What We are Going to Do Next For the Industry that We Love
Hi,
Over the last 5 weeks, we’ve been touring Asia — Seoul, Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong (again) and Manila. What a trip!
It was an eye-opener and it made us realize how much farther we can go as a community. For a company that wants to bring the best of what blockchain technology can offer to the music industry, this tour made us realize where our focus needs to be in the coming months.
We’ve never been this excited. Let me tell you why.
What Asia Taught Us
Vivienne and I have been riding planes and living in hotel rooms while meeting with potential partners and discovering how we can grow as a community.
This trip proved to be one (if not the most) inspiring and sobering experience that I’ve had since I decided to create a blockchain-based music project. Before we boarded the plane leaving for South Korea, we already knew our team was onto something special. After meeting with giants in both the blockchain and music industries, we realized that there is a room for improvement in the way we could position ourselves.
What’s the challenge that everyone is facing when it comes to adopting blockchain? The answer is this: everyone is yet to see a real, sensible, and accessible use case for this innovation.
Blockchain has a lot of promise, but right now there is a level of uncertainty in relation to mass adoption and we are all working out what needs to happen in these early stages of this tech disruption. Inmusik is poised to attract a large number of users and what we saw is it will take a number of related companies to pool together to make a massive impact. And so, instead of focusing on how changemakers are different, we can focus on what makes them leaders in their space and integrate with our idea of Shared Success. This allows us to tap communities that are yet to learn about what we want to do for the industry and allow other initiatives to scale with us.
At this point, we are now an alliance of changemakers. Moreover, we now have strategic partnerships in place that will allow us all to experience faster growth.
The Invisible Crypto
We talked to CEOs, blockchain practitioners, big labels, amazing collectives of independent artists, and creatives that are tapping different business models to support artists. Whenever we shared the vision of Inmusik, we witnessed faces lighting up. Bear in mind that we had back to back meetings every day, many late nights getting to know people better and, on occasion, a few too many drinks. It was the consistently positive responses that kept us energized and eager to get to the next meet.
Part of the magic was invisible crypto. Paramount to making every revolutionary model mainstream-friendly is simplicity in the user experience. Look at Google! For Inmusik, the idea of investing in music is already new thinking, adding crypto to the mix… It will alienate a lot of mainstream users.
To keep it simple, we made the decision to make the cryptocurrency component invisible at launch. On the surface, users will be using fiat currencies to make purchases and to invest, but underneath, tokens will be used. Users will experience how digital tokens work but won’t have the headache of wallets, private keys, secondary markets or ‘cryptocurrency’. Piece by piece we will introduce these elements and roll out new features until the complete vision is realized.
Talking about Inmusik in this manner has brought a ton of benefits in building relationships. Here’s the best one: it allowed us to discover and tap more revenue streams. This is a massive development, as it will allow us to bring returns back to investors at a much faster rate and encourage more users to invest in content.
In effect, we are going to grow our community much faster.
The Next Big Step
By the time you read this, we’d be back to the sunny state of California. The rest of the team would be working hard on developing our MVP as we solidify partnerships and relationships we have built during the five weeks that we were on the road.
At the very heart of this step is the desire to make Inmusik as inclusive as possible, putting the concepts together in a neat package that can be easily understood and adopted by everyone who has used a streaming service. We want it straightforward, fun, and shareable, just like how we all want to enjoy music.
We have some big changes in the way we talk about Inmusik as a company but are more confident than ever in our vision. We are charged, we are prepared and we are focused!
Good times are here!
