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Specialized online platform for small artists looking to sell their beats/music
As a beatmaker myself, I’ve been pretty disappointed in the options for selling my beats online. I either have to go with something general like Shopify (low fees but not great for the music industry) or something like BeatStars (good for music but very high fees).
I want to create a platform that is somewhat a compromise between these two. On one hand, I want it to have all the basic features that sound designers and musicians need, like user-friendly audio sampling and instant social sharing. But I also want to be limited enough so that fees can be similar to what you see on Shopify and the like, ideally less than 5%. I know that’s ambitious, but if I keep costs down and use PayPal as the primary payment gateway, I think I could make it possible.
My main worry is that I’d have a hard time finding demand for the platform. Not only is sound design a pretty limited industry, but I’d be competing against the big companies that already have hundreds of thousands of users. If any of you know the industry, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Even if not, I’d still love more general feedback on the technical/financial potential you see in this.
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24 Replies
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I don’t think your main issue would be getting users, I think it would be keeping the fees as low as you’re proposing. If PayPal takes ~2.5% off the top of transactions, that means you have to sustain your entire website on the remaining 2.5% of the purchase before you hit the fee cap that you proposed. The big players can do this because they have massive numbers of users and plenty of other revenue streams, but I don’t know if it would be sustainable for a small startup like yours. If you do the math and it checks out though, I think there is plenty of demand and potential for an idea like this.
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Thanks for the feedback. To remedy what you’re saying, I think I’d have to make the fees a little bit higher in the beginning and find other incentives to get new users, and then once the platform grows enough I can move to the lower fee structure.
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I like this idea.
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Appreciate it. You think it’s feasible enough to sell or just good in concept?
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I like this one too. I don’t know much about the music industry but I think it’s a niche enough group that if you market it right you won’t find the demand to be an issue. One question I would have is how would you build the site? For small stuff like this, the design quality is going to be really important.
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Agreed and I second the question. If you want to compete against these sites that spend thousands on creating the best user experience possible, you’re going to need a pretty good site yourself.
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I’m a web dev with a couple years of experience, I’ve worked on marketplace sites in the past and have experience with plenty of payment APIs (PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.NET, NMI, etc). Let me know if any of you would be interested in making this idea into reality.
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I think you could feasibly do this without needing to spend thousands of dollars. You could probably build it on a platform like WordPress and then most of your cost would just be finding a payment gateway. But for sure the user experience would be crucial for something like this, you’d want to spend a lot of time working on the site design.
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I think it’s feasible, but you wouldn’t want to start at 0 sellers and try to grow purely organically. If anything, I’d reach out to a few small/mid-sized artists and get them to commit to selling their next piece exclusively on your platform (you’d probably have to pay them a bit). That would immediately drive their fans to your site, and if the drops went well then you could consider longer-term deals with those artists and grow from there. Plenty of other ways to go about this as well, I’d just recommend trying to jumpstart with something like that if you can afford it.
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Very well said, and I totally agree. When you’re creating a social site, doing something like that to drive a quick movement of people to your platform is one of the best ways to make it eventually self-sustaining. That being said, it wouldn’t be cheap to get artists to sell exclusively on a little-known platform. You’d either have to be willing to put decent money in, to start small, or to get some really favorable deals.
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I’m liking this plan. I’d want to keep it as low budget as I can, but I think I’m willing to spend what would be needed to get some artists on the platform. I do have some artists as friends and as friends-of-friends, so I’m hoping too that people would be more friendly with deals because of that. Also, instead of just money, I could maybe also offer them free marketing on the site and its social pages. Thanks for all the ideas!
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This strategy is definitely your best bet. Get some pre-established brand credit on your side and then you can start with a solid and dedicated userbase. It might be harder than you think to onboard creators, though. Entrusting their main revenue stream to an unknown platform is a risky move for them to take and they’re going to want benefits and assurance to do so.
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Definitely agree with this as someone who’s worked with creators myself. Be ready to spend big or offer unmatched rates/benefits. I think the plan could work but it’s definitely harder in practice than abstract.
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Appreciate the feedback. I am ready to offer good benefits, but you’re right in that I should be prepared to offer even more especially to get my first few creators.
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What benefits would you realistically be able to offer though? Keep in mind you’re a cash-strapped startup and other companies have thought of these possibilities too.
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I’m very much interested on this plan
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Awesome, let’s DM and see what we could do.
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I think this is a pretty good idea. There’s a lot of inter-platform movement right now, so with the right brand deals, I think you could get off to a good start.
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Thanks. What do you mean by there’s a lot of inter-platform movement?
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Of course! I mean right now we’re living in a few years where artists and creators transitioning between platforms is commonplace. If you look at streamers or podcasters or musicians, it’s normal (maybe even expected) for them to change it up once in a while. So I think it’s feasible that you could attract some substantial talent with the right approach.
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Oh I see. Yeah, I agree, and I definitely hope I can use it to my advantage in growing the platform.
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I agree. Now is a good time to start implementing this idea.
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I left my advice on this idea before and I want to agree that I still think the market is ripe for something like it. Unless one exists that I don’t know of, I believe this is something new and something that, with the right design and positioning, could be big.
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I also still agree, but I’d reiterate that you want to make sure there is an adequate market for this. It’s a niche idea which means you’ll have customers who like it, but will there be enough of those customers to sustain your business model?
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