McClain Portis is a Nashville-raised talent scout, A&R and video producer based in Los Angeles, and the founder and CEO of Live2 (legally Live2 LLC, publicly rendered as “Live 2 Create” via its web domain livetwocreate.com), a Los Angeles talent-discovery outfit built around the tagline “Art Not Algorithms.” Starting from a USC dorm room in 2018, Portis built an informal, non-exclusive network of early TikTok-era musicians rather than a conventional label or management company, and in doing so was among the first people to hear Em Beihold, Chappell Roan and Tai Verdes, years before any of them had major-label deals. His model, and its limits, are best summarized by what happened after Em Beihold's 2022 breakout single “Numb Little Bug” went platinum: the label apparatus that assembled around her success publicly credited someone else with her discovery, and Live2's own music video for the song was pulled a week before release and replaced by an outside production at eight times the budget.
McClain Portis is the middle of three siblings, born to Scott McClain Portis and Carol Len Frist Portis of Nashville, Tennessee. His father is an Auburn-trained computer engineer turned restaurateur who, with Portis's mother, owns and operates several Moe's Southwest Grill franchise locations in Nashville under Cannon Restaurant Management. Portis has described his father teaching him rudimentary business fundamentals as a child: at around age 8, he found a leftover candy vending machine in the attic, left over from his father's old office, and convinced his father to let him run it as a small business, restocking it weekly with candy bought in bulk from Sam's Club. “My dad showed me how to run like a little profits and losses,” he has said.
Before TikTok, Portis ran a high-school YouTube channel of trick-shot videos called “Ultimate Insanity.” He has said he “wouldn't watch movies until I was about 16 years old” and found his father's camera around 2015, having made only a single YouTube video years earlier, around 2011 or 2012. He has connected these childhood habits directly to his adult career: “When I was a kid, I loved coin collecting, metal detecting, and finding things underneath the ground. I liked finding the diamonds in the rough and the things that people had walked over and forgotten. Discovering musicians was exactly that.”
He enrolled at the University of Southern California in 2018 to study film business, graduating in 2022, but has said he decided almost immediately that traditional coursework wasn't for him: “As a freshman, I said, ‘Screw that. I'm not studying all this bullshit. I'm going to do my own thing.’” That own thing became Live2, which he says he began building “starting in my freshman dorm room in 2018.”
Live2 did not start as a music company. It began as a clothing brand: Portis funded short documentary-style films about photographers, filmmakers and “anyone doing anything he thought was cool,” then sold merchandise tied to those stories to support the subjects. An early company description put it plainly: a group of aspiring artists “dedicated to living life to the fullest while seeking out awesome artists… in order to tell their stories through film,” then turning those stories into clothing sold in support of the artists.
The pivot to TikTok came in November 2019, when Portis's younger sister introduced him to the platform. He grew a personal account from zero to 200,000 followers in about two months, first posting general content, including a clip of a seal he filmed on a trip to Hawaii that got roughly 20,000 views, before shifting toward what he has called “real videos.”
The breakout moment for the @livetwocreate account was a series called Making a Sensation, built around an aspiring rapper and singer named Chase Paves, whom Portis met performing in a USC music class while he was there shooting photos for a professor. The first Making a Sensation video, built around Paves's unreleased song “bedtime,” reportedly drew over two million views overnight, legitimizing the Live2 TikTok account. COVID-19 arrived shortly after, pausing the series as Portis temporarily relocated back to Nashville.
It was in the aftermath of that pause that Live2's defining project took shape. Portis says he began receiving hundreds, if not thousands, of direct messages from unsigned musicians asking him to listen to unreleased songs. That flood of inbound submissions led directly to the creation of the Art Not Algorithms playlist, built around a simple premise stated in Portis's own words: “It's unfair that artists have to break these algorithms now, and I was like, I wish that algorithms didn't have to be broken in the first place to get good out there, but if it does, then I'm going to be the one who breaks it so that the artist doesn't have to.” His stated criteria at the time favored artists with fewer than 5,000 monthly Spotify listeners. A dedicated r/ArtNotAlgorithms subreddit from July 2020 shows the mechanic running in public: a weekly submission-and-vote system in which the highest-liked songs were added to the Art Not Algorithms playlist and given a chance to be showcased by Live2. By October 2020, the playlist was described internally as one of the fastest-growing on Spotify, with over 120,000 followers.
The Art Not Algorithms era produced a cohort of artists that, in retrospect, reads like a snapshot of an entire generation of Los Angeles pop before any of its members were famous. Portis discovered Tai Verdes after Verdes sent him “Stuck in the Middle” in 2020, the two speaking for the first time while Verdes was still working at a Verizon store; Verdes went on to sign with Sony Music and build his own platform independently of Live2's playlist infrastructure. Claire Rosinkranz, who later self-released “Backyard Boy” from her bedroom before signing with Slowplay/Republic Records, and David Hugo, known for early covers and a later Nicky Youre collaboration, were both part of the same circle; Hugo lived in an LA house during this era alongside Amelia Moore and Christian Gates. LA act Slush Puppy was also part of the circle and later opened Christian Gates's February 2022 headline show at the Roxy in West Hollywood.
Perhaps the most striking name in the historical roster is Chappell Roan, whom Portis picked up years before “Pink Pony Club” broke into the mainstream; he still holds an unreleased demo video of Roan singing the song, recorded before her official Atlantic Records release and long before its later viral resurgence. Livingston, the Denton, Texas-raised singer who signed to Elektra Records in 1919 as a teenager, was part of the same overlapping ecosystem; he, Roan and Em Beihold have all shared management with the firm State of the Art, a documented overlap that reinforces how tightly connected this cohort was even after individual artists moved on from Live2 itself.
Devon Again is listed on Live2's own website as a “Friend of Live2 / Artist” dating to 2021, one of the clearest first-party confirmations of the roster's membership. KiNG MALA, the El Paso-born, Los Angeles-based alt-pop artist signed to Handwritten Records, was also part of the circle; both KiNG MALA and Christian Gates were booked to play a Live2 backyard concert together, though Christian ultimately pulled out due to an exclusivity clause tied to his Roxy show. Christian Gates himself connects to Live2 in a specific, documented way: it was Live2 that pulled him into Los Angeles proper from Orange County, and he later appeared on the Art Not Algorithms Podcast in an episode built around his own TikTok rise, titled “How @itsluxcity Came Up.” His account of the relationship's timing, that Portis reached out only after Christian was already gaining traction on TikTok, situates him as one node among many in a roster whose real center of gravity was Em Beihold.
Em Beihold is Live2's flagship discovery and the artist Portis has repeatedly called the one he “really went all in with.” He found her in 2020 through a TikTok video of her performing an unreleased song in what he has described, in multiple interviews, as “a red polka dot shirt.” At the time she had roughly 1,000 TikTok followers and a few hundred thousand monthly Spotify listeners. Portis reached out cold, despite never having met her in person, and the two built her early singles “City of Angels” and, in 2021, “Groundhog Day” together, with Live2 Films producing the videos for both. Beihold has credited Portis by name in the press: “Because of that video I met my closest collaborator, McClain Portis. He helped me continue to market ‘City of Angels,’ as well as strategize the ‘Groundhog Day’ social media campaign,” she told Bleu Bop in July 2021, adding that Portis introduced her to Isaiah Mirigian, the director of the “Groundhog Day” video.
The relationship changed in early 2022 when Beihold's third single, “Numb Little Bug,” released via Republic Records, became one of the biggest pop songs of the year: RIAA platinum, roughly 486 million Spotify streams on the song alone, and more than 2.3 billion catalog streams as of March 2026. As the label's machinery closed around Beihold's rapidly growing career, an industry trade piece publicly credited a Republic/Moon Projects staffer with discovering her on TikTok, in the context of the song's ad campaign, rather than acknowledging Portis's earlier, smaller-scale find. Portis has since told the fuller story himself: “We released three songs together over the course of a year and they progressively got bigger and bigger, to the point where she had a couple million monthly listeners. She had no manager, lawyer, or label. She had nothing besides what we were doing together. Right after her third song came out, she ended up getting a lawyer, a label, and a manager. They turned around and looked at us and were like, ‘Who the fuck are these guys? Why are they involved?’ We got pushed to the side and had to swallow the pill on that one.”
The clearest single example of that dynamic involves the “Numb Little Bug” music video. Republic commissioned Live2 to produce the official video on a $5,000 budget, and Portis's team built it around Beihold's real friends and community in the same DIY style that had worked on her previous two videos. A week before release, the video was pulled. In Portis's own words: “A week before this video was supposed to come out I get a call and they tell me that the video is being pulled from us, they're not going to release our version, and they're going to give another production company, I later learned, $40,000 to make a very… not our… like, the reason our video was cool is because it had all of her best friends in it and the people that made it, and it was like true to the culture of what we were doing, and it was a very solid video, it was just slightly grungier and slightly darker than the label one, and it was now going to be very clearly one of the biggest songs of the year, and they were like sorry, and so yeah, that happened.” The released video carries a director credit for Jaime Valdueza, produced by Vilas Entertainment; Live2's in-house cut was never publicly released. Live2's own case study on the relationship states only that “over the next few months, many more elements of Em's team fell into place,” marking “the end of Live2's potential to partner on the music.”
Despite the professional falling-out, Portis has continued to describe the friendship warmly and without bitterness: “My friendship with Em has been one of the most pivotal and eye opening experiences that one can possibly have… Live2 would not exist today if it were not for Em… I am hopeful that our friendship can last a lifetime as the music has just been the excuse for an incredible friendship and something to bond over.”
Live2 LLC was founded in September 2018 and is based in Los Angeles. Portis describes it as “a network, a movement similar to MTV, but on the internet,” organized into four divisions: ANA Projects, the artist-development arm named for Art Not Algorithms; a broadcast network that powers Live2's in-house shows; Live2 Films, a video production company; and Live2 Events. A dedicated arm, Live2 Records, explicitly describes itself as neither a label, management company nor distributor, but a “business partner” to artists, stating that its artists “are not ‘signed’ underneath us… we are equals building things together.” That deliberately informal, non-exclusive structure is the same one that left Live2 without leverage when Em Beihold's career scaled past what a handshake agreement could protect.
The company runs without outside funding; Portis has described budgets as “really low,” with his mother assisting on legal and tax matters and a childhood friend handling accounting. As of the mid-2020s, Live2's office is a converted garage in the San Fernando Valley. Beyond artist development, Live2 has also functioned as a for-hire production shop, with contracted work for Universal Music Group, Republic Records, Neon Gold Records and Mercury Records listed on the company's own materials. Early team members included Ty Allen, Patrick O'Neill and Paris Watson; later-era contributors include directors Zay (Isaiah) Mirigian, Zade Batal, Ethan Frank and Connor Leeds.
Art Not Algorithms exists in three public forms: the original Spotify playlist, a TikTok video series whose individual episodes are largely unrecoverable outside Live2's own accounts, and the Art Not Algorithms Podcast, co-hosted by Portis and Live2 artist Pertinence. Confirmed episodes include “How to Make Your Music Last Forever” featuring Oblé Reed (July 2023), “Why All of Your Ideas Should Fail,” in which Pertinence interviews Portis about building Live2 in his dorm room, “Why Pertinence Is BROKE! (and it's a good thing)” (April 2023), “Does Your Song HAVE to Go Viral?” and an earlier episode, “How @itsluxcity Came Up,” in which Christian Gates discussed his own TikTok rise and a self-reported moment of reaching around 700,000 followers.
Beyond the playlist and podcast, Live2's model has always included a physical, communal-living component. In 2023, Live2 artist Pertinence moved into Portis's own living space as part of a pitch to build a year-long content project, and a few months later moved into what the company's own materials call “the Live2 house,” where artists live together to build content and careers under one roof. An earlier version of this model existed in a Hollywood-area apartment during the 2020–2022 era, functioning as a co-living space for musicians with internal creative competition and cross-engagement between roommates, predating Live2's more formal, publicly documented case studies of the model.
Almost none of the 2020–2022 names remain on Live2's active roster as of the mid-2020s. Em Beihold is listed on the company's own site explicitly as “graduated”; Chappell Roan, Tai Verdes, Claire Rosinkranz, David Hugo, Slush Puppy, KiNG MALA, Livingston and Christian Gates do not appear in any of Live2's current site content or its 2024–2026 uploads. That near-total turnover reflects the ordinary arc of a tastemaker's roster: artists are found, developed and eventually move on to their own labels, managers and lawyers.
The clearest active Live2 artist as of the mid-2020s is Timmy Skelly, an alternative Americana, self-described “Y'allternative,” artist from Sandwich, Illinois, now based in Los Angeles. His music is released under exclusive license to Live2 Records, more recently jointly with Neon Gold Records. His EP Meet Me in Nowhere Land arrived January 23, 2026, preceded by singles “Nowhere Land,” “QB1,” “Summer of '16” and “Come on Diana (Highway 55 Version).” His February 2026 “QB1” video credits “Produced by: Live2 Create” directly, and a 2026 tour opening for Jimmy Eat World, Richy Mitch & the Coal Miners and Houndmouth earned him a dedicated profile in The Los Angeles Tribune. Other current names include BAYBE, produced by Live2 since 2024 with continuing independent singles into 2026, and Pertinence and Noah Floersch, both under Live2's ANA Projects arm since 2022.
No mainstream trade outlet, Billboard, Variety, Rolling Stone, Music Business Worldwide or Pitchfork, has published a profile of Portis or Live2, and he has not appeared on a Forbes 30 Under 30 list, including the 2023 Los Angeles local edition specifically aimed at young entrepreneurs in the city. What recognition exists lives almost entirely within his own ecosystem: a three-hour episode of the Music Matters podcast, a February 2024 feature on the No Directions Substack, which described him as “an entrepreneur who finds himself, serendipitously, at the forefront of a revolution in the music and entertainment industry,” and Live2's own case studies of artists like Em Beihold and Pertinence. Portis has framed his approach to Live2 in the same self-published venues: “I think businesses can be built inside of a movement, but a movement can't be built inside of a company,” and has described the community atmosphere he tried to build as “a Dream Factory,” comparing it to “Plato's Academy for chronically online people.” He has also mentioned an intention to eventually make a feature-length documentary about building Live2, saying in early 2024 that he had already begun filming for it.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2018 | Enrolls at USC to study film business; founds Live2 in his freshman dorm room as a clothing brand supporting artist-storytelling films. |
| Nov 2019 | Pivots to TikTok after his sister introduces him to the platform; personal account grows to 200,000 followers within two months. |
| 2019–2020 | “Making a Sensation” series, built around Chase Paves, breaks through with over two million views overnight, legitimizing the @livetwocreate account. |
| 2020 | COVID pause leads to a flood of inbound DMs from unsigned musicians; launches the Art Not Algorithms playlist. Discovers Em Beihold at roughly 1,000 TikTok followers. Circle also includes Chappell Roan (pre-“Pink Pony Club”), Tai Verdes, Claire Rosinkranz, David Hugo, Slush Puppy, KiNG MALA and Livingston. |
| 2021 | Releases “Groundhog Day” with Em Beihold; Live2 Films produces the video, directed by Zay Mirigian. Christian Gates, pulled into Los Angeles proper from Orange County via Live2, appears on the Art Not Algorithms Podcast. |
| Early 2022 | Em Beihold's “Numb Little Bug” breaks via Republic Records; Live2's in-house music video is pulled a week before release and replaced by an outside production; Live2 is squeezed out of Beihold's ongoing career as her professional team consolidates. |
| 2022–2023 | Builds out Live2's four-division structure (ANA Projects, broadcast network, Live2 Films, Live2 Events); develops Pertinence and Noah Floersch; establishes the Live2 house model. |
| 2023–2024 | Co-hosts the Art Not Algorithms Podcast with Pertinence; gives long-form interviews to Music Matters and the No Directions Substack. |
| 2024–2026 | Continues producing and co-directing videos for Timmy Skelly and BAYBE; Timmy Skelly's Live2/Neon Gold release cycle continues actively into 2026. |
Yes. Portis found Beihold in 2020 through a TikTok video, when she had roughly 1,000 followers and a few hundred thousand Spotify monthly listeners, well before her 2022 breakout. Beihold has publicly credited him as “my closest collaborator” who helped market her early singles “City of Angels” and “Groundhog Day.”
Live2 was commissioned by Republic Records to produce the official video on a $5,000 budget, built around Beihold's real friends. A week before release, the label pulled it and paid another production company a reported $40,000 for a replacement, which was ultimately credited to director Jaime Valdueza. Live2's version was never publicly released.
No. Live2 Records describes itself explicitly as neither a label, management company, nor distributor, but as a non-exclusive business partner to artists.
Live2 helped pull Christian Gates into Los Angeles proper from Orange County during the same 2020–2022 era that produced Em Beihold, Chappell Roan and Tai Verdes, and Gates later appeared on the Art Not Algorithms Podcast to discuss his TikTok rise. He and KiNG MALA were also both booked for a Live2 backyard concert, though Gates ultimately withdrew due to a scheduling exclusivity tied to his Roxy show.
As of the mid-2020s, the clearest active artists are Timmy Skelly, whose music is released under exclusive license to Live2 Records and Neon Gold Records, and BAYBE, alongside Pertinence and Noah Floersch under Live2's ANA Projects arm. Nearly all of the 2020–2022 cohort, including Em Beihold, who is listed explicitly as “graduated” on Live2's own site, has since moved on.
| Video | Artist | Year | McClain's Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Groundhog Day (Official Video) | Em Beihold | 2021 | Producer |
| Groundhog Day (Behind the Scenes) | Em Beihold | 2021 | Assistant Director |
| All I've Built (Official Video) | Holden Miller | 2022 | Executive Producer |
| Numb Little Bug (unreleased Live2 cut) | Em Beihold | 2022 | Producer (shelved before release) |
| Nowhere Land (Official Video) | Timmy Skelly | 2024/2025 | Co-Director, featured cast |
| I Get Drunk (Official Visualizer) | Timmy Skelly | 2026 | Camera |
Further reading: Live2's history and the Em Beihold relationship sit alongside the broader story of the mid-2020s Los Angeles scene documented elsewhere on this wiki, including Christian Gates's own itsluxcity-to-main-stage arc, Devon Again, and KiNG MALA, all of whom passed through the same loosely connected network of TikTok-era discovery, before-the-deal demos, and Hollywood creator houses that Live2 helped assemble.