How This Started

The Job I Didn't Take

That sounds a lot more courageous now than it did at the time. At the time, it bordered on irresponsible.

The previous few years had been brutal. Our oldest had come into a world that wasn't particularly well designed for him, although it took us a long time to understand why. Melissa carried an enormous amount of that. Then the Great Recession hit. I lost my job. Eventually we lost our beloved Atlanta bungalow to foreclosure. For a while, the worry and isolation felt all-consuming.

By the time we moved to Colorado, we didn't need an adventure. We needed something to go right, and this job was supposed to be it: good salary, office on Pearl Street, windows looking toward the Flatirons. At a time when people were sending out hundreds of résumés and hearing nothing back, I knew exactly what I had been handed - security, respectability, a way back.

The job didn't start for several weeks, so I was supposed to spend that time getting the family settled in our new rental. Instead, I spent most of it in the garage.

A split-level rental house under a gray Colorado sky, with the two-car garage where The Music Room began — The “warehouse,” 2011.

I had started buying and selling stereo equipment on eBay after losing my job. It was just a way to make some money: find a piece of gear, bring it home, figure out whether it worked, clean it up and take clear photographs. If there was a dent, shoot the dent. If something wasn't right, say so. Sell it. Stand behind it. Do it again.

Somewhere along the way, something happened that I didn't expect: I became completely absorbed by it. I'd put the kids to bed, walk out to the garage and look up four or five hours later wondering where the night went. I loved finding the equipment, figuring out what it was worth, talking to the customers and solving the problems.

I wouldn't be formally diagnosed with ADHD until I was in my forties. For most of my career, I had experienced the way my brain worked as something to overcome. I often felt as though I was disappointing people: full of potential, capable of more, but never quite able to make all the pieces fit.

In the garage, that same brain finally stopped working against me and started working for me. The intensity, the curiosity, the constant need to solve the next problem - entrepreneurship had a use for all of it.

I hadn't changed. I had finally found the thing that came naturally to me.

The problem was that the start date on Pearl Street kept getting closer. So I did what responsible adults do: I made spreadsheets. I ran the numbers every possible way, and they all said the same thing.

Take the job.

There was no rational case for doing otherwise. We had two little kids. We had recently lost our home. We had no meaningful safety net. What we did have was about $40,000 in a retirement account. Every sensible person in our lives told us not to touch it.

They were right. We touched it anyway.

I called the company and told them I wasn't taking the job.

I wish I could tell you I had some grand vision for what The Music Room was going to become. I didn't. I only knew that, for the first time in my life, I had found work that used nearly every part of me.

Of course I was afraid it would fail. But taking the job scared me more. I had found myself in that garage, surrounded by hi-fi gear, and I couldn't bear the thought of losing that version of myself all over again.

We officially incorporated The Music Room in April of 2011.

Getting Good at the Hard Part

Forty thousand dollars does not buy much stereo equipment. There was no brilliant business model hiding behind it either.

Great used hi-fi already existed everywhere - in basements, closets, estate sales and living rooms. There were also plenty of people who wanted it. The problem was everything in between.

Somebody had to find the gear. Pick it up. Test it. Clean it. Figure out what was wrong with it. Photograph the scratch instead of hiding it. Pack a seventy-pound amplifier well enough to survive a trip across the country. Answer the phone when something went wrong. Most people didn't want to do that part. We decided to get very good at it.

And when I say “we,” I mean we. Melissa was there from the beginning - not standing behind me cheering while I chased some entrepreneurial dream, but in dirty basements with me hauling amplifiers up stairs. As the business started growing, she took on almost everything I was terrible at: payroll, HR, finance, administration, all the machinery required to turn a guy selling receivers out of his garage into an actual company.

I chased the gear and the opportunities. Melissa made sure there was something standing behind me when I caught them.

Josh Jackson and his wife Melissa, smiling together in front of mountains at sunset — Melissa and me, fifteen years later.

At first there were a few pieces in the garage. Then there were too many for the garage, too many for a room, and then a warehouse. There were a lot of years when nothing about it felt glamorous. It was work: packing, driving, testing, hiring, fixing mistakes, making payroll, answering emails too late at night, buying another rack because somehow the last empty rack was already full.

Josh hanging The Music Room sign on the wall of an office hallway — Hanging the sign at our first real commercial space, 2014.

The strange thing about building something that way is that you almost never notice it becoming successful. It just keeps becoming slightly less impossible. Then one day you look around and there are racks of equipment to the ceiling, customers on the other side of the world, and a team of people who know more about much of this than you do.

But “successful” can be a dangerous word. It makes the story sound finished. Ours isn't. We have stayed independently owned and operated, and we have never given up control of the company. We want to build something great, but we also want it to have a soul. That means there is no outside roadmap, no one else holding the risk, and no guarantee that the next year will look anything like the last.

Some years have ended with high-fives. In others, we have lost our asses. Growth has never been a straight line, and scaling the company without surrendering what made it worth building is still a fight.

Today, The Music Room is the largest seller of pre-owned hi-fi equipment in the world. I am proud of that, and I still have trouble writing it without wanting to knock on wood. It does not mean we have arrived. We are independent. We are still learning. We are still the underdog. And I still remember the garage.

What We Were Really Selling

As The Music Room grew, we attracted a particular kind of person: people who obsessed over music. Audiophiles, obviously, but also musicians, engineers, technicians, record collectors, people who could hear the difference between two capacitors, and people who could tell you exactly where they were the first time they heard a particular record.

Eventually we understood that the equipment was never really the point. It was what the equipment could bring into a room: music that could stop you, carry you somewhere else, remind you who you were twenty years ago, or make a room full of strangers feel like one thing for four minutes.

A listening room with blue horn speakers, stacked subwoofers and a lit wooden diffuser wall

The business never became easy. But eventually it gave me enough room, now and then, to look beyond the next payroll, the next inventory purchase, the next month. Survival was no longer the only question. A harder one took its place.

What is all of this actually for?

I didn't know. Then I went to see a band in Lafayette, CO.

A Different Kind of Listening Room

It was 2020. Almost nothing was open. One of the guys who worked for me was mixing sound that night and invited me to come.

The venue was an old church - or something that had once been one - and maybe thirty of us were sitting in folding chairs. The band was The Riverside Folk: three people, a guitar, a fiddle, a cello and three voices. There was no production to speak of. No elaborate lights. No spectacle.

The Mary Miller Theater in Lafayette, CO, a small converted church with teal trim and wooden doors — The Mary Miller Theater, Lafayette, CO.

Then they started singing, and the room changed. I don't know how else to describe it. Three people who had been standing in front of us a moment earlier suddenly filled the place. They were extraordinary.

Inside the Mary Miller Theater: rows of folding chairs facing a small stage with a grand piano under a vaulted wooden ceiling — Inside the Mary Miller Theater.

Partway through the show, they thanked everyone for coming. They mentioned the CDs in the back and the tip jar by the door. Then they said what would really help them was another show - a living room, a backyard, somebody's house, anything. They had open dates while they were in Colorado and were hoping someone in the room might host them.

There was no embarrassment in the request. They weren't asking anybody to save them. This was simply how they did it.

I remember sitting there doing the math. One more show and maybe the week works. Two and it probably does. Miss a couple and a week of driving around the country making music barely pays for itself.

I knew that math. Not their version of it. Mine.

I remembered kitchen tables and spreadsheets that didn't work. I remembered making a decision that looked stupid on paper because something inside me kept insisting that I do it anyway. And I realized that was what I was looking at.

These people were betting on themselves. They had something to give the world, and whether or not the world ever made them rich or famous was almost beside the point. They were going to do it. They had to. I understood that.

But sitting there, something else hit me. My side of the equation had changed.

Because I sell speakers that cost more than their van.

Some of our customers have rooms built around a single chair, designed, treated and tuned for one purpose: to reproduce music as faithfully as humanly possible. People spend astonishing amounts of money trying to remove every barrier between themselves and a performance. I love that world. It gave me a rewarding career and a deep purpose. But it's not my life.

A dedicated listening room: large floorstanding speakers, acoustic treatment, records and a single leather chair — A room built around a single chair.

But sitting in those folding chairs, one truth became impossible to miss.

Not one of those rooms makes a sound by itself.

Not one amplifier, one pair of speakers, one turntable or one cable. All of it is waiting for somebody like the three people standing in front of me.

Somebody has to write the song first. Somebody has to risk making something. Somebody has to practice until it's worth hearing, load the van, drive to Lafayette, CO, and stand in front of thirty people and give them everything anyway.

On the way out, I bought a CD and a sticker and emptied whatever cash I had into the tip jar. I got to the car, and I knew it wasn't enough.

They had told me what they needed: a room. And by then, I had one.

We just needed to move a few racks of audio gear out of the way to make room for the musicians.

Making Room for the Music

The idea stayed with me for years. The problem was that having a room doesn't mean you know how to capture what happens inside it.

Then Bret Batterman came to work at The Music Room. Bret is a musician and producer - he records, mixes, masters and runs live sound. He understands both sides of this world. I explained the idea to him, and he understood it almost immediately.

So we cleared a space in the warehouse, right in front of the racks of equipment that had somehow grown out of that garage all those years ago. And we started bringing musicians in.

That became The Music Room Presents.

Looking down on a session: a band playing between racks of hi-fi equipment while the crew films — A session on the warehouse floor.

We pay the artists, and Bret records every session properly - multitrack, studio-quality. Their songs and publishing stay theirs. We produce and publish the session, they receive the finished audio and video to use and share, and we put The Music Room's audience and marketing resources behind the release.

A camera operator filming a band under green light, racks of equipment on both sides — Filming in front of the racks.

We don't take a cut. We don't sign anybody. We have no ambition to become a record label. The artists bring the one thing none of our equipment can create. We give them a room, a serious recording and an audience.

Bret Batterman in headphones, seen through a shelf of equipment, listening during a take — Bret, listening during a take.

Fifteen years ago, I emptied a retirement account and bet on the first work I had ever found that seemed built for the way my brain works. I had no idea whether it would succeed. I only knew I couldn't walk away from it.

Every artist who walks into this room has made some version of that same bet. They're saying: This is what I can do. This is what I have to give. I don't know where it leads, but I'm going anyway.

A bassist and a saxophonist mid-take on the warehouse floor — In the room, mid-take.

I know what that costs. And I know what can happen when somebody gets just enough room to keep going.

The Music Room has that room now. We have the microphones. We have the people. We have the audience.

Two crew members setting cameras on tripods before a take — Setting cameras between takes.

We are still independent, still taking the risks ourselves and still figuring it out as we go.

We're not waiting for the business to become easy before we make room for the music.

Whatever success we have has come from people who love music so much they will spend extraordinary amounts of time and money trying to reproduce it perfectly in their own homes. There's something beautiful about sending a little of that devotion back upstream - back past the amplifiers, past the speakers, past the recordings, all the way to the person standing there with a song and the nerve to share it.

That's the circle. That's why we built The Music Room Presents.

Josh Jackson
Founder, CEO, The Music Room