“SWITCH” BRINGS REVOLUTION AT THE MUSIC INDUSTRY
This semester our team had a great opportunity to attend some enlightening
presentations about the gap in the music industry. We were asked to “fill” this gap by creating an innovative start-up. By researching the music industry in several countries as well as the global music trends, we reached the conclusion that “SWITCH” is the solution.
At the beginning of our research we detected certain pains in the music industry. Initially, there are difficulties on finding new music and artists in the Greek market as well as internationally, because mainstream music is mostly promoted. Another obstacle we want to overcome is that artists cannot easily gain recognition in the big music apps (Spotify, Youtube) due to the hard competition coming from the accumulation of many famous artists. After we created our value proposition canvas and we ended up with certain solutions to overcome those problems.
Before creating our app, we took into consideration some remarkable global trends about the music industry. One of them is that people demand immediacy as the attention span has been restricted at 8 sec. Moreover, the researches prove that generation Z loves diverse music, more specifically listen at least five musical genres on regular basis.
Taking into account the above mentioned, we decided to create an app which
contains the following characteristics:
-always exposes people to new music/artists.
-new artists can avoid the competition with the established ones.
-new artists can be heard by a community that is interested in alternative musical option.
But how did we manage to validate our target market? It is already known that even more new musicians take part in music reality TV shows such as “The Voice of Greece”, “X Factor”, “Greece’s Got Talent”, “Rising star” etc. and a new music TV show “The Four” will be presented in 2019–2020. Furthermore despite the fact that many new artists promote their songs via Youtube, they still remain unknown to the public. Following, in order to
confirm the data we collected from secondary researches, we made some interviews on potential users as well as some artists. The insights we were given, ensured us that “SWITCH” is the solution to their problems.
So, according to our findings we decided that our target market separates into two basic categories. The first group consists of our users, which are mostly millennials and generation Z, because we believe that the solutions we offer are closer to their needs. On the other hand there are our customers, new independent artists living in Greece that want to promote their work easily and with a low cost.
Another important factor that we took into consideration as we were testing ourapp, is the competition. We did that to ensure that is unique and innovative. After a longterm research we ended up with the conclusion that there is nothing similar with “SWITCH” in the Greek market and that the “strong” competitors such as YouTube and Spotify do not compose a threat because they offer different kind of solutions to the public.
Our app gives the user the opportunity to discover new music based on his favorite genres and moods by listening to various songs for ten seconds each. After that he can either save the song and see more information about the artist or switch to the next song. The artists also have access to the analytics of their songs and profiles, where they can also add information about their live performances. We have also created a prototype of our app
in order to test its effectiveness as it depicts in the Image 2.
According to the cost, the revenue streams will be derived from the artist/
subscribers who will pay 7 Euros/ month in order for them to upload their songs, promote them and have access in their analytics. As far as the users are concerned, they could join our community for free. By taking into consideration that the key of success is the correct partnerships except from just the idea, our aim is to be accepted in an incubator within 3 months.
Finally for the marketing adoption to be successful we are promoting “SWITCH” via social media ( Instagram and Facebook) and we are planning to participate in events such as Schoolwave, Chania Rock Festival Band Contest and Athens Music Week because we consider that they are closer to our target group and they have great recognition.
Tonia Molvali, Athena Styllou, Olympia Georgakopoulou, Anastasia Koutsothodorou
