✦About
ainsley
Raw talent
+ relentless ambition
At just twenty two, Ainsley Costello has already been pursuing music professionally for nearly half her life. She’s out to prove to an industry obsessed with finding viral influencers over talented musicians that hard work and paying your dues still matter.
Ainsley moved from Seattle to Nashville in 2020 at just fifteen years old, arriving in Music City two weeks before the pandemic brought the world, and the music industry to a halt. But that didn't stop her; Ainsley turned lockdown into a launchpad. She finished high school online graduating at sixteen, while simultaneously beginning classes at Berklee College of Music online, studying under music industry heavy hitters who were backup singers for P!NK and Roberta Flack, Mariah Carey’s attorneys, and veteran radio promoters who launched careers from the likes of Duffy to Taylor Swift.
When COVID lasted far longer than anyone expected, she kept the momentum going, logging hundreds of hours of virtual and in person writing sessions with established songwriters from Nashville and around the world. Now, she’s written songs with Nick Wheeler of the All-American Rejects, and renowned Nashville producers like Sam Kayko and Christian Harger. Her growing catalog now spans over 300 songs, a foundation that underpins everything she does today.
By the time her peers were finally finishing high school, Ainsley had already graduated from Berklee College of Music at nineteen with a BA in Music Business, Magna Cum Laude. She played over 200 shows in more than 20 states and between 2021 and 2023, and released a nine song EP along with sixteen singles without missing a beat. That work ethic set the tone for her evolving persona and ever-developing sound.
At just twenty-one, she released her debut full-length album, EXLESS, a defiant, hook-driven collection of pop-rock anthems about self-love and female empowerment. It wasn't just an LP, it was an arrival. Proof that Costello wasn't a Nashville hopeful, she was in it for the long haul.
Now, at twenty-two, Ainsley is readying for her sophomore album, The Terrible 20s, coming early 2027.
Produced by Christian Harger (Patrick Droney, MORGXN, CAM) with a track co-produced by JSTFRNDS (Michael Sanzone, TX2, We Ani), The Terrible 20s is a savvy, funny, and unexpectedly moving portrait of the chaos of becoming an adult in today's post-pandemic, chronically online world. The record explores the trials of a titular decade track by track: the micro-humiliations adulthood consists of that nobody warned you about ("Existing = Embarrassing"), the fierce loyalty of female friendships ("Anyone But You"), the exhausting volunteer work that modern dating has become ("Passion Project"), the double standards ambitious young women with goals face, (“GDWHF”), struggling with whether or not to keep pursuing your dreams (“Poor Thing”), and other topics that delve deeper than the typically youthful themes of love and heartbreak.
The chorus of the title track is a thesis statement of the whole album: “It’s the roaring, soaring, unbearable, terrible 20s, it’s okay, you can laugh it’s kinda funny!”
Sonically, Ainsley has carved out a lane that's entirely her own; Often compared to front women like Hayley Williams, Gwen Stefani, and sometimes Carly Rae Jepsen, she's frequently been heralded as "too pop for rock and too rock for pop” and that’s just how she likes it. Her sound sits at the intersection of primarily live instrumentation and a healthy dose of today's pop sparkle. She wears the contradiction like a badge, expressing that true artistry does not fit into one neat genre.
In 2023 she made history as the first artist on Wavlake to reach one million fan-direct payments for her song “Cherry On Top”. Those earnings quickly surpassed her traditional lifetime royalties through traditional DSP’s. This led to Ainsley becoming one of the loudest voices in the direct-to-artist payment movement, fighting to remove middlemen from the connection between artists and their fans. Today she is helping independent musicians around the world opt-out of traditional predatory streaming economics. She is the co-founder of Epoch Music App (epochmusic.xyz), a direct to artist streaming and distribution platform built to give independent artists self-distribution, publishing, direct-to-fan payments, and a royalty-collection infrastructure that will one day divert money away from traditional platforms and back to the people who actually create the art.
Her story is a culmination of a decade in the music business all before she turns twenty-three. Her mission is simple, and unshakable: help independent artists win financial independence, and she's fighting for that mission with the same stubborn conviction that took her to Nashville at 15 to pursue her dreams.
Endorsed by Breedlove Guitars, Aurora Strings, and Mackie Audio, with strategic partnerships with Taylor Guitars, Sennheiser, Fountain.FM, TrueFans.FM, Wavlake.com, Bitcoin for The Arts, and many more, 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.