Adam Wexler is back where he started. Fifteen years after walking away from GoRankem, the fan-powered music discovery platform he built as a senior at the University of Georgia, the entrepreneur is once again running a music company based in Athens. This time it’s a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The seed money is his own. And his last venture sold for billions.
That was PrizePicks, the daily fantasy sports platform Wexler founded in 2015 and grew into the largest of its kind in North America. In late 2025, PrizePicks announced a majority-stake acquisition at an implied valuation of up to $4.15 billion. Wexler had already handed off the CEO role in the summer of 2024 and moved into an executive chairman seat. He calls the new role “special projects guy.”
What he has been doing with the rest of his time is resurrecting the music project he could never quite shake. Now called The Hidden Jams, the platform is backed by a $5 million personal investment from Wexler. There’s no outside money and no revenue model, and he’s in no rush to monetize. The premise is simple. Invite superfans to rank an artist’s entire catalog, song by song, and use the aggregated results to surface what the platform calls “deep cuts” and “hidden gems,” tracks that fans love and streaming algorithms ignore.
The idea is already working in the wild. Ahead of Camper Van Beethoven’s 40th anniversary shows this spring, frontman David Lowery said the band used The Hidden Jams to engage fans and shape its performances. “It was amazing, fans loved it, and we even modified our set lists based on their responses,” Lowery said.
We spoke with Adam Wexler about the through line from GoRankem to The Hidden Jams, what streaming has broken, and returning to an idea 15 years later.
Adam Wexler and Bendadonnn attend 2024 PrizePicks World Championship at Pullman Yards on November 17, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Credit: Paras Griffin/Getty Images for PrizePicks)
Take me back to 2007. What made you build GoRankem then, and why bring back the concept now?
I was fascinated by the digital music industry. Facebook had just come to campus, Tim Westergren was touring campuses pitching what Pandora was becoming, and I was watching Shazam and SoundHound take off. The summer before my fifth fall, I came up with the concept and decided I had to do it now. The premise was simple. Artist catalogs have real depth. Nobody knows each catalog better than the fans. Why not aggregate the wisdom of the crowd the way college sports polls do?
We got to tens of thousands of monthly visitors but couldn’t find a business model that paid the bills. We had to put it on ice. The summer of 2024 felt right to bring it back. I was handing over the keys at PrizePicks, I had extra time, and I’d started getting liquidity out of the business. We’re not picking up where we left off. We’re building it back from scratch, bigger and better.
The Hidden Jams is a 501(c)(3). Why structure it as a nonprofit instead of another for-profit play?
It started with the fact that PrizePicks has been a runaway success, and because we never raised venture capital, there was very little dilution. A lot of shareholders did well, and now with the majority-stake sale, my financial career is on cruise control. I still have stake in the game going forward. That gives me the luxury to ask, what am I most passionate about? I’m a builder. The world needs this solution. I have the means to fund it.
You’ve said the music discovery problem hasn’t been solved in 15 years. It’s actually gotten worse. What’s most broken, and why haven’t the streaming giants fixed it?
Most people discover music now by going straight down the popular list on Spotify or Apple. Spotify’s list is curated based on what’s gotten the most streams in the last 28 days. That doesn’t tell you what’s best. It tells you what’s hottest. Radiohead supposedly refused to play “Creep” in concert for 20 years because of how much they didn’t like it, even though it was their most commercially successful song. Ask their fans what their best song is, and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who says “Creep.” That gap is the entire reason The Hidden Jams needs to exist.
As a music fan, I wish they had solved it. But they have different priorities. One of the bigger storylines in the industry right now is private equity buying up superstar catalogs. The value they’re acquiring sits at the top: the radio hits, the singles, the most-streamed tracks. The long tail is where so much of the value actually sits. And as good as AI has gotten, you can’t just scrape Reddit. You have to ask the fans directly, and give them a structured way to answer.
Adam Wexler on February 14, 2025 in San Francisco, California. (Credit: Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Jaguar)
The platform draws a clear distinction between “deep cuts” and “hidden gems.” What’s the difference?
GoRankem was about rank-ordering catalogs by collective fan favorites. The Hidden Jams goes a couple steps deeper. We took “deep cut,” a phrase popularized through ’90s radio, and built our own algorithmic definition for the streaming era. Moderate streaming popularity but high fan ranking, we tag it as a deep cut. Low streaming popularity but high fan ranking, that’s a “hidden gem.” My favorite recent example is a Futurebirds song that’s the 81st most-streamed track on their page, but when you ask their fans, it ranks No. 1. Without word of mouth or a platform like ours, no one would ever find it.
The launch is rock first, with country to follow. Walk me through the genre roadmap.
Rock is one of the more straightforward genres from a product standpoint. It doesn’t have the considerations EDM and hip-hop bring, like remixes and features and catalogs spread across SoundCloud. With rock, you can largely source from Spotify. Country is up next. Singer-songwriter has a lot of overlap with both rock and country, and that’s what bridges us into R&B and hip-hop. By the end of the year I’d like to think we’ll be live across a lot of genres.
David Lowery of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker is an early supporter. Who else has bought in?
David and I got close back in the GoRankem days. He wanted to get involved then, but we were on our last leg. When I told him this was coming back, he was in, and Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven became two of the initial test catalogs. From there we expanded to Futurebirds and the Whigs and a handful of other Athens-rooted bands, and in the last few months we’ve gotten to a point where we have the feature set and the personnel to start working with Hall of Fame-caliber artists. I just got off a call this morning with R.E.M.’s manager. It’s exciting to know we’re at that stage right now.
You’ve said The Hidden Jams could become a bigger brand than PrizePicks. What does success look like for a nonprofit?
It’s a fun chase when you’ve already built one popular brand to be able to swing for that again. With GoRankem, we were racing to find a business model. Now we come at this from a pure place. We’re in no rush. We’re launching one artist page at a time, working with artists’ teams to get the catalog right before fans rank it. Success looks like artist pages that become the definitive resource for existing fans and, more importantly, for the next generation of fans. There are so many catalogs to chase that this becomes a lifetime project. That’s what gets me excited about it.