Katching up the events of music!
Catching up with the events of music and knowing every new application that comes out to the market about music industry is not an easy task. And that’s true both for the artists and the audience. The new digital era changed the process of music production and consumption dramatically and sometimes it seems difficult for a person involved in this industry to follow this fast “rhythm” of development. But in this digital ‘Babylonia’ there are some hidden ‘gems’ that can reform this process in the most spectacular way. “Katch” and “Warm” are two music technology start ups that can make a great impact to music industry.
Katch: a music scouter!
To begin with Katch if we had two words to describe it as an application would be “musicians scouter”. And that’s because it’s a platform designed in France that helps talented unknown artists to promote their work to the audience through an unorthodox but very smart way. It provides previews with no title or name of the artist for 15 seconds to the listener and if the user is interested to the music he will get the artist’s information, such as his name, his cover photo and everything he must know about the artist in order to deepen his knowledge of the musician he listened to.
It may seem a bit crazy for someone to listen a song that he does not know its name, or the name of the artist who created it. But it is a very fair way for artists to be treated as equals. Especially, when it comes to musicians with low budget for advertising or artists who are not promoted by a music company, Katch gives them the opportunity to be treated equally with the “big” names of the industry. In addition, this platform offers to the artists that collaborates with, the opportunity to discover their audience. It provides them with information about the popularity of their songs, the number of listeners, the distribution of listeners in all the countries, the cities and other statistics vital to their success. So, it is obvious that a musician, without a music company that would provide him a marketing team that would collect and analyze all those metrics, would never have the opportunity to organize targeted tours and he could not be more efficient with his advertising.
Opportunities for the many not the few.
We could say that Katch tries to “democratize” music, by giving “voice” to every artist. This new era of democracy in music industry, that this start up company is trying to bring, provides to the audience a whole new experience. The big difference with mainstream music streaming applications like spotify, is that the user will develop his critical thinking and will listen to songs with his mind open to explore and discover the fascinating world of music without being “directed” and sometimes without being unilaterally informed by companies who promote the same old artists over and over again. This is the main goal of this platform according to Katch’s cofounder, Raphael Bourguet who stated at an interview he gave at bfmbusiness.bfmtv.com that the founders’ ambition was to give the opportunity to unknown artists to gain reputation, fame and expand their audience.
The platform’s success can be seen by the number of users, that are more than 20,000 people. Moreover Katch has been the Top # 1 Trend in Music & Audio within Play Store in 2019 and features over 250,000 titles of independent artists for those open to new musical experiences.
An artist won’t feel the ‘cold’ loneliness with “Warm”.
On the other hand, another great application that can offer very important information to the artists, like Katch did, is Warm. This platform was founded in Copenhagen by Jesper Skibsby in 2016 and in its case, the artist can have access to much more specialized and hard-to-find information. It actually helps independent musicians, songwriters and producers to monitor more than 25.000 radio stations in more than 130 countries in order to know in real time if their song is played by a radio producer. With a recognition rate of 99,99% Warm is the most well designed platform, that provides access to music data. So, it is rather obvious why this platform was the 2017 Winner of SLUSH MUSIC20 Startup competition.
Before a few years all this information was a privilege of the big companies who had commercial deals with the radio stations. But now every artist with a cost from 3 to 6 euros per month can have access to data, that will help him plan his tours and e-campaigns on his own and thus increase his revenue. Because if an artist knows which country’s radio stations his songs are played the most he will have the possibility to plan much more geographically specified tours and concerts. Also, via this platform it is easier for the artists to collect money from the copyrights of their songs. And that was the main concept behind Skibsby’s start up. He was a label’s manager and the band he was managing was ignoring for a long time that their songs were main “hits” in Poland and as a result, until he noticed that, they weren’t receiving any payments for their copyrights.
Nevertheless, because it doesn’t matter how many articles are written about Skibsby’s innovative idea by external observers, no one can describe better the story, the conception and Warm’s functions by Skibsby himself. So the interview he gave during the Canadian Music Week can be very enlightening:
To conclude, both Katch and Warm can offer a new perspective on how music industry could work in the near future. But the most important is that this future is more open to the audience and the artists, creating a new cultural framework, in which consumers and producers will have to follow a more interactive model and re-design together the social, legal and ethical structures of music community. So, replacing a much more austere and centralized model with a decentralized accessible-to-all model for music industry, could help more people to be enrolled to the artistic process.
Team Phoenix: Ελένη Πούλιου, Sofia Pavlidou, vlahou eleni
Supervisor: Betty Tsakarestou
