Category: Newsletter

Lead articles from the weekly newsletter.

Monetizing remix culture: Beatport’s former CEO about his new mission

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Matthew Adell about founding MetaPop and the surprising amount of money being left on the table by artists & labels.

It’s 2016 and artists still have to think like lawyers when working on remixes. As someone whose music consumption primarily exists of remixes and sampled works, this is a very personal pet peeve of mine. The topic is, finally, getting some attention beyond lawsuits and takedown notices.

Earlier this year, a task force from the US Department of Commerce presented their findings of a 2-year study, suggesting that a compulsory license is undesirable. Instead, it recommends that the marketplace be left alone to figure this out. An upcoming key player in this marketplace, is MetaPop: a platform that connects labels, producers and remixers, co-founded by former Beatport CEO, Matthew Adell. To date, MetaPop has signed on over 5,000 labels and helps them clear and monetize fan remixes.

I spoke to Matthew about how it got started, why remixes are so important, and the future of the remix landscape and MetaPop’s place in it.

~

A year after selling Beatport to SFX, Matt decided to step down and take some time off. After some time spent relaxing, he started looking for a new challenge, asking:

“What is not getting solved, because people just think it’s hard?”

This question formed the basis of Matt’s search for intractable problems in the music business. Having always had an interest in derivative works he decided to investigate this problem, because “especially in music, we’ve seen the behaviour of people making remixes without authorisation really become explosive,” indicating that remixes account for 10% of all music listening on YouTube.

To find this out, he teamed up with Michael Mukhin, former CTO of Boomrat, and built a piece of technology called Remix Finder. The purpose of the technology was to understand derivative works online. To start, they created a huge index of remixes, mashups and DJ sets on YouTube. The index contains track information, metadata, and engagement metrics, and over time they could also start seeing the speed and frequency at which these derivatives were taken down. If at all.

“What we learned is while mashups have hits every now and then, there aren’t a lot of mashups that generate a tremendous amount of engagement on YouTube. DJs have some of the tastemaker names in the world, but we found that other than after-movies from really big festivals, DJ sets weren’t really generating that much engagement on a global scale. The work that was really generating the most engagement, and was leaving the most possible revenue on the table, was what we call the single-song remix.”

So as a starting point, they honed MetaPop’s technology on single song remixes and found that they’re better at finding single song remixes than YouTube’s Content ID tool. On YouTube alone, they identified over 8 million remixes that are currently not monetized for the original artist nor the remixer. This could mean hundreds of millions of dollars currently being left on the table, because according to MetaPop just 2.5 million of those fan remixes generate over a billion plays per month.

“So, we have built a system now that allows rightsholders and remixers to come together on our platform to authorise and monetise all of these fan remixes.”

The platform is intended for all genres. In fact, they found that country music is one of the more popular remix genres on YouTube. But why should artists care about remixes in the first place? Matt explains how back in the day, one would have to press vinyl bootlegs to get remixes out there. It was a slow process.

Now music has become part of a constant flow of social media. As a musician, it’s nearly impossible to create enough music to feed this constant flow by yourself, he explains. For remixers, it can help them get noticed, and for the original artist it means an expanded fanbase, and increased revenue.

It makes sense. If you make country music, and someone makes an EDM remix of your track, suddenly you’re reaching another demographic that you otherwise wouldn’t. MetaPop’s revenue split, 70/15/15 to the original artist, remixer and MetaPop respectively, can form a great incentive to monetize remixes, as opposed to taking them down.

If it’s so valuable to artists and there are hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, then why has nobody cracked this before?

“It wasn’t solved before, because there was no money. And it’s complex. Each country has its own laws for how to deal with derivatives.” The rise of streaming means that now there suddenly is a way to monetize. You wouldn’t be able to track the vinyl bootlegs and monetize them, but with all the music platforms out there now, there’s suddenly a lot more data.

Matt also understands that older generations of original artists were more wary of remixes, but this is becoming less the case today.

In the next 10 years, he expects remixes to become even more prevalent, because the software and hardware necessary to create them is becoming ever-accessible. In this landscape, we’ll see much less takedowns than we do today, with there being more systems in place to monetize instead. This is where MetaPop’s place is, as a rights-clearing house for derivative works.

There’s still a long road ahead. The team currently consists of 5 people, with all the technology being built by 1. The thousands of labels, remixers, and original artists they’ve managed to attract and host is an impressive feat, and testament to many years of experience the team has throughout music & tech.

MetaPop’s currently in the process of raising a Series A investment round, so that they can start going global and bring in more music from more places. Besides single song remixes, they want to expand their footprint to cover other forms of derivatives, too, like mashups. The goal is, quite simple: to be able to monetize derivatives more widely and more efficiently.

Are MetaPop going to be able to crack this problem? Matt is confident.

“Nobody else has the right mixture of experience, tech and relationships.”

~

Personally, I’m happy to see people cracking away at this problem, because its importance is underestimated. There are 2 trends that make it urgent to create a legal base for derivative works:

  1. Adaptive music: generations are growing up expecting interactivity from everything in their environment. This is the generation that is growing up trying to swipe magazines, televisions and windows, believing they should be able to interact with it. Their music is going to be adaptive to fit the situation and whims of the listener.
  2. The remix is the internet’s language: whether it’s attaching a gif to a tweet, changing the caption on a meme, or filming yourself playbacking on the wildly popular Musically, we use the remix to express ourselves now. Music genres are increasingly behaving like memes: they often start with remixes by bedroom producers giving existing tracks another twist. Take vaporwave, moombahton, nightcore or even edm-trap as an example.

This is the way people interact with music now. The world shouldn’t have ignored the inner city kids sampling in the 80s and 90s to create hiphop, but now there’s just no getting around it.

Remixing is the new default.

~

Matt and I are both speaking at Amsterdam Dance Event (19–23 Oct).
Come see us.

Walking on stairs

Moving up the music curation food chain

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Time for a quick lesson in free publicity. The increase of easy access to information and entertainment, combined with the democratisation of creation thereof, have led to the need for curation.

As an artist, you want to get your music noticed by curators, so it gets spread around further. But how do you get them to give a damn?

 

Curators follow curators

How do you think curators get their content? They follow other curators. It can be the DJ getting selected tracks from a trusted label rep, or a blogger learning about new releases through a mailinglist.

The easiest way to get noticed by top curators, is making sure you get noticed by smaller curators.

You have to be consistent about it. People have to see your name a few times before recognising you. Only then will they start giving a damn. How you do this depends on the category of music curation.

It will take time. It can be a year if you work hard at it – or even longer. If you don’t work hard at it, it will never happen, unless you hire someone that already has the network.

 

The categories of music curation

The actual dynamics differ from category to category, but the basic jest is that you start small and try to move up the curation food chain. Follow the curators who you want to be noticed by closely, so that you can figure out where they get their music from.

Some domains to think of:

  • Radio airplay: start with local and genre-specific, and slowly work your way up. This is probably the slowest process of all, since nationwide airtime is highly valued.
  • Genre-specific publications: there are dozens of decent publications and blogs per genre, perhaps a bit less for younger genres.
  • Location-specific publications: can even be location/genre-specific, like a local rock magazine.
  • Channel curators: think YouTube, Soundcloud.
  • Theme publications: these are similar to genre publications, but generally broader. Might also report on fashion, or a certain set of genres and sounds that can be loosely grouped together.
  • Live DJs.
  • Playlist curators.

There are plenty of other areas to explore, but if you’ve never really thought about this topic, then these are a good place to start.

 

The music business is a network business

You have to build your connections. Start with the more approachable curators. You can find them at events or in online communities like Facebook groups or Reddit. Your music might be really, really good, but when you hit the inbox of a curator, chances are it’s going to look like just another promo. They might not even listen to it.

Be creative about it, like these guys who wanted to get noticed by a prominent DJ in their genre:

If you’re intent on being able to arrange your own publicity, then check out the books Made to Stick and Contagious. They’re great books for learning how to construct strong stories to communicate ideas.

And a little hack: get a free Hubspot account, so you can see when people open your emails and whether they’ve clicked your links. It will help you to determine where you’re succeeding or failing, and adjust accordingly.

Hidden in plain sight: a global underground dance music scene with millions of fans

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Are gamers the biggest millennial subculture in music? An exploration of ‘online-only’ music.

With the rise of the internet, music has lost more than industry revenues. Music has lost its cultural monopoly for identity building. Music used to be the only fast way in which people could understand that there are other people around the world, with similar ideas and feelings. People who are just like them. Now, social media & internet communities have stripped music from that. A Google search can instantly connect you to people who think the same things you do. Music is simply not important for that anymore.

A large aspect of music’s identity building nature used to be subcultures. Music was at the core, and perhaps the fuel for these subcultures. Subcultures still exist though, but not in the massive way they used to and have less appeal for the middle class. Many that remain are porous, intertwined with all the shades of ‘hipster’ you can imagine.

But there is one massive subculture that remains: gamers. It’s an identity and producers are providing it with a soundtrack.

Emblematic of the music culture among gamers is the label No Copyright Sounds. It was created to discover and provide royalty-free music for gaming videos. By now, it has grown out to a YouTube channel with millions of followers, and hundreds of thousands of followers on their other channels, adding up to millions. They’re now part of AEI, a full-stack music company which also runs a handful of other well-known music networks.

No Copyright Sounds is emblematic, because it comes from the subculture itself. It represents the gamer, which is the epitome of the digital native. They expect free access to music, which is why you’ll see most of the music targeted at this audience offered as free downloads. They don’t expect free music, because they’re unwilling to pay. They spend lots of money on their computers and games. They want free music because of the convenience. You might pay for Spotify, but if you want to share music with other gamers, it’s still more effective to drop a YouTube link.

YouTube copy permission

Another aspect of the digital native is that they exist in networks. If you want information to spread in networks, you have to remove the barriers. So to serve them, you have to go free-first. This means producers in genres specifically targeted at gamers are either looking for alternative revenue streams, or are happy to do it for the love of it. Most are gamers themselves: they’re producing for people like them and get fulfilment from that. It can be that simple.

Perhaps the largest online-only genre is something called nightcore (nxc for short). Nightcore is a remix culture. Most commonly, producers take a pop or dance song, raise the BPM and pitch, do some additional editing and that’s a wrap. Here’s an example of Kelly Clarkson’s Since U Been Gone getting the nxc treatment. But sometimes the BPM is not raised, sometimes it’s rock or metal, sometimes it’s an original production. It’s basically the opposite of vaporwave.

To some, nightcore edits can look like blatant rip-offs, but what they’re doing is they’re translating a song and sound to a different audience. Would I listen to Kelly Clarkson? No. Would I listen to nightcore Kelly Clarkson? Well… Yes. 😅

The spectrum of music for gamers has a lot of gradients and you can go deep into niches. For instance, related to the gamer subculture is the phenomenon of furries, basically people that enjoy role-playing in custom-made anthropomorphic animal suits. There’s also an online equivalent, cyber furries, which is probably best represented by the Lapfox Trax label. All the producers on the label are avatars of the same guy.

Numbers mentioned earlier already showed that this is not an underground movement, and services are taking note. Twitch, a platform for streaming games, created a music section. Spotify has a whole section of playlists aimed at gamers.

Spotify gaming playlists

The most exciting or inspiring thing about this subculture is that people can be themselves without compromise, make the music they believe in, and find audiences for it. Music that you’ll never hear at a liveshow, like the Undertale soundtrack, but finds resonance with millions of people online. And then there’s the cross-overs.

Due to the sugary nature of nightcore, it found lots of sympathy from artists inspired by the music of SOPHIE or the PC Music label. Both have been important to pop music in recent years, with the former producing for Madonna, and the latter resisting an offer from Skrillex. Their sounds can be described as a kind of artsy, over-the-top, hyperpop music. Nightcore artists are happy to incorporate that, to provide a more accessible version of the style:

Speaking about accessible… You know what’s not accessible? Hardcore. Gamers enjoy the high energy offered by happy hardcore, an offshoot of 90s hardcore rave. So, that too, finds an audience:

I’m by no means trying to make an exhaustive list. The music is diverse, and I want to focus on the trend and the business aspect.

The most important thing is: most of the people who listen to this music will never see these artists live. Partly because they just might not be interested in going out to a club, but also because there’s just not really a scene for it, despite these artists having online followings of hundreds of thousands or millions.

Outsiders are taking note, but the music scene’s very much defined as ‘by gamers, for gamers’. While now it’s niche in business terms, and hidden from plain sight if you’re not involved with it, it has three trends going for it.

One is the rise of virtual reality and tools that allow for ‘cyber raves’.

Second is the rise of Esports, which has exhibited 50–70% year-on-year growth rates and will continue to grow rapidly.

The other is that it’s getting easier to sample, remix and edit tracks and distribute the music, without the fear that it will be taken down. The former CEO of Beatport now runs Metapop, which focuses on exactly this problem. And there’s Dubset, which has partnerships with major streaming services.

With the trends going for it, this music subculture with all its subgenres, is about to blow up.

Keep close watch.

Why should artists be able to make a living off of music?

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Does this question make you feel uncomfortable?

If so, allow me to break your music industry bubble for a second.

People outside the music business are often filled with astonishment by the music industry’s prevalent sense of entitlement.

“I made something, so I deserve money.”

Nonsense. What kind of business is that?

To me, the best way to think of yourself as an artist is as an entrepreneur or freelancer.

You have a business to build, an audience to identify & serve, and a competitive landscape to understand.

The landscape is hyper-competitive and choosing to participate in it, especially without identifying a good niche, means there is a good chance you will not be able to make a good living out of it.

If you make good music, appeal to a well-defined audience, and have a good business strategy for monetizing that relationship, whether that’s through gigs, sales, Patreon or something else, then you’ve got a good chance to make a good living.

But you’ve got to keep working hard at it – just like an entrepreneur.

If you build enough, work at it long enough, you might be able to let the reins go and collect money on your past achievements – just like an entrepreneur.

But if you fail to identify your market or risks, you’ll go broke – just like an entrepreneur.

A recent report commissioned by Dutch rights organisations and a labour union for musicians revealed that as much as 19% of Dutch musicians who live with a partner or family are able to make a living from music (PDF). It’s as much as 31% for singles.

Graph: percentage of musicians making a living from music
How cohabiting musicians (left) & single musicians (right) make a living. Green means they live from money generated by music. (Source: Pop, wat levert het op?)

It’s a decent success rate.

If we look at the survival rate of businesses in the US, we can see that half of them die within the first 5 years. The 20 year survival rate is just 20%.

Over 80% of businesses FAIL.

Why should it be different for music?

Let’s take the 20-30% success rate for musicians who can make a living and think about how we can increase that.

First, we need to shatter the sense of entitlement, that has new artists entering the business with false expectations. It sets them up for failure.

We need management companies, record labels, booking agencies and rights societies who stress the importance of hard work and strategy. Who can communicate the necessity of reinventing yourself when your chosen path hits a dead end.

Many artists choose to continue down a dead end path. Becoming wedding DJs or playing covers of classic rock ’n roll tracks at the opening of a friend’s shop in a local mall or something.

“This is the music I play. I should be able to make a living off of it.”

No. Your entrepreneurial pursuit failed. Start over. Do something else. Pivot.

We need music schools to prepare artists for this.

Artists also need room to fail – just like entrepreneurs.

Look at startup accelerators and incubators, look at tax incentives or cuts from governments. Governments, businesses and the existing music industry could do more to give artists some room to breathe while they work on their music & business strategy.

Many initiatives already exist. Every country, and every city, having its own mechanics or ecosystem.

What I’m particularly interested in are collaborations between people from different disciplines. Take artist managers, musicians, developers, tech entrepreneurs, designers, and organisations in music with a lot of data, like ticketing services, event organisers, collection societies, etc. Divide them into groups and give them 48 hours to hack something together.

We need:

  • More data to help artists & management to understand their markets and to develop strategy to address them;
  • More collaboration to make it easier for entrepreneurs to have their products piloted at scale;
  • More applied innovation – we can talk about blockchain, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, but how do you apply it to your strategy?

I’d love to live in a world where everyone who wants to make a living with music is able to do so. It’s just not likely. But let’s expand that 20-30%. Let’s push it to 25-35% and then higher.

Rapid developments in technology means we’ll be able to offer a greater diversity in experience. It’s these developments that has led to a situation where more artists are simultaneously earning some money with music, than ever before.

Technology, combined with human creativity, can expand the market.

And that may be just what we need to help more artists make a living.

Hat tip to Marco Raaphorst for the link to the research report.

tents at what might or might not be a music festival

The Urgent Need for a Sustainable Music Industry – and the Innovations that Make it Possible

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Every month this year has been the hottest in recorded history. Our weather is getting increasingly unpredictable, leading to more storms and floods in some areas and extreme droughts and forest fires in others.

The importance of selling music, or solving problems in the music business, pales in comparison with these issues.

However, these are not separate. We are the environment and our actions affect it. You can bet that last century’s vast record distribution networks made an important contribution to our CO2 output.

Can you guess how much of the CO2 footprint of a CD purchase comes from the ride between the consumer’s home and retail outlet?

10%?

Bit more.

Try something like 20-30%.

Well..

Still wrong.

It’s 50%.

CO2 cost of music sales
Comparison of six album purchase scenarios in GHG emissions (g CO2/album). Error bars represent 90% credible intervals from Monte Carlo analysis. (Source: Microsoft, Intel)

The good news is that consuming music digitally reduces the CO2 footprint of that music by 40-80%. So, sure, the decline of the CD brought a decrease in revenues for the overall music industry, but at least we get a less tangible benefit in return. And the industry appears to be recovering.

In economics, there is a concept called negative externalities which is defined as “economic activity that imposes a negative effect on an unrelated third party.” Take the CD trade as an example. It imposed a large negative effect on consumers, since the taxes levied around transportation do not raise enough money to reverse the effects of the associated CO2 output.

There are many remaining negative externalities in the music business, but technological innovation can help alleviate problems. It’s in our economic interest to care about these negative externalities. If we can prevent scenarios with cataclysmic weather events, consumers might be a little more relaxed to go see a gig, buy some merch, and spend money on music instead of sand bags to protect their house against a flood. I’m not exaggerating: floods in US coastal cities have more than doubled since the 1980s.

Transportation

As highlighted before, transportation is one of the biggest contributors to CO2 output. What can we do besides driving hybrids or environment-‘friendly’ trucks?

The commute to the studio

Democratized means of production, such as production software and more affordable high quality digital equipment, have reduced the need for regular commutes to the studio. Studios may still be a necessity due to acoustics, sound isolation and for recording purposes, but you don’t need them every step of the way.

Bedroom producers are polar bears’ best friends.

Hawaiian polar bear

The commute to the office

What goes for musicians, definitely goes for most people with office jobs in the music business. If you want to be a sustainable company in this day and age, encourage everyone who’s able to, to work from (close to) home at least 1-2 days a week.

VR and concerts

Perhaps the biggest contributors to the industry’s carbon emissions are live touring and festivals. They require equipment to be shipped, band members to be flown, and fans to be congregated. In the UK, audience travel is estimated to account for 43% of the industry’s gas emissions. The rise of electronic dance music and hiphop have helped to reduce the amount of equipment, and band members, being flown around. Virtual reality could be a next step.

While VR won’t replace the concert experience, it will offer a new competing experience. Being able to host virtual performances for fans worldwide, at a much lower cost, won’t just help reduce emissions, but can also alleviate some of the stress that a lifestyle of always being on tour entails. There has been much attention for mental health in music recently: perhaps VR can help?

VR, band practice and collaboration

Another reason why people come together a lot is for practice and collaboration. What if you could work together in a virtual environment, from the comfort of your homes? What if that virtual environment replicated a normal practice studio perfectly? What if that virtual environment could provide an experience richer, especially in terms of features, than a real world place?

Merch, 3D Printing, and distributed manufacturing

Another big cost to the industry, consumer, and environment: shipping merchandise. And let’s think beyond just the t-shirts. Some artists ship in large quantities, but most don’t have the scale to mass-produce. They produce small batches, and then ship them around the world from where they live. It would arrive at your home or a local pick-up point. What if instead, you order something, it’s produced at the nearest 3D printer and you can pick it up from there. Not only are there less emissions involved, but it might be faster too. There are still questions about whether the amount of energy required offsets the carbon emissions, particularly for mass production, but some printers are performing great.

Services like 3D Hubs are already providing over 1 billion people with access to 3D printers within 10 miles from their home.

Developments in commercial flight

Even if we don’t do anything, technology is being developed to make flight a lot cleaner. Biofuels may reduce carbon emissions by 36-85%. Longer term, lithium-ion batteries may allow for solar-powered flight. We’re not quite there yet, but as can be seen in the video below, Elon Musk is optimistic that it’s doable.

Hardware

Now let’s tackle the impact of producing some of the equipment necessary for making music. Some instruments get resold, recycled, or re-used. A lot of hardware doesn’t, though. According to a UN study, only 15.5% of ‘e-waste’ gets recycled.

Furthermore, there is a lot of unused value sitting inside communities.

Self-driving vehicles promise to reduce the amount of cars we need to manufacture. Why? Because our cars are standing still 95% of the time. If cars are automated and shared, one car could service many more people on a day than it would normally do in a month.

Likewise, a lot of instruments and equipment go unused for vast amounts of time. What if there was a way to share this value with other musicians in your community? Think Airbnb for music equipment, which includes insurance. A startup called Demooz lets you borrow things to try before you buy. A startup with a broader use case, Peerby, lets you lend to and borrow from your neighbours. For free, or you can charge a fee.

So, maybe you don’t have to go to the studio to use a good microphone and there is also no necessity for everyone to own all of the equipment they might need either.

Why spend money when you can be like Kramer?

Festivals & events

A lot of festivals are powered by diesel generators, costing around half a billion euros each year, just in Europe. As much as three quarters of the UK music industry’s greenhouse gas emissions come from live performances.

Tents get left behind, a lot of water is used to clean, and cars queue up for hours to get into parking lots.

One of the most interesting music-related startup accelerators has to be Open-House. They look at how events can be made more efficient, but also how festivals can be used as a case study for how we organise humanitarian aid, or solving other societal issues.

Their startups include Kartent, a recyclable cardboard tent, Sanitrax, which makes the toilet experience more efficient, and Watt-Now, an energy monitoring system for festivals.

Each year, Amsterdam Dance Event organises a full day of presentations, panels and discussions about sustainability in events and dance music, called ADE Green. Other conferences should take note.

Conferences

Music industry events used to be the only way to handle business for a lot of people. Now, with fast communication, video calls, etc. that aspect has lost its importance. Even for networking, Slack channels like the Music Tech Network or good old Twitter might be a n easier way to get in touch with relevant people, and especially more CO2 efficient. Sure, online networking doesn’t build the same trust relation as meeting face to face does, but collaboration does – and with such vast arsenals of tools at our disposal for online collaboration, there has never been a better chance to involve people from around the world in your projects.

And if you’re going to organise a conference that flies in a lot of people – at least dedicate some time to sustainability.

Using music to inspire

Music is powerful. When people come to a festival, for many, it will be an experience they’ll never forget.

Music is part of everyone’s life. From Fortune 500 CEO to high school student, from plumber to engineer.

This gives us a unique position. We get to dictate the standard. We get to influence what is ‘cool’, and what should be considered normal.

Consider a large-scale, ‘green’ festival, such as the UK’s Shambala. Implementing these solutions has a ripple effect.

Music has the power to inspire movements and new societal norms. It can ignite revolutions.

Let’s use music’s power to inspire people to build a greener world.

Extra resources

If you want to make the music business more sustainable, here are some amazing sets of resources to help you on your way.

  • Julie’s Bicycle: a global charity dedicated to making the creative industries sustainable. They have a vast set of resources ranging from guides, to fact sheets, and webinars.
  • Ouishare: a collaborative economy initiative that does research, connects people together, and shares advice and insight into how sharing can make us more resource efficient.

Interview: Wil Benton (Chew.tv) about building a livestreaming platform for DJs

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Can Chew be to music what Twitch is to gaming? Find out what it takes to build the world’s largest video platform for DJs.

Chew team

Wil Benton is one of the founders of Chew, a service that lets performers create a livestream of their DJ or studio sessions. They were launched in January 2015 and signed up tens of thousands of creators, broadcasting over fifty thousand performances.

Not only does Chew provide a platform where you can interact with DJs while they’re playing — it also functions as a massive archive of DJ sets, easily rivaling those of Boiler Room, and providing a more visual alternative to Mixcloud.

This is the first edition of a series of interviews with music startup founders and professionals. With the series, I want to shine a light on what goes on in music startups, how they work and what their challenges are. So, first up: Wil about building Chew.

Chew.tv logo

—

How has the journey been since graduating from the Ignite startup accelerator?

It may sound cliched, but we really wouldn’t be here today without the support and guidance we had on the Ignite accelerator. The team were the first to believe in Ben Bowler and I as founders, investing in us as a team (our idea pre-programme wasn’t quite as strong as it is today!) and giving us the focus and headspace to start building what became Chew at the start of last year. 

Our continuing success is testament to the Ignite team and all that they do — so can’t really say more than that!

—

Some people argue that investors are wary of investing in music startups due to uncertainties with rights and monetization. Have you encountered this?

In a word, no. Not yet anyway!

I think, had we not been demonstrating ‘interesting’ metrics and engagement on both sides of our creator & consumer marketplace, we would’ve found it harder to raise the two rounds of seed funding we’ve raised to date — but, on the whole, raising investment’s been a pleasure so far!

We’re gearing up to our first institutional round towards the end of this year; and conversations there have been promising too; again possibly thanks to the numbers we’ve got. That and the large amount of time we spend talking to our investors (both currently and looking to invest).

Chew presentation

—

You ran a crowdfunding campaign letting users invest & get equity. What made you choose this?

We looked at crowdfunding as a way to fill part of the seed round we did at the start of this year. We’re building a community-based business, so it made sense to look at crowdfunding as a way of allowing our EU-based users to invest.

What better way to demonstrate we’re building something of value than our users actually investing in what we’re building?

We ended up having 122 individuals investing in the campaign; many Chew users but also supporters who saw value in what we’re doing. Seedrs, the platform we used, operate a nominee structure where their legal entity represents all 122 investors’ interest — but we have a great relationship with both parties and keep them in the loop with news on the business every fortnight.

Crowdfunding as a route to accessing capital isn’t the easiest thing to do — but as a way of generating interest in our community, product, and offering, it was unparalleled.

—

How did the idea of Chew come about?

Ben and I met the summer before we launched Chew — introduced by a mutual friend because we shared a love for music and tech. The predecessor to Chew was called EatBass (sticking with the culinary theme here!) and we spent a few months on that before I left my job at an advertising agency at the end of 2013.

Ben had spent a lot of time working with live streaming at his job with AEI and was being asked back to stream club nights and other events after having left. That’s originally where the idea for a live streaming platform for music came about. I started working full-time on Chew in that guise at the start of 2014, in a marketing and biz dev role. Meanwhile Ben covered the tech side by working evenings and weekends until joining me full time in August 2014.

Wil Ben Chew

It wasn’t until our time on the Ignite accelerator in October that we focused the idea being a platform and community for DJs and the electronic music community, though.

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How did you assemble your team?

We raised an SEIS investment round in April 2015 after we’d finished Ignite, which gave us the capital to hire our CTO, Sam. We spent ages trying to hire for the full-stack role we wanted to fill; and Sam ended up finding our listing on the AngelList profile. He joined us the week after graduating with a Computer Science degree.

We’re still a team of three today; Sam as CTO, Ben as CSO/CVO and me as CEO. This year, we’ve been lucky enough to welcome a few ‘grownups’, who bring extensive industry experience to the team on a consultancy basis as we continue building out the business.

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What are you happiest about regarding Chew? What pains you?

Our continuing success — and hearing about the value we’re adding to our users’ lives and careers on a daily basis!

Pain points are, thankfully, few and far between at the moment. Finances, given we’re working on a limited runway, and resource, being a team of three, have their downsides — but I wouldn’t have us operating in any other way!

Chew office setup

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What are you happiest about regarding Chew’s current feature set? And what bugs you?

We’ve achieved a huge amount in our short history — especially given we’ve only one (truly awesome) developer!

Our ability to plan, build and execute features to a reliable schedule — on top of bug fixes, community support etc — never ceases to amaze me.

In terms of personal bugs, it’s more of a resource issue than a problem with our features. We’ve got so much more to do, but our team is at capacity — so we need to expand to be able to improve what we have. So not necessarily a bug of mine; just conscious awareness that there’s only so much we can do as the lean team we are today!

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You have over 25,000 DJs and producers on the service… How did they find out about Chew?

We had just under 30k users sign up in our first 18 months. We spent four or so months last year testing low level spend on Facebook ads (less than ÂŁ5k) and, having just looked at the data, our numbers (in terms of engagement and platform usage) are actually better if we ignore the data from the duration of the Facebook spend.

Otherwise, our growth has been purely word of mouth. We turned Facebook ads off in August last year and haven’t looked back! We’re pretty active on the socials and in terms of community support, and we find that keeps our DJs and creators happy.

The happier [the DJs] are, the more content they produce on Chew and the larger the audiences they bring.

We’ve also just acquired our largest competitor, Mixify. The users we’re transitioning onto Chew is more than ten times our registered user number — so seeing how that impacts our numbers will be a fun journey!

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How do you think DJs can benefit from live broadcasting?

Live streaming is an open, democratic process that allows anyone, anywhere in the world to share what they’re doing in realtime. It’s the realtime aspect that connects us as consumers, the ‘spontaneous togetherness’ we get from sharing this experience. Josh Elman, one of the VCs who invested in Meerkat, wrote a great blogpost about this.

For DJs, music producers, and personalities, it levels the playing field and enables anyone at any stage of their career to build an audience, drive that engagement that defines success as a musician and ultimately monetise their activities. That’s what we’re seeing with Chew — bedroom DJs building a global fanbase, established artists communicating with an engaged audience from their bedrooms or studios and record labels sharing new content from their artist rosters.

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You mentioned spontaneous togetherness. How have you tried to foster that?

We are as hands off, from a platform point of view, as our creators want us to be.

Everything that happens on Chew is user-driven; our contribution to that is making sure the tech and platform makes things as easy as possible for our creators and consumers to engage with each other.

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Do you think live streamed shows should be an essential part of any performing DJs digital strategy?

Yes — but potentially more than just shows. We see the best consumer engagement when our creators break away from the ‘let’s stream a show’ mentality.

It’s more about creating a consistent flow of content than sticking a webcam behind you in the club.

Live video is probably the most powerful thing, second to only live events, in a DJ, producer, or personality’s digital strategy for a number of reasons. Frequency and consistency are key, though. Without them, we don’t see as good an engagement from the audience side.

Wil Benton of Chew.tv DJing

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You mention frequency and consistency being key. Does that in any way contrast with ‘spontaneous togetherness’?

Great point — I hadn’t thought of it like that! Being consistently spontaneous kind of defeats the point doesn’t it 😉

I think, like I said earlier, allowing every creation and consumption decision to be user-driven helps drive this togetherness — but it’s the regularity of spontaneity that drives the behavioural change from a consumption side of things, which allows creators to maximise their audience’s engagement.

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Are you going to be launching Twitch-style monetization options like donations and subscriptions?

We’re working on a number of new features — watch this space!

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Do you have any words of advice for people with a genius music startup idea and other founders?

I’ll let Betaworks/ Startup Vitamins answer this for me.

One of the things we learned on Ignite:

You can never have a product in users’ hands too quickly.

Build, launch and iterate as fast as you can.

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