Built In Denver would like to congratulate August’s Startup of the Month: MusikFly!
For independent musicians, staying creative is only just one of many daily challenges. Another is connecting with the right people to tap into bigger and better fanbases. This bootstrapped company takes care of that second challenge by putting musicians in touch with bloggers, writers and critics. By introducing artists to tastemakers, MusikFly makes it easier for the latter to discover the former’s new work.
“Instead of relying on email for music submissions, MusikFly reduces the spam that bloggers receive to increase the chances of the artist getting heard and covered by press,” says Jeff Kendall, MusikFly’s co-founder and Head of Business Development.
We chatted with Kendall about MusikFly, the music industry and the company’s Colorado connections. Read our interview below.
How did the idea for MusikFly come about?
The idea came about six-to-eight months ago during a co-working session at CU Boulder. We all have a lot of friends trying to become musicians, and they told us that in order to promote themselves, they sent out hundreds of emails to bloggers, and never heard back from any of them. After talking with the blogs, we realized that they were being spammed by hundreds of artists every day. There was no chance for most of the music to get listened to. We decided that we should build a better platform for both sides to use.
What makes you different from other music discovery services?
We are not a music discovery service in the sense that the term is usually used in. Typically, the influencer will browse through artists, and build a listing of artists that he or she cares about. Then the system recommends new artists to them. MusikFly allows the artists to submit directly to influential people so time is more efficiently spent by both parties. It allows artists to be more effective and proactive in their quest for a fanbase and influencers to be more efficient in sorting through music.
Why are you tackling independent music?
We feel that the days of the old mega-studios are over; independent musicians, like Macklemore, and small record labels are beginning to take over the music industry. We are currently focused on blogs, and would like to solidify MusikFly as a necessity to running a well-managed music blog, but as we grow we are going to be building an ecosystem for strategic music promotion. We would later like to expand to host the entire music promotion industry.
What are some of your day-to-day challenges?
Getting more influencers signed up, fixing bugs, and deciding what new feature we are going to build next. We all have full-time jobs, so it is tough at times when we work 8+ hours at our day jobs, and then work on MusikFly until we pass out.
When do you plan to launch from beta? How many users do you currently have?
We plan to launch from beta once we have solidified our revenue model and we feel comfortable with the quality of the product. We have around 500 users right now, about 50 of those users are bloggers or influencers.
How are you uniquely using technology to solve the problems surrounding promoting independent music?
Right now, the primary way that music is spread from person to person is by email, or word of mouth. People use social media to tell people about the songs that they should be listening to, but not to discover entirely new music. We are flipping the music discovery process on its head and giving it a smart process. Instead of just blasting out to anyone and everyone, artists that use our technology are able to specifically target influential music critics who can amplify the artist’s audience. We also provide bloggers with a submission widget [like this one] that enables artists to submit to them through MusikFly without leaving the blog.
What are some of your greatest successes to date?
We recently hit over 1,000 song submissions and have had a number of our artists blogged about. We have had a taste of what it is like to help a musician and it keeps us working harder and harder every day. We’ve also been featured in the Denver Post, and on several music tech blogs including Hypebot and SoundCtrl. Also, we were named startup of the month by Built in Denver :)
What are your goals for the rest of 2013?
Continue to polish and add features to our product and help our musicians grow their fan base. If we can help one artist (or ideally many) go from a few fans to a few thousand in the next couple months, we would feel successful. Some specific features we have in progress include giving PR firms the ability to manage multiple artists, giving blogs the ability to have many different writers on one feed, and developing a system to match artists based on the type of music that the blog is most likely to post.
Why are you based in Colorado?
We are all students or graduates from CU-Boulder. Colorado is also full of great music and great musicians. The electronic music scene is great in Boulder, and we have found that electronic music is one genre that is tightly coupled with blogging.
