While the initial business model failed, it was clear that something had been created.
By the end of 2019, musicto.com was pulling in 42,000 visits a year from organic traffic alone. That number grew to 74,000 in 2020, with the site delivering over 300,000 page views. The website worked, and the playlists, even though they couldn't be monetized, defined what we were about: quirky, human, and created with love.
While we didn't have a business model, we had a brand.
For the 100+ people that joined in the first 3 years, we had over 500 curator applications. We reached out to about 150 candidates and offered them a 30 minute Zoom interview with a member of the core team to check alignment. If the fit was good, they'd create their own 10 track playlist, sign a curator agreement, and we'd give them a paid seat in the slack channel which we referred to as our "community"
We offered help with design, developed training videos and email sequences, we established best practices for social media management and how to respond to artists, we helped them build their own email lists and distributed the playlists across the major streaming platforms, as well as producing analytics and KPIs - all to empower the individual to grow their audience.
And yet within 6 months to a year, close to 90% of curators put their lists on hold and left.
In conversations, the overwhelming response was that the playlist was taking up too much of their time. What we were requiring them to do - in order to be on our platform - was just too much. With no likely monetization in sight, it made sense that people would turn their attention elsewhere.
It was clear we had two problems:
1/ Our positioning was offering people something we couldn't deliver
2/ We didn't have a community, we had a network of people who were aligned towards a common goal
Once we wrapped our head around this, we changed the language on our join page to de-feature the monetization aspect of musicto and played up the idea of community.
We also set out to build one.
Our strategy?
While most curators moved on, some didn't. Early collaborators like Chris and Jon were soon joined by curators like Matt, Maria, Jorge, and Jane - people who felt part of the project and were already volunteering their time to help out.
We offered mentoring and internships to community members - we taught digital marketing and coached them on project management and communication skills. We got approvals from NYU and Manchester University's music departments to offer internships, and worked with music business students on playlist marketing and audience development.
While the change in language on our join page significantly reduced applications (aside from the Covid spike,) we started attracting a different kind of person. The arrival of Otis, Andie, Jenna, Molly, Sky, Nuno, & Lindsay, enabled us to develop a social media team, a community nurturing team and a systems development team.
Outside of these volunteers, we still had long standing curators like The Hoof, Ben, Lyris and others who were still showing up and publishing, along with new people joining the community and contributing their love of music to the mix.
Yet even with this new approach, community remained elusive.
The core team continued to grow & strengthen but community members had little reason to connect and learn about each other. As Slack got too expensive we moved to Facebook Groups and tried to develop community there with little success.
We bit the bullet in 2021 and hired a community consultant to help us with our next move. On their advice we moved to a dedicated community app called Circle, where we still run the community today, she helped us with architecture and gave us some ideas to generate connection. But none of it really created the traction we were looking for.
And then - by complete accident - we found it.
Two community members decided to make a playlist together. In that process, they learned things about each other, recognizing they had more in common than they'd thought. While they built this great playlist, they actually built a better relationship.
When we saw that, it clicked: if community strength reflects the number and type of connections between members - this mechanic - this simple process of collaborating together to make a playlist - could create stronger connections between our people - and do so in a way that was rewarding and fun.
In 2021, we made collaboration the north star metric of the community. We redesigned the front page to feature our collaborative playlists - we changed our join page language and onboarding process so that new potential community members had to make a collaborative playlist with an existing member before they gained access to the community.
Attrition went from 90% prior to Covid to less than 50% afterwards and now with 40 active community members and a core team of 10 people working in the organization - we're in good shape for the next phase.
And then there was the money.
Running musicto isn’t free - there's software costs, design costs, development costs, migration costs, - all the costs ;-) At times we've experimented with paying people during which everything accelerates, but without a revenue stream or visible business model on the horizon, it becomes unsustainable pretty quickly.
This period saw a significant investment in infrastructure. We migrated the website to a professional WordPress environment (thank you Jon!) - we invested in systems to improve artist track submission, upgraded our community functionality, invested in design and development to improve the look of the website and upgrade the brand - as a result, traffic continued to grow and we had options.
The biggest revenue stream open to us was (and still is) to charge artists for submitting their tracks. Charging a single dollar per submission would have brought in hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a month. Nobody on the core team wanted to do it. We kept - and will always keep - track submission for artists free.
We had labels and distributors who wanted to take advantage of our traffic and visibility - they were offering to pay for write ups and reviews and playlist placement. Again - none of it felt right - if we were receiving money to place one artist over another - then we're just perpetuating the same old system of haves and have nots which was antithetical to the underlying ethic of musicto and the core team.
Not least - the minute you know a playlist or a person can be "bought," they lose their integrity - their authenticity - and pretty quickly their brand dies.
So, if we couldn't monetize our playlists, refused to take payola or charge artists, and if the world isn't yet ready for a DAO with a mature token economy, the only model left to us was non-profit.
In 2023 we successfully applied to become the musicto Foundation, a 501 (C)(3) registered public charity.
Part 3
So yeah - that was the rebuild but - what did we rebuild for? That's in Part 3.
Andrew McCluskey
