Releasing classical music
I was chatting with my friend Dan Nelson today after bumping into him at the Cornell Music Department library. He’s currently a Ph.D student at UPenn studying musical composition. He threw an idea at me and, after some collaboration, we came up with something akin to a Flickr for composed music.
It would work like this:
Everyone who registers gets a tumblog. (Side note: I love Tumblr. I thought about apologizing to everyone who keeps hearing me implement ideas with Tumblr, but I’m not going to. They deserve it for a job well done.)
Composers will use their tumblogs to publish 2 things. One, an mp3 of their composition. Two, a PDF of the score. Composers are encouraged to tag their content for improved discovery.
Everyone can use their tumblr dashboard to follow composers they like and heart music they like. Everyone can also use their tumblogs to re-blog music they particularly like and post about their experience with the music they’ve discovered.
Like Flickr, people can search for music or composers. Like Flickr, you can explore the most interesting compositions. And most importantly, like Flickr, you can pay to have a hard copy printed, bound, and mailed directly to you.
Your market is anyone who buys sheet music – basically every school and private music teacher in the country (and internationally). Sure, some people would just print out the PDFs for free, but I bet enough schools and teachers would pay for the nicely published and bound parts and score to make a profit. Like Chris Anderson has been saying since he wrote the Long Tail, you can be successful even if only a minority of your users pay.
If successful, what we will have done is broken the pre-Internet strangehold of the major publishing houses and academic elitism on composed music, similar to what Vimeo is doing for video and Etsy is doing for handmade goods. Something I thought about when I was at Etsy that applies here is, “An audience for every artist.” We can create a forum for quality composed music with a long tail. We can use social aggregation instead of editorial fiat to discovery great music. We can empower people to try their hand at composition even if they are a one-hit-wonder.
If anyone is interested in helping Dan build this company, please contact me – david.lifson at gmail – and I’ll pass your name along. It’s super simple, engineering-wise; Tumblr’s API is free and easy to use, storing the data and metadata is easy, slap a search index on the data, and you’re done. All that would be left is to set up a business partnership with a printing company like Subito Music, and the task of getting the word out and building up a community. And really, how many startups these days come with a business model, not to mention a highly targeted audience and a trove of user preference data.