music streaming

Are donations becoming a viable part of artists’ business models?

Posted on October 10, 2016 | by Bas Grasmayer

With the rise of live streaming and new media models, donations deserve another consideration.

Napster, the early file sharing service, not only introduced many to piracy. The platform also exposed two competing world views. One believed that information should be free and the other believed in combating such ideas. They were both wrong.

As a teenager, and still today, my personal sympathy went out to those who saw a better world and wanted to accomplish that by facing down large corporations. Their envisioned world was never satisfactory enough for me, though. It seemed oversimplified. One of the most common tropes you’d hear would be:

“Artists should just release their work for free and let people donate. I’d love to be able to donate to my favourite artists.”

Donation request from a band — An example of a common donation request.

At that time, there were only about half a billion connected devices. Most of the world’s population wasn’t online yet. Those that were, and thought this way, were a minority projecting their own behaviour onto others. It’s common: most music startup founders do the same thing — overestimating how much people care about music. Simply put: the donation model could not scale.

The model didn’t take into consideration the complexity of the way music is made. Let’s say artists were able to make a living off of donations — this benefits the most visible artists; the singers, but not the songwriters. How should money from donations then be distributed so that it’s fair? Does the intention behind the donation matter? Questions like these are the reason why there’s so much legislation around creative work.

An elemental overview of merely the royalty distribution part of the music business. Via Bemuso.

Time passed and two trends have developed. Firstly, there has been an explosion of artists who do everything by themselves. Households in many countries now no longer have just 1 family PC, and music production software is easy to attain. This has led to a rise of ‘bedroom producers’, many of which are world famous and make a good living off of music.

The second trend is that the internet has become more real-time. Ten years ago you wouldn’t consider sharing memories online that would only be visible for 24 hours. Now, two of the world’s most popular apps, Instagram and Snapchat, not only encourage, but thrive because of that behaviour.

Fast wireless connections and increasingly powerful devices have enabled livestreaming. Anyone who’s ever ‘gone live’ on Facebook or Periscope knows that it changes the creative process of making a video. Live video streams are not just a new way to broadcast, they’re a creative format.

Trends mix and influence each other. If you want to understand where things are going, you have to understand how trends converge and diverge. In this case, the two highlighted trends have culminated into a particular reality: donations are becoming a viable part of artists’ business models.

Understanding how donations are becoming viable is easiest by looking outside of music. Donations are already an important part of the economy on Twitch, a platform for broadcasting gameplay, which also encourages creatives to start streaming.

Gamers use donation apps to display tip notes in the live video stream. Some apps actually automatically read out the tip notes on-stream. Tipping is done for various reasons: to actually show appreciation, to encourage the chat to discuss a certain topic (or more likely: to emote-spam), to request a song, to ask for expert feedback, to get their name or joke into a YouTube highlight reel, etc.

Twitch tip scare — And sometimes they use tips to scare streamers shitless.

For popular streamers, it’s hard to interact with the chat, because there’s just too much to read it all — and they also need to focus on their game. Tip notes provide a way for viewers or fans to rise above the noise and get the streamer’s attention.

The takeaway here is that donations do not seem to occur for altruistic reasons in most cases. The exact ratio would make for an interesting study. Much of the donation behaviour happens due to the desire to interact, stand out or to get a request fulfilled. It’s a behaviour enabled by the immediacy brought on by the rise of high quality live streaming.

DJ live streaming on Twitch — Some streamers highlight their top donators by keeping their names visible (in bottom).

Musicians that want to incorporate donations into their business model will need a clear strategy. Firstly, it’s unlikely that donations on their own are viable if the goal is to make a living off of creative work. Although if you do it all yourself, like many artists these days, you get to keep the whole cut.

Secondly, the reason why donations are becoming viable is because of live streaming. This means the artist needs to be able to consistently generate audiences and that takes time to build. One-offs are a recipe for failure, especially if they don’t sit within a broader strategy.

Live streams being a creative format of their own means that there needs to be an intrinsic motivation to work in this way. Else one won’t be able to muster the consistency and grit necessary to succeed. The question for the artist is: “is this medium compelling enough for you to spend a significant amount of your time on it?”

Whatever the answer, the trend is clear. As artists are embracing the live format, with younger ones even coming into maturity with it, we’ll see donations make a comeback. This time, not as charity, but as a well-planned part of artists’ business models.

An example of donations on Chew.tv, a live video streaming platform for music.

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

Posted on September 26, 2016 | 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:

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.
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.

Why nobody cares about your free download

Posted on September 15, 2016 | by Bas Grasmayer

You spent years honing your skills. Countless hours putting together your latest song or album. You value your work immensely, so you decide to give this valuable thing away to your fans. Maybe it will even get you some new fans.

But they don’t care.

In the age of constant connectivity, free downloads have lost their value.

Music has become ephemeral

People jump from playlist to playlist, see music shared in their social media feeds, and are presented with a radio station button on each page of the streaming service they use. Research done by Nielsen asked people what they do when the music they want to access can’t be streamed: most people just move on. There is so much music one can access, immediately… a free download won’t make your music stand out.

Nielsen streaming availability graph — Via eMarketer

Why download?

There are certain use cases for downloads, and I’ve written about them below, but if it’s easy to retrieve tracks on YouTube, Soundcloud, or Bandcamp and stream them… then why would you bother with downloading? Especially when the user flow often looks something like:

Click download
Get sent to another site
Click download again
Prompted to connect to Facebook
Prompted to like the page of the band, label and lead singer
Prompted to share the track on Facebook
Prompted to do the same things on Soundcloud
*curl up in a ball and cry a little*
Download starting
Select location for your file

Is that worth it? How many times do you expect people to listen to your download?

Overused

Free downloads have become such a standard part of the strategy of artists, that it’s actually not that special anymore. Think about it: seeing FREE DOWNLOAD next to a track used to pique our interest to give it a listen. No more. Now, the only ones who get excited by seeing that are dedicated fans of the artist, label or genre.

Nobody cares about your free download

Or at least less than you’d think.

But free downloads still work in certain cases.

Free downloads can be a good way to please fans

Fans will care about your free download. Make sure it fits into a broader strategy, like I’ve shown with Yellow Claw. For instance, you can use mixtapes to hype an upcoming release and a tour you’re doing. Definitely offer those mixtapes for free.

Know your audience

There are some easily identified types of audiences that would actually care about a free download, other than hardcore fans. For instance:

Very young teens who can’t afford a streaming subscription. This may be changing due to Spotify pushing family plans.
Audiophiles. They often complain that streaming audio quality is not good enough and they want higher definition sound, typically best offered by downloaded files.
(Bedroom) DJs. If you’re making electronic music, chances are a lot of your fans are also aspiring producers or DJs. Most DJing requires files, whether you use software on your laptop, a USB drive, or burn tracks to CD.
Older audiences. Many people in the older demographics want to be able to listen to ‘owned music’. They care less about music discovery – making music less ephemeral for them.

Important features for streaming services by age group — Source: Jackdaw Research

Audience first, strategy second

I wouldn’t want the elderly to get bombarded by trap producers. So, to avoid people thinking “so THAT’S who I need to target with my free downloads”, let’s get your strategy sorted first. I wouldn’t want the elderly to get bombarded by trap producers.

Look into the data you have on Facebook and Twitter. Look at the faces you see when performing live. Research the audiences of other artists who make similar music. Understand how they use the web, what they do, what they like, whether they’re streaming subscribers or not.

This is your point of departure.

Then set goals: what do you want to achieve? A bigger fanbase? More people at your shows? Make it tangible if you can. Now, free downloads become a method to achieve something. A tactic, rather than just something you do.

Free downloads should be something that makes people excited.

Make it so.

Further reading:

Music Business Growth Hacking 101: How to Scale Your Fanbase & Revenue Sustainably — Click here to continue

10 Lesser-Known Tools for Music Discovery

Posted on September 14, 2016 | by Bas Grasmayer

Radio, streaming services, social networks – everyone has their own way to discover new music. Meanwhile, there are dozens of entrepreneurs out there who believe they have a better way. Here are some of the best ones out there.

cmd.to fm

http://cmd.to/fm

cmd.to fm screenshot

How it describes itself: This is not your mothers radio. Listen awesome tunes from cmd.fm’s curated playlists.

How it works: It’s radio powered by a command-line interface. To keep it easy, it lets you click on the most essential commands. Player controls are activated by typed commands. All music appears to come from Soundcloud.

First impression: Fun! And I’m pretty sure this is how hackers listen to music. Does this make me a hacker?

MagicPlaylist

https://magicplaylist.co/

MagicPlaylist screenshot

How it describes itself: Get the playlist of your dreams based on a song.

How it works: You type the name of a song in a search box and it automatically generates a Spotify playlist with 30 other tracks.

First impression: It succeeds because it doesn’t let itself fail: generating a playlist from one track doesn’t create huge expectations, so it doesn’t disappoint. The playlists are not amazing, but it works as a quick way to pick a theme and have some music to listen to.

Cymbal

https://cymbal.fm/

How it describes itself: Discover songs the world is falling in love with.

How it works: Cymbal is a music social network that looks and feels a lot like Instagram.

First impression: Easy to use, because they make use of familiar interfaces. They make it easy to share content outside of the app, which is important in the early stages of social networks. Upon first try they really show you where the content is, so you immediately have something to check out. The onboarding process has too many steps and needs work. Ideally, you let people use the app ‘immediately’ and guide them through it, nudging them step by step to connect other accounts, etc.

As a social network, you need a certain critical mass to let users retain each other, so they should consider how to improve sharing the content outside the app in such a way that:

Users will use the app, even if their friends are not on there;
The content becomes so engaging that their friends will join.

trbble

https://trbble.com/

trbble screenshot

How it describes itself: Discover new music by listening to a song’s best part first!

How it works: trbble sources music from Soundcloud and lets users define the most important part of the song, so others can get a quick impression of it. This 30-second clip is then called a trbble. The playback and upvote count of your trbbles is displayed on your profile. So there’s an incentive for active users to provide music for passive users.

First impression: Found it hard to get used to the interface, but there’s a use case to explore. trbbles could perhaps provide a passive stream for DJs to listen through a lot of music, instead of actively skipping through tracks. I think conceptually it could be interesting, but needs to simplify its interface.

A Song a Day

http://www.asongaday.co/

A Song a Day screenshot

How it describes itself: Music from humans, not robots, delivered to your inbox every day. Because people are cool.

How it works: Give your email address, select which genres you like, and maybe select a curator. From that point you’ll receive new music recommendations, every day, in your inbox.

First impression: What I really like about the way it’s designed is that at every moment in the sign-up process, you can either give your preferences or say screw it, just send me some music. Simple and does what it says. I could imagine this having some growth potential.

Rising.fm

http://rising.fm/

Rising.fm Screenshot

How it describes itself: Music charts powered by Soundcloud.

How it works: It looks at data from “social media sites” and has a simple ranking algorithm to come up with charts. It’s basically an easy way to discover popular and trending music on Soundcloud.

First impression: Works well for the default tags and very popular search phrases, but if you go a bit more obscure, you get no results (eg. psytrance, goa). Even ‘trance’ returned just 6 results of which 3 were not trance. Perhaps it’s just not tracking the right blogs for that.

22tracks

http://22tracks.com/

22tracks screenshot

How it describes itself: 22tracks is a brilliantly curated playlist service, run by 120 expert and influential DJs from Amsterdam, Brussels, London and Paris.

How it works: The service appoints curators for genre-based playlists in each city. The curators are mostly local DJs, journalists, etc. with many being known within their scenes worldwide. Each playlist consists of 22 tracks and is updated regularly. You can save tracks to your own 22 track playlist.

First impression: Very cool concept, and so simple. They seem to monetize through brand partnerships, but I imagine they should be able to monetize part of their userbase at a low price point (between $1 and $4 per month) for additional mobile features like offline syncing, personalization, and perhaps exclusive premiers.

Chew.tv

https://chew.tv/

Chew.tv screenshot

How it describes itself: DJs everywhere. Right here.

How it works: DJs can livestream their DJ sets on the platform, but you can also rewatch sets later. You can find all kinds of electronic music on the site, basically: if you can imagine it, they’ve got it.

First impression: Fun. Takes me back to when I would put Boiler Room sets on my TV all day long. This is a bit more personal, as you can follow DJs and also engage with other listeners through the chat function. In terms of music discovery, it would be nice to have some type of dynamic tracklist, but having a phone with Shazam handy has done the trick for me so far. And else you can always just tweet a DJ to ask about that track you must find!

Check out my interview with Will Benton from Chew.tv.

Wonder

http://wonder.fm/

Wonder screenshot

How it describes itself: Wonder is a platform that simplifies indie music discovery — a place to hear what’s new as soon as it’s released.

How it works: Wonder uses some ranking mechanism to find trending tracks on Soundcloud and then presents 99 one of them to the user. Some research suggests that after the algorithms surface tracks, some human curation is involved.

First impression: Wonder is a great way to find hot new tracks before they make it to the charts. I personally enjoy Primary and Whitelabel off-shoots more, which represent hiphop and dance music respectively. Very high quality tunes. Throw out your radio.

Muru

http://murumusic.com/

Muru screenshot

How it describes itself: Create your own music journey.

How it works: You pick a genre as departure point, another genre of where you want to go and then the app creates a playlist that builds from the former to the latter. You can adjust the tempo, energy, popularity, and vocal-drivenness of the tracks in your playlist, as well as the length of the playlist.

First impression: There’s quite a bit of work to be done. For one, it’s currently iOS-only, and you have to connect to Spotify. The authorisation process is a bit of a pain in the butt when first launching the app, especially if you just want to try it. I’d move the ‘Connect to Spotify’ step to after playlist creation. That way you already have commitment from the user. To avoid disappointment, the necessity for Spotify should be communicated upon launch. I also wasn’t able to find the genres I prefer, because they’re not available in the app yet.

There’s plus points too: the app’s design is neat and the playlists it creates are interesting. This is in part by the concept of genre journeys: you immediately start to wonder how the app is going to transition from Blues to EDM.

5 Big Ideas for the UK Association of Independent Music

Posted on August 24, 2016 | by Bas Grasmayer

The Association of Independent Music (AIM) recently put out a call for ‘big ideas’ to be discussed at their Annual General Meeting.

“The goal is to produce and publish by the end of this year a manifesto which sets out 10 big ideas to help the indie sector to thrive in the coming years.”

I’m not a member, but not shy to give a bit of unsolicited advice.

Here are my 5 big ideas:

Streaming exclusives

The indie sector needs to widely speak out against streaming exclusives. After years of hard work, we’re now sending music fans back to pirate services. Let’s keep working on sustainability, instead of sacrificing it for short-term gains.

Streaming exclusives may be making the music piracy problem even worse >>>
Why streaming exclusives are bad for the music business >>>
Spotify: Streaming exclusives are bad for artists and fans >>>
Why exclusives are terrible for fans, artists, and the streaming music business >>>

Startup license

Establish a framework which allows startups to quickly and flexibly license music from indie labels for a set duration. The prospect of spending years in licensing negotiations stops entrepreneurs and investors from supporting innovation the independent music sector desperately needs. Let’s remove the necessity to negotiate for the most common use cases.

The case for a startup license: why startup founders choose to ignore music copyright law >>>

Focus on dance

The Netherlands is stealing the UK’s spotlight as the centre of global dance music with events like Amsterdam Dance Event, major DJs, and a huge global dance event business. The UK has a rich history of dance music and is home to some of the best artist, clubs, and labels in the world. It needs an action plan to assert itself. With Sadiq Khan as London’s Mayor, there has never been a better time.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan is looking for the UK’s first night czar >>>

Refugees

Develop an initiative to help artists and aspiring musicians among the refugees arriving to the UK. They bring a unique cultural and musical perspective, which could blend into the UK’s rich multi-cultural musical tradition. They need material assistance in the form of access to equipment and instruments, as well as contacts in local radio stations, venues, etc. Besides the musical benefit, there is also the advantage of contributing to better assimilation of new arrivals.

New anti-piracy research

A research initiative looking into the return on investment of money spent on countering digital piracy. With countless anti-piracy companies popping up, it should help indie artists and labels determine whether their money’s best spent growing their fanbase and making more music. It’s important to know what anti-piracy methods pay off, and what’s just a way to use the threat of piracy to get musicians to pay up.

Foster my ideas

Since I’m not a member of AIM, I cannot officially submit these ideas. If you’re an AIM member and interested in fostering the streaming exclusives, dance music, or refugees idea, get in touch: bas@musicxtechxfuture.com

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

Posted on August 22, 2016 | 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.

—

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.

—

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

—

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!

—

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 £5k) 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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