CASE STUDY

Funding Platform To Help Budding Musicians

Industry

Financial Services, Media

Work Done

MVP Development, Web Application Development,

Challenge

The founders came up with a unique idea of creating a funding platform to help budding musicians with no strings attached.

We held a product discovery session with them. And we agreed on creating a system which sorts artists eligible for financial push and offer a customized contract to them without any human interference.

Now that is easier said than done. There were many questions that needed to be addressed. How we’d decide who will get what? Or who is eligible or not? What will be the criteria?

So, we decided to take help from existing music platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon, QQ. And then pin on Spotify, as it’d be easy to integrate the data and they have a huge inventory of budding artists as well.

Our developers quickly started charting out the user flow. First, the budding artists will create an account by using their Spotify ID or name. Then the system will fetch data for the artists to find out if he/she is eligible to get assistance. And then they’re presented with a digital contract offering the amount of assistance with no strings attached.

Now, we needed to make a workable system to achieve this. And our goal was to find out artists who genuinely need a push in their career and offer them customized contracts.

The solution

Creating a system to sort-out eligible artists

There are thousands of artists who needs a financial push to forward their career. And there are millions seeking it. So, to sort out those who’d make the most of it, we identified Spotify as a catalyst. We fetch artist details from the platform and also their social data to calculate their influence.

So, what’s the criteria? Typically, those who have as little as 10,000 and as many as 10,000,000 monthly listeners are most likely to qualify for funding. Usually, this process takes a just few minutes and we have customized contract ready for the said artist.

The algorithm takes literally billions of data points on hundreds of thousands of artists and millions of songs to predict an artist’s future earnings, and hence to offer befitting assistance.

Offering the best assistance through funding platform

To calculate the amount of assistance one would need, we pin on the annual income they get from their existing work on the streaming platform. So, the funding arranged would be 8x the annual streaming income of the artist while keeping 100% ownership of the masters, publishing, touring, merch and synch.

The product also offered advances on new releases and on catalog. While giving complete flexibly to the artists over marketing and distribution. All these are explained in the digital contract offered to the artist, which is generated through the system.

A solution for no-so-tech-savvy artist

Many artists avail the services of a manager, and there are many who manages more than one artist. So, we created an option to sign in as Artist Manager (not managing more than 2 at a time) and then create eContracts by using artist information from the current distributors (Spotify). It is like having a representative dealing with the client on your behalf. The terms and conditions will be the same for all, and our system will issue eContracts in the name of artists, and not the manager.

Renegotiating a contract. And is there any cap on where to spend?

As we offer automated eContracts based on distribution data of current work, we understand that some artists would have a few concerns. That’s why our developers introduced a customization option for artists to amend the contract term length, content, and monthly income levels according to their wishes. Artists can also re-negotiate the final offer, but that happens offline with the management of the company.

And as far as spending is concerned, they don’t care what you spend it on and the client don’t want to have a say or control in your career. They give you the freedom to do what you want. And that’s why we decided to be their partner in getting this product online.

Technologies used

Results

GrowExx demonstrated an approach that aimed to make the agile process even ‘leaner’ for the application development life cycle. Our approach made it possible to launch the funding platform for budding musicians well before the perceived time. And negligible number of user complaints were received after the launch.

Hence, our efforts reflected in the achieving the below numbers: