Ainsley Costello

Ainsley Costello isn't your average 22-year-old. She's the one who graduates high school at 16, college at 19, plays 250 shows across 20+ states by 20, releases 15+ songs before her 18th birthday, lands her debut album at 21, and is now following up with her sophomore release, The Terrible 20s, this fall. She's also not waiting around for an antiquated music industry to change on her behalf. Ainsley holds a Music Business degree from Berklee College of Music, where she graduated with Bachelors of Arts as the second youngest in her class at just 19.

After relocating from Seattle to Nashville in 2020, just before COVID shut everything down, she turned the industry's halt into hundreds of virtual writing sessions with established Nashville songwriters, building a catalog of more than 300 songs that underpins everything she does today.

In 2025, Ainsley released her debut album EXLESS, a collection of pop-rock anthems about self-love and female empowerment created alongside collaborators including Nick Wheeler of the All-American Rejects, Christian Harger, Sam Kayko, and Nathan Dohse. EXLESS was an arrival moment, proving her conviction as a serious songwriter and artist on the Nashville music scene.

Her forthcoming 2026 follow up, The Terrible 20’s, continues down the road that EXLESS started. Rather than reducing the female experience to romance and heartbreak, the album dives into the larger existential questions that define your twenties: identity, ambition, uncertainty, purpose, and the full chaotic mess of being alive at 22. Produced by Christian Harger (Patrick Droney, Caitlyn Smith), Costello offers a sharp, funny, deeply relatable record out of working through your twenties in real time, growing a community of young women relieved to hear someone singing the quiet parts out loud. These are the songs she needed at 20 and couldn’t find anywhere else, so she wrote them herself. Equal parts existential and electrifying, Ainsley Costello is redefining what coming-of-age music sounds like for a generation tired of clichés.

Aside from finding her catalog on all traditional platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, etc), Ainsley has become one of the most prominent artist voices in the movement toward direct payment technology in music. As the first artist on Wavlake to reach one million fan-direct payments for a single song, she's a vocal advocate for artist-first payment models alongside platforms like Tidal, Fountain.FM, and Epoch Music. Her mission is straightforward: help a new generation of independent artists find financial independence by cutting out the intermediaries that have historically captured most of what fans spend. She is also the co-founder of Epoch Music App, a music streaming and distribution platform built to give independent artists a global direct payment infrastructure and real financial ownership of their work. For Ainsley, Epoch Music isn't just a side project or a brand extension. It's the logical conclusion of nearly a decade in the music business, all culminating before she turns 23.

Armed with the belief that music should support the people who make it, she's working to change the music industry from the inside out, not for herself but for the 7 million independent artists around the world who need it most. She is pursuing that goal with the same stubborn conviction she's brought to everything else.

Proudly endorsed by Breedlove Guitars, Aurora Strings, and Mackie Audio, with partnerships spanning Taylor Guitars, Sennheiser, Wavlake, and a growing global community of artists and developers reimagining how music gets paid for, Ainsley Costello is as connected to the future of the music industry as she is rooted in the craft that got her where she is today.