Keeping a close eye on the music space, I encounter a lot of startups and fledgling products. Unfortunately, a lot of them are misguided, for a variety of reasons, most of which can be prevented. Often, these early mistakes result in painful pivots or founding teams giving up, which is a real shame, as we need more applied innovation in the music business.
Here are the questions I wish music startup founders would ask themselves early on.
Does this work as a mainstream behaviour?
The biggest mistake music startup founders make is they assume that everyone loves music the way they do. Most people simply don’t care that much about music. They like it, they love it, but in a very different way from whoever’s likely to read this — let alone found a music startup.
You need to be very critical of your idea. It’s ok if it doesn’t work for mainstream consumers, but then adjust expectations and target your product accordingly.
Does this work as a mainstream price point?
So let’s say you figure out you have the perfect lean-back experience for music listeners. You’re creating something that’s not demanding of its users and doesn’t require big changes in existing behaviours. In other words: you’re ready to cater to a mainstream audience.
What about the price point? Price points are difficult to determine and people are notoriously bad at predicting what price they’re willing to pay for something. If you’re going for a mainstream audience, your safest bet is pricing for impulse purchase decisions.
How does this work rights-wise in the long term?
You can’t live on the APIs of YouTube, Soundcloud or Spotify forever. At some point, you need to build your own business. Do you understand the costs involved of licensing? Will content disappear from the service?
Launching light weight is fine — if you’re looking to test an idea, using an API can be a great choice, but you need to understand your long term strategy, too, and plan for the next steps.
What are the ways in which people already solve this problem?
Changing an existing behaviour is hard work and takes commitment. It’s risky to assume people will immediately fall in love with your product, drop everything, and never look back. Problems I see entrepreneurs frequently try to tackle are: staying up to date with your favourite artists, better ways to find new music, or giving people all their music in one place.
Are these problems consumers are already aware of? We all have our workarounds, so it may not seem urgent to your target users. Understand exactly how people are currently solving the problem, so that your product fits into a certain behavior and augments it, so that it becomes better.
Radically changing a behaviour is painful for users.
Do I really need to do a consumer-facing startup?
Sometimes entrepreneurs do music startups, because they have a vision for the music business and they want to break into it. Doing consumer facing startups is often costly and makes it trickier to gauge interest and test the market. If your goal is to create a better music landscape, perhaps you could consider solving problems within the music business.
After all, many of the imperfections that consumers have to deal with have a lot to do with problems in the music business internally.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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%.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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!
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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).
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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.
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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.
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!
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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 £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.
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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?
