Michael Rasile — touring drummer turned fan-experience leader at Front Row and partner at Ceremony of Roses — joins Arthi and Jayan to talk about what really happens inside the war room when a major artist drop goes live. He walks through the Harry Styles drop that "looked like a roulette machine," the trade-off between blocking freight forwarders and protecting Billboard chart eligibility, why the line between a super-fan and a fraudster is razor-thin, and the under-discussed rise in chargeback abuse he believes is being fueled by AI cynicism toward the internet.
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SHOW NOTES
Guest: Michael Rasile Founder & Director of Customer Experience, Front Row Partner, Ceremony of Roses (Sony Music)
Hosts: Arthi Rajan Makhija & Jayan Tharayil, Cofounders, Pinch AI

In this episode we cover:

• How a touring musician ended up running merch ops for some of the world's biggest artists
• Why he calls his work a "fan experience" company, not a customer experience one
• What a typical day in the life of artist merch ops actually looks like (spoiler: a lot of "hurry up and wait")
• The Harry Styles drop that he says he'll "never forget as long as I live"
• The "freight forwarder belt" (Florida, Delaware, Oregon) and the trade-off between blocking resellers and protecting Billboard chart position
• Why the line between a super-fan and a fraudster is razor-thin — and the fiduciary duty Michael feels to get the call right
• The chargeback feature he wishes Pinch would build next (and the alpha we're already cooking)
• His craziest fraud story: 50,000 $10 t-shirt orders in five minutes, on the weekend of his mom's 60th birthday, during COVID
• The behavior shift he's seeing in chargeback abuse and why he thinks AI cynicism is partly to blame
• His three-pillar playbook for any ops lead taking over an artist e-commerce drop with no fraud tooling
• If you operate, protect, or build for any high-velocity e-commerce business — not just music — this one is worth your 40 minutes.
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  CHAPTERS:
  00:00 Intro — meet Michael Rasile
• 02:06 From touring drummer to merch ops: the pandemic pivot
• 05:31 Both sides of the merch table — building a fan experience company
• 08:11 A day in the life of artist merch operations
• 10:49 Inside the war room when a drop goes live
• 13:30 The Harry Styles drop: "like watching a roulette machine"
• 15:09 Freight forwarders vs. Billboard chart eligibility — when to cancel, when to let it ride
• 19:10 What "good" looks like with Pinch: protecting the super-fan
• 22:41 Closing the loop — the chargeback feature Michael wants next
• 25:28 Lightning round
• 25:50 Craziest fraud story: the $10 tee Billboard fiasco
• 30:11 What keeps him up at night — chargeback abuse and the AI trust gap
• 34:09 Advice to a new ops lead with no fraud tooling
• 38:36 About Front Row
• 40:14 Wrap

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KEYWORDS
artist merch, music merch, e-commerce fraud, freight forwarders, chargeback abuse, fan experience, super-fan, bots at checkout, drop protection