Soundtrack Your Brand — Being at the right place and with the right team

At last week’s superb SLUSH 14, Andreas Liffgarden, of Wellington’s portfolio company, Soundtrack Your Brand (the business-to-business spinout from Spotify), gave an insight into how the company started up, the beauty of timing and a good old gap in the market. In case you weren’t one of the 13,000 people at the event, here are my key takeaways…

Make sure you have relevant experience within the team

“Connecting brands and fans through music is the next wave of innovation and growth in the music industry.” — Andreas Liffgarden

Even if the idea itself is brilliant, it doesn’t mean automatic success — the formula has to include insight into the industry, and a real understanding, based on experience, of where it’s headed.

Being ex-Spotify, Andreas knows everything there is to know about the future of his industry, and with a co-founder, Ola Sars from Beats by Dre, the company lives and breathes music business. These guys are in the big leagues when it comes to experience (and who better for future startups to learn from?), so it’s no wonder that they were invited to take a stage at one of the startup world’s biggest events.

Soundtrack Your Brand is a great example of a startup that saw a golden opportunity, seized it and grew from it. What’s better than filling a gap in the market? Following it up with hard work and execution. Best of all, what they do is beneficial to every party involved as it manages to help both retail businesses and music.

Address a market gap

The same things we take for granted in the consumer world is only happening now in the B2B world. Over 66% of all music you hear in stores comes from CD — a format introduced in 1982 that is still very much alive and kicking in retail music. — Andreas Liffgarden

Basically, digitalisation of music may have already invaded homes, education and workplaces, but retail appears to have lulled behind. Soundtrack Your Brand noticed this gap in the market, and promptly took it upon themselves to take retail out of the 80s and into the modern age of music.

Music can reflect a retail brand and increase customer relations, and Soundtrack Your Brand does this through their two different options, ‘business’ and ‘enterprise’. The first is a smaller scale option, and the latter allows users to have easy access to unlimited music in multiple locations. Alongside this, brands gain a follow function for their site, to directly connect people to their playlist collection. With around half of retail customers saying they may leave or remain in a store depending on the music, it’s a move that’s obviously great for retailers and has so far attracted a number of big names, including McDonald’s, Sweden.

But more than that, it’s also great for music as it fills a huge gap for new artists trying to make it big by putting them in front of their target audience. As Andreas says, “In the new digital world, MTV and radio are no longer the way to market music,” so finding new distribution channels where they are able to reach a new audiences are crucial to artists.

Timing is everything

“Things are changing fast. Obviously, physical retailers will adopt digital technology to make their business more efficient.” — Andreas Liffgarden

The second point to learn from Soundtrack Your Brand is that timing is crucial. A great idea without great timing is probably not going to succeed.

Soundtrack Your Brand has struck at the right point — they quite simply wouldn’t have been around 2 years ago. Spotify had to come first — to pave the way from a music rights point of view and present the issue that permissions on personal spotify accounts don’t cover playing music in stores. Additionally, the absence of high speed internet in stores contributed to why retail and music was stuck in the 80s. But with internet speeds up and costs down, this element of digitalisation has started to become commonplace in retail.

So what can startups learn from Soundtrack Your Brand? It’s all about the right time and the right place. Add the right team with the competitive advantage into that simple equation and your startup is in prime position.

What gap in the market may be filled by the time we visit SLUSH 15? We’re definitely on the look out for opportunities that tick all the right boxes.

Visit Soundtrack Your Brand for more information https://www.soundtrackyourbrand.com/