The Music Den: Experimenting with Entrepreneurship

It’s Friday night and the Rogers Communication Centre at Ryerson University is quiet. Most students have left campus and are starting to enjoy their weekend. But there’s one studio that’s still lit up. In it is Adulis “Chedo” Makonan, recording his weekly podcast. Chedo is the founder of The Come Up Show — a podcast, video series and e-magazine that focuses on emerging hip hop talent. The Come Up Show is incubated in Ryerson’s latest effort to support entrepreneurs in Toronto: The Music Den.

Launched in April 2016, the Music Den offers community, resources, education and mentorship to budding entrepreneurs in the music industry. Right now we’re focused on products and services, not artists, and is a unique initiative in Canada — although programs like it have been popping up around the world, such as Abbey Road Red in the UK or Project Music Program in Nashville.

The Music Den aims to take a unique holistic approach to helping its resident entrepreneurs — connecting them to mentors, educational programming, student workers and the music community.

Residents are mentored by a steering committee of music industry veterans with a variety of specializations, including Mike McCarty of SOCAN, media and entertainment lawyer Angelika Heim and Aubrey Winfield from Orange Media Labs. This is the same committee entrepreneurs must pitch to before they’re accepted into the Den, which essentially acts as a key exercise in product validation. The committee only accepts teams that excite them enough they want to commit their personal time to helping.

On the other end, the Music Den works to provide a direct link between founders and passionate student interns. Often working for school credit, these students can help with a variety of business aspects, from backend development to marketing and communications.

Working with Ryerson’s Zone Network, the Music Den also offers educational programming on everything entrepreneurs need to know, from market testing to patent and trademark processes and pitching for funding.

The final part of our programming is connecting these startups to the music community in Toronto. While our program is solely focused on startup companies for now, it’s essential these entrepreneurs are embedded with the artists and audiences they want to serve, solving actual issues the industry faces. As Cherie Hu notes, entrepreneurs in programs like Project Music learn that creating experiential content that satisfies edge or niche cases in music is a more viable approach. We’re proactively searching for these niche communities and trying to integrate our residents into them. Our goal isn’t to only grow music companies, but make sure they fill needs of artists and audiences in the city and beyond.

This goal is ambitious, and as a young incubator, right now our system is far from perfect. We’re trying to simultaneously build an internal culture and an external brand. Our administrative team is small, and we sometimes struggle to balance our community involvement with focusing on our entrepreneur’s teams.

We work to tailor programming and mentorship towards each company’s specific needs, but we can’t solve their problems by snapping our fingers, it will take months to help them build sustainable companies. Each day we’re faced with the question — how do we prioritize telling people how great we are and refining our internal processes and culture to actually be a great incubator?

So we’re experimenting. Sometimes our efforts work out extremely well for our teams, sometimes they see less value in them than we thought they would, sometimes we get lost in the bureaucracy that is a university. Just like our startups, we’re constantly making mistakes. But thinking about what role we could play in making Toronto a true “music city” keeps us excited and moving forward.

You can find out more about the Music Den and apply here.