are things that the really well-funded organizations do first that we’re able to then democratize so even the smallest organizations can benefit from it.

Monica Holt: That makes a lot of sense, and I’m glad you put a finer point to it. I’m curious what you think of our field’s overall tolerance for innovation, and if you’ve seen that change over the past, let’s say, 10, 15 years.

Andrew Recinos: Oh, that’s a great question. I think that there is more of a thirst for innovation than there once was. When I started out as an implementer for Tessitura 20 years ago, there were a lot of leaders who saw technology as a necessary evil, and more and more leaders and more and more folks now are recognizing that arts and culture lives side by side with Amazon and Netflix, and there is an expectation of a certain level of innovation. It doesn’t matter that you’re a $2 million theater company and Netflix is an increasingly big monolithic media company that if you can get into Netflix and do what you want to do in two clicks and you only have to sign up once, that you should be able to do the same thing with your $2 million theater. And so our job as Tessitura for the sector is to make sure that we can take the economies of scale that we have to make sure that that technology can be delivered at that same level.

Monica Holt: That makes sense to me. And yes, as you say, I do think we’re in a moment where the field is beginning individually to examine what their organization’s tolerance has been and could be for growth. So you and I have talked about AI on kind of our own time over the past several years, and I know that you’ve said technology shouldn’t replace meaningful interaction, but instead be an enabler of that. So what does that look like in practice for you and what does that look like in practice for Tessitura?

Andrew Recinos: Yeah, it’s a great question. And you’re right, we think of our role in the art sector as providing technology that can elevate humanity. If our technology is working right, then cultural organizations that we serve are able to connect with their people in a more meaningful way, which means that more art and culture is getting out into the world. And what could be better than that? I mean, our vision is working towards a day when every human and every community we serve has arts and culture as a meaningful part of their life. So we don’t see this as, ‘Let’s have robots just do arts and culture now.’ I like the term popularized by Ethan Molick, which is co-intelligence. Because there are many things that AI can do to help deepen somebody’s work, either to make it faster, to make it richer, to make it scale. So one of the prototypes we did was pretty simple.
It’s using GenAI on a constituent record and you press this little button and it just gives you a quick paragraph about them, but it’s not that hard to imagine that going just a step or two further. You’re a frenzied development officer. It’s intermission. You’ve got the donor lounge. You’ve already got the list from Tessitura of the 20 people who are going to be there. You could certainly run reports on each of those people, or maybe you just have that report and AI has generated two sentences on each of the important people and why they’re important and put them in the order of importance so you know who to walk up to first. And because you can store their photos in Tessitura, you know the photos so you can find them. It’s all things that you could do today, but as a co-intelligence, AI is able to magnify that and make you more effective.
And because of those relationships that you build, because of course we know in fundraising, building the relationships is the key to all of it. These are ways that can help ensure that that organization can survive for years to come because of these wonderful folks who you’ve been able to make a deeper connection with. And I hasten to add that that feature is not on our roadmap. I just kind of made it up as I was talking, but it’s an example of the sort of thing that you can see even today’s AI being able to do, and it’s advancing by leaps and bounds all the time.

Monica Holt: Well, we won’t hold you to it, but I’m sure you’ll get a few curious emails after this to see, ‘How can we do this? When can we do this?’ So sorry in advance for that. As Tessitura is exploring its own approach to AI, what are some of the decisions you’ve made, some of the features that you’ve created, that you’re most excited about, and what are the principles guiding the decisions about what you’re creating?

Andrew Recinos: Yeah, well, a couple of things. I mean, first I want to say, being a nonprofit member-owned organization means that you make different decisions. If we were a commercial provider, we would be answering to investors. Our board would be made up of people who have skin in the game. They have put money into the company and they expect to get money out of the company. But that means, for instance, that you’ve seen a lot of businesses start putting out AI features left and right that frankly aren’t very useful because from a sales perspective, from a positioning perspective, from a keeping-the-investors-happy perspective, you have to be able to show that you’re doing AI. Tessitura has put out AI as well, but not because we wanted to show that we were doing AI. It was because it was a way to answer specific needs that we’ve heard from our members.

We are releasing — early in 2026, in Q1 — GenAI around analytics so that if you are looking to build a dashboard of all of our ticket sales for this particular show and we want to see web versus anything else and break it down by postal code or something like that, you just type that ChatGPT style into a window and it just builds the dashboard. It just builds the widget, and you put it in and then you can tweak it if you need to tweak it. But again, it’s the co-intelligence thing. Today you can do that, but you need to drag and drop and understand the vernacular and all of that. So this is something that we hear from our members all the time. ‘[Analytics are] so powerful. We get so much great data out of Tessitura. It would be great if it was just a little bit easier to understand in plain English.’ Well, one of the things that AI is great at is understanding plain English, as long as you train it right. So that is something that we’re quite proud to be releasing to all of our members imminently.

Monica Holt: That’s wonderful. I’m excited for that one. So listeners who have stuck with CI to Eye for a long time might remember that back just as I think you were taking the CEO role at Tessitura, maybe just before, you were on CI to Eye and you had been spending months listening to over a hundred member organizations This past year, I know you did something similar, but this time in person across 10 different countries. What was that experience like and what did those conversations reveal to you that you couldn’t have learned in any other way?

Andrew Recinos: Yeah. Since I became CEO five years ago, we’ve been on this tremendous journey of renewal. We have grown… our top line has almost doubled. We went from 220 to 370 staff in that time. We’ve completely replatformed our user application. We’ve completely replatformed our cloud infrastructure. It’s just been a time of tremendous change. And you know when you’re working on a big project and you haven’t come up for air? As we got to the start of ’25, I felt like it was time for me personally and for us as a company to start looking outside again. So I gave myself a goal. Tessitura operates in 10 countries and to my knowledge, no one had ever visited all 10 in the same year. So I decided to do that — not only all 10 countries, but in the UK where we operate in all four countries of the UK, I also visited all four countries of the UK, so England and Wales and Northern Ireland and Scotland.

And it was so interesting in 2025 where there is a lot of upheaval in lots of different ways in the world itself where arts and culture has been under a lot of pressure, a lot of funding pressure, a lot of will-audiences-come-back pressure, a lot of changing tastes… It’s very interesting to spend time sitting in the offices or touring the buildings of what ends up being 103 arts and culture organizations around the world. And there’s some big themes where it doesn’t matter the size of the organization or even the country that it’s in, there’s some big themes that just kept coming back. And the first one is: everything is under construction. First of all, as a traveler — I don’t know about you, Monica. I have not been in an airport that hasn’t been under construction…

Monica Holt: In a long time.

Andrew Recinos: Downtowns? I’m in Atlanta right now. I’ve walked past… I don’t even know how many buildings going up right now. The hotels I stay in half the time are under construction. But more importantly, the arts organizations, the cultural organizations themselves, [are] sometimes physically under construction. There is a lot of building happening, either in the middle of a renovation or they’re adding a wing or they’re creating a new building or they’re planning it or they’re building an endowment campaign and and and. But then maybe the most important or almost existential is rebuilding the business itself. And I’ve seen more and more of that. And I think that there are meta themes about that as well. There is generational change happening in leadership all across the world. Boomers are retiring. I think COVID is also kind of with us forever in a way.

Monica Holt: Oh, for sure. Yeah.

Andrew Recinos: It just remains part of the conversation, even as just that ‘before times’ and ‘after times’ thing. How we structure our organizations is being questioned, how we program, what we program, what our role is. There’s a lot of soul searching. And so everything is under construction. And I think that’s a good thing because as much as it is a pain to not know where baggage claim is, the reality is I’ve also seen, and we’ve probably all seen, communities where nothing is under construction.

Monica Holt: Yeah, that’s right.

Andrew Recinos: And the only communities I’ve ever seen where nothing is under construction are communities that are dying. And I’ve seen it in parts of this country, I’ve seen it in the UK, and there is simply nothing sadder than the decay. So yes, it can be kind of irritating and it can be challenging while you’re in it, and ultimately it’s a good thing. And I don’t know if that’s something you’ve seen, Monica…?

Monica Holt: I agree with that completely. And I agree that with construction, you also get renewal, new beginnings, expansion, hopefully. And I am heartened to see how much of that there is in a time where it is desperately needed across the board.

Andrew Recinos: Yeah. Another theme that I’m seeing is around fatigue. I think that there’s a whole lot about fatigue. There’s just physical fatigue. There is donor fatigue. Just do the mad lib of ‘-thing fatigue.’ Arnold Toynbee, I think, has famously said, ‘History is just one damn thing after another.’ And honestly, I mean, I started as an arts administrator in 1995, and we’ve lived through 9/11, and we’ve lived through the first dot com bubble, and we’ve lived through the Great Recession, and COVID, and political shenanigans, and George Floyd. It is sort of one thing after another. So on the one hand, I think, of course the fatigue is real. Arts and culture leaders and employees are being asked to do more with less all the time. And it’s also a reality that there isn’t really a normal.

Monica Holt: A great point. The only thing constant, right?

Andrew Recinos: Yeah.

Monica Holt: As you’re talking to leaders around the globe, what is giving you the most hope right now about where the arts are heading?

Andrew Recinos: I learned about so many amazing things that are happening in communities all over the place. And I’m not suggesting that arts and culture isn’t under a tremendous amount of pressure — financial pressure, political pressure, structural pressure. And there aren’t a whole lot of blaring headlines that talk about the multitude of good that every single one of these organizations is doing every single day. I sit down with organizations and we talk about: ticket sales are back, but expenses are up so much more. We’re having trouble finding attention from donors because there’s so many social causes that they feel compelled rightfully to give to those sorts of things. And in the same conversation, you hear about all of these new things that they’re doing. I think that there’s this multi-decade pivot away from the purity of the high art to the primacy of community. And I see it everywhere. I’m hard pressed to think of an organization that I visited this year that community is not one of the first three sentences out of their mouths. It is incredibly important. And what arts and culture is doing at the ground level, at the nobody-is-being-left-behind level, is tremendous. And so I think that gives me amazing hope. I wish — and this is not just an arts problem. This is sort of a how-media-works problem. I wish those stories got as much airtime as the stories of the impending doom of arts and culture, which looks strangely similar to articles I used to read when I was an arts administration student in 1993.

Monica Holt: Man, we really need some of our friends in media to start telling the stories for joy and inspiration instead of just for anxiety. We’ll get into quickfire culture in a second, but I have looked up to you as someone who has been such a great leader for the field, both in terms of your viewpoint but also in watching you take on the leadership of this important organization. What do you think will define the arts and culture sector’s most successful leaders over the next decade?

Andrew Recinos: Yeah, that’s a good one. I feel like I can spend about three minutes with the leader of an arts organization or a cultural organization and have a pretty good sense of how that organization’s going to do. I mean at a really high level. And the ones where I’m like, ‘There’s no stopping [them]’… I would say what they have in common is sort of this creative pragmatism.

Monica Holt: Sure.

Andrew Recinos: Almost, but not quite, an oxymoron. It’s this, ‘let’s do great things. Let’s do something new and let’s not go bankrupt doing it.’ And we’ve all sort of seen the dangers of being on one or the other side of that pendulum. I mean, there’s… How many famous stories are there of the unbound artistic director who decides to do something crazy and spend all of the money, or on the ultra conservative kind of business director who won’t allow any innovation to happen. But I think creative pragmatism means — is different than walking a line down the middle. There’s really famous examples. The Phoenix Zoo in Phoenix, Arizona is credited with being the first zoo to do zoo lights back in the early ’90s. What did they do? They’re like, ‘What do people love? They love looking at Christmas lights. What do we have? We have this huge campus that can fill an endless number of people. What is a time of year that we have trouble attracting people to the zoo? Not a lot of people are going to the zoo in December.’ But when it features millions of LED lights, they have opened up an entirely new revenue stream. They are activating their space in a completely new way. They are bringing genuine joy. That to me is creative pragmatism. It was a very clever idea. I think of symphonies who perform with film and now it’s a staple of most symphony orchestras. That’s creative pragmatism. When you hear these things that have been huge successes and you’re like, ‘Why didn’t I think of that? ‘ I think those are the kind of leaders that we’re going to see leading us into the future in the next 10 years.

Monica Holt: So we have sadly reached the end of our time together, but of course we have our quickfire culture questions just to wrap things up. So what is one piece of culture right now that you are currently obsessed with?

Andrew Recinos: David Byrne’s ‘Who is the Sky.’ So it’s his new album and he is on tour right now. And my good friends at Massey Hall were presenting David Byrne for three nights and hooked me up. And it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to in my life. It is just a joy from beginning to end.

Monica Holt: If you could go back in time, what is a live performance or event that you would want to have attended?

Andrew Recinos: I would like to have been in the room where it was created maybe more than performed. So the creation of West Side Story where you’ve got Bernstein and Sondheim and Robbins and Arthur Lawrence. And it was so groundbreaking in so many ways. But just as a music guy, I’ve always appreciated how Bernstein was able to take his towering classical music prowess and make it current to the time that he was living in. I mean, West Side Story has four-part fugue in it, but it’s a bunch of street kids singing about the fight they’re about to have. I mean, and it’s all jazz with a hi hat behind it. I mean, talk about creative pragmatism. This has to be catchy. And from his perspective, his idea of excellence is, ‘It has to stand up as a work of art.’ I just wish I was there to see that happening.

Monica Holt: That’s a fantastic answer. And I hear a little bit of your music nerd come out there. What’s one free resource in any field that everyone should check out?

Andrew Recinos: So I’d be remiss if I didn’t say Tessitura.com. You can sign up for our mailing list. It’s not spam. We send maybe once a month. And it’s really more of a newsletter of what’s going on in our community. We share a lot of just cool stories that we’ve heard. So that’s one. The things that I literally read every day, the first is ArtsJournal.com. Doug McLennan. It’s a compendium of arts stories in the last 24 hours that is incredibly complete, actually. The other one that’s more on the AI side is a newsletter called TLDRAI. And again, it’s just sort of everything that happened in the last 24 hours with AI, which right now is a lot. A day goes by and there’s like 10 big news stories about AI and I just read it — I devour it every day.

Monica Holt: And finally, if you could broadcast one message to executive directors, leadership teams, staff, and boards of thousands of arts organizations today, what would that message be?

Andrew Recinos: I think the message would be: pay attention. It’s not news to anyone who’s listening that the way that we are sort of wired into the digital landscape today has changed our brains and has changed how we interact with each other. But if you can start to pay attention a little bit more — to your staff, to your colleagues, to your audiences, to your artists — I think that that unto itself could help dial back a little bit of this kind of zombie apocalypse that we all sort of feel in some days and help us move forward as a sector.

Monica Holt: Pay attention. Thank you, Andrew. Appreciate your time and thanks for a great conversation.

Andrew Recinos: Thanks so much for having me, Monica. It’s been great.

Monica Holt: Thank you for listening to CI to Eye. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, please take a moment to rate us or leave a review. A nice comment goes a long way in helping other people discover the show. And if you haven’t already, click the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve got some great episodes coming your way and I wouldn’t want you to miss them. A huge thanks to our team behind the scenes, including Karen McConarty, Yeaye Stemn, Stephanie Medina, Jess Berube, and Rachel Purcell Fountain. Our music is by whoisuzo. Don’t forget to follow Capacity on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube for regular content to help you market smarter. You can also sign up for Capacity’s newsletter at capacityinteractive.com. And I hope you’ll reach out to us to let us know who you’d like to hear from next on CI to Eye. I’m Monica Holt. Thanks for listening.