Mapping the hidden connections between musicians, bands, and scenes.

What is The Shared Stage (TSS)?

Over the past three months I’ve been building a project called The Shared Stage (TSS).

It started as an attempt to document my own live music history — the shows I’ve played, the musicians I’ve collaborated with, the venues, and the songs. That effort became BillTaylorBass.com, a growing archive of hundreds of performances spanning decades of live music.

But something interesting happened while building the data. Once every show, band, venue, and musician was connected, a network began to emerge. Each performance creates links between people, bands, and places. One show connects to another through shared musicians, shared stages, and shared bills.

Those connections revealed something much bigger than a personal archive. They revealed the living network behind music scenes.

The Shared Stage is an experiment to map that network. By collecting simple information — the bands musicians have played with, the collaborators who shared those bands, and eventually the shows those bands shared — we can begin to see how artists are connected across genres, cities, and decades of live performance.

This project also wouldn’t exist without the heavy lifting of modern AI tools. The concept, direction, and musical context came from decades of playing live music and thinking about the scene. But the organizing, structuring, prototyping, and relationship mapping have only been possible because AI has been able to execute against that plan.

This alpha is the first step: seeding the network with real musicians and real bands to see what patterns emerge.

“Every show connects musicians in ways we rarely see. The Shared Stage is an attempt to make those connections visible.”