The Music Industry is Finally Making Money Again and PACEMAKER is Here to Give DJs Their Share
After almost two decades, the Music industry is finally back at being an actual profitable business. And if things go accordingly, this should last for the coming few years thanks to the growth of paid music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. Even if it’s still in a fragile state, these tech-savvy companies have breathed new life for the industry that hasn’t been in this position since the end of the ’90s, with its CDs revolution. Speaking of a revolution, the next major movement in music is unquestionably being lead by innovation. This is what Techstars Music, an accelerator program based in Los Angeles, believes. Startups from all over the world are now trying to push the boundaries in the way we create and consume music, and Pacemaker is one of the 11 companies that’s been tapped by the program. Coming all the way from Sweden, the team entered the accelerator program fine tune their app that gives every user the ability to create their own producer-level mixes, and the opportunity to DJ like a professional; everyone and anyone finally has a chance to to make a living with their own self-produced music. A few days before their big presentation, Jonas Norberg, CEO and co-founder at Pacemaker, opened up the doors to the Techstars building for us to share the vision behind his company and his plans to democratize Pacemaker’s music mixing capabilities as–and here’s the kicker–not downloadable files, but online steaming.
Every startup story starts with an idea. What was the original vision for the Pacemaker app and its position within the music industry?
That’s a good question. Pacemaker has always been about making it possible for anyone to engage with the music they love. Because that’s what Pacemaker basically does, it lets you create a seamless mix that essentially is a very personal playlist anyone can delve into. That’s the ambition, making it possible for everyone to engage with the music they love.
We’ve been on this mission since the Pacemaker device, following that up with Pacemaker for iPad. We launched the iPad app with a Spotify integration in 2014, and since then we’ve been working on making mix creation more and more easy. We realized that to take it to the ease of use we wanted to, we had to ship a DJ with every app, and this is where artificial intelligence came into the picture. With artificial intelligence we have finally been able to bring mix creation to another level.
In 2007 you launched the Pacemaker device, then 7 years later the Pacemaker app for iPad. What did you do during this period of time and why did you decide to drop the device to focus on the software?
The old Pacemaker device was launched in the world of iPod and when the iPod moved over to video, that’s when it became more of a multimedia thing and we realized there may be an opportunity to dig deeper into music. We launched the Pacemaker device in the beginning of 2008, and we were featured in the New York Times, Wired and more. Around the same time, Apple opened up the API for third-party developers, which was the beginning of the end of the iPod era. It just didn’t make any sense to do your own hardware anymore. So I believe we had a great thing, but the timing was terrible. The world had already changed to go with the iPhone.
So you spent seven years working on the software to then launch on the iPad and iPhone?
Well, the old Pacemaker started in January 2005 and I was the CEO of the company until June 2008. I left because a lot of things happened in a very short period of time. We basically created an iPod, an iTunes, and a Myspace in one year and we grew from 1 employee to 30 within that same year. That was too ambitious and it was clear that I at the time was over my head in managing the kind of company Pacemaker had become.
I handed the company over to a new CEO to manage operations, and from my position on the board I tried to change the company’s strategy from hardware to apps but I couldn’t convince everyone else, so I decided to leave. And the company kept on focusing on the hardware and inevitably the company went down.
Following the bankruptcy of the old Pacemaker project In 2011, we felt that we had an opportunity to relaunch Pacemaker as an app, and possibly also leverage the transition to music streaming. So Daniel Wallner, my co-founder from old Pacemaker, and Olof Berglöf decided to reacquire the IP rights of the old project. This was the birth of the new Pacemaker.
That’s the ambition, making it possible for everyone to engage with the music they love.
Take us back to the early days of Pacemaker. How did you meet your two co-founders, Daniel and Olof?
Daniel and I met in 1999 when I was doing my Master’s thesis at the Swedish Space Corporation. Daniel was a consultant and we worked on the same satellite, that used an all-electric propulsion to go from an earth orbit to a moon orbit, and then purposely crash against the surface of the Moon in a hard stop ending of the mission.
Later on, I was lecturing in a school for advertising and communication, and there was this one student that was way ahead of everyone else, and that was Olof. We stayed in touch afterwards and after the old Pacemaker project went down, we were like “Hey! Let’s do this!” And we did.
How is the tech industry in Sweden?
It’s great! In Stockholm especially, we like to think of ourselves as the number one startup hub in Europe, and there’s a lot of successful companies to prove it. We have Skype, King (the Candy Crush company), Mojang (Minecraft), Klarna (payments), iZettle (payments) and of course Spotify. And it’s kind of interesting because Stockholm is so isolated. I tend to compare it to Game of Thrones. You know there’s a wall and Stockholm is on the other side of the wall (laugh), because it is so isolated way up North! But it is sort of a great tech city inside of its isolation.
The music market is definitely not an easy one. What are your thoughts on working within the industry? How do you see it evolving in the future?
Yeah, a lot of people say that. Maybe we’re a little blessed because we do not work directly with the music business. We operate with Spotify and they clear the licenses for us. But the industry is back in growth and it’s much easier to invest and adopt innovation when things are going well, so I think we’re heading towards a very exciting future.
Landing a partnership with Spotify is very impressive! How did this happen? Did you reach out to them or did they approach you? And how did that conversation go?
After the old Pacemaker went down, Blackberry called out of the blue. So we actually did the Blackberry app first, and that’s how we launched. It was a great playground for us. It gave us market experience and the Blackberry audience was really friendly. When we launched, a typical rating was something like “Crashes all the time, but I love it! 5 stars”. There wasn’t much else out there in the marketplace, it was a really friendly place to be.
Already from the beginning of new Pacemaker, we started to nag Spotify because we wanted to democratize music creation and we knew that having access to millions of tracks would make a big difference. People don’t but we almost launched back in the Spring of 2013, and the launch was supposed to have been at SXSW. We had the tickets, the hotel booked and everything… and we were on a shoestring budget, so nothing was refundable.
The software quality wasn’t there so we couldn’t launch, but we decided to go Austin and SXSW anyways. And we had built this giant, blue wireless speaker which we dragged around, placing in street corners and djing on the beta version of Pacemaker for iPad. Stopped by the police etc etc… Then on our way home to Stockholm, we bumped into Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify. Olof was like “isn’t that Daniel?” I took the iPad, I approached him and said, “hey Daniel have you seen Pacemaker for iPad?” I showed him and he said “can I have this?” Back in Stockholm Spotify got in touch with us and said that they wanted us to be the first djing app with Spotify, then we launched in February of 2014. It obviously helped that both Spotify and Pacemaker originates from Stockholm.
Why did you choose to move to Los Angeles instead of San Francisco?
We’ve been thinking about SF or LA, even New York for some time, and our conclusion is that Los Angeles is the best spot for us because this is the entertainment capital of the world. Now that we’ve been here for a couple of months, it’s worked out great. And San Francisco is just an hour away, so it is a very good spot to be in.
If you can get successful entrepreneurs or investors to advise your small company to understand what to focus on, it is very, very valuable.
You just joined the Techstars Music program. For our readers that are not familiar with the startup world, can you explain what an accelerator is and why you decided to join the Techstars’ program?
Accelerators are there to literally accelerate your business. Each and every accelerator have their own sort of ‘secret sauce’ to it, but Techstars is more like a “tech mafia.” It’s very much about the network, you’re supposed to help each other. It’s this ‘give first’ thing. They invest a little bit of money but it’s really more about this network building process and they put a lot of emphasis on that. That really helps because if you can get successful entrepreneurs or investors to advise your small company to understand what to focus on, it is very, very valuable.
In the beginning of the program we got to meet five Techstars alumnis that have all gone through this, and they were basically one after the other explaining how they pivoted and changed their company’s direction in a dramatic way during the course of the program. And I think it’s much because they have this “mentor madness” part. So during the first one and a half months, we had between 5 and 10 mentor meetings per day! Super knowledgable people, decision makers, came to see us, and then we had them in a room for 20 minutes. We explained what we do, got their feedback and then that the same procedure is repeated over and over and over again. It’s like an immense pressure and in that pressure of what we’re supposed to crystallized. And for us, it has been very helpful to understand the perspective of both rights owners and talent — we really see where we can be helpful.
If you look behind every successful company, you always find great mentors. You need someone to challenge you because otherwise you will just be wandering around. I think for startups, the biggest fail is trying to do too much. So to make sure you focus and focus on the right thing — that’s key.
When people can make a living out of creating mixes in Pacemaker, then we are successful!
What does a typical day look like during the three months of developing the program?
Now that we’re out of that “mentor madness” period, we’re sort of in the situation where we are supposed to be leveraging all of what we’ve learned from these mentor meetings. Explore all the new ideas and the focus that came out of that. And then we have Demo Day. So right now it’s focusing, and then demo day, then “POW!”
Demo Day is happening on May 18. How do you feel being only a few weeks away from the big presentation? Any early announcements you can share with us?
What has come out of these mentoring sessions is that the business needs a way to bring DJ-mixes and re-mixes into the world of streaming. Right now they are a really popular form of content, but it’s only available on low-paying platforms like YouTube, Soundcloud and Mixcloud.
We have a very good solution for bringing that type of content to streaming services and we call it the Metamix. DJs aren’t really acknowledged today and what is interesting with the Metamix is that it actually captures the value of what the DJs adds to a number of tracks. When people can make a living out of creating mixes in Pacemaker, then we are successful!
Don’t you think that making DJing so easy and accessible to everyone may lead to undervaluing real DJs?
That’s an interesting question. I get this a lot because our AI is better than most DJs out there. People ask me, “will you replace DJs?” And I know we are on our way to replacing DJs in bars and hotels, where it’s more background music. But then there’s the live performance aspect. It’s actually an interesting philosophical question, whether an AI can actually replace a human performing live. I don’t think so because humans tend to like other humans — it’s a social need. So even though I believe that machines will be able to outperform humans from a sort of technical perspective, I’m not sure they will be able to replace the human-to-human connection.
Our goal is for people to make a living curating music for other people.
That’s true! We’re social animals and we need interactions. I think that all these new technologies will give humans the opportunity to create better music and experience.
Exactly! That’s how we see it. Our artificial intelligence is about empowering people, and now with the new Pacemaker+ experience, you can really engage with the music. DJ mixing is really, really difficult… Incredibly difficult. And it’s limited to just a few that do it well. But with artificial intelligence, we can help people create stuff that they haven’t been able to do before. I think that’s also the first step because when humans engage with music on Pacemaker, they are creating a data set for us that we can use to improve the system. And that’s happening all over.
How do you see Pacemaker five years from now? How do you see this whole project evolve?
Our goal, as I mentioned, is for people to make a living curating music for other people. We used to divide the world in two parts: the “Tastemakers”, the people who move culture forward, finding ways to engage themselves with the need to create. But they also want an audience for their creations. So we have “Tastemakers” and then we have “Tastetakers.” So the long-term goal of Pacemaker is that all these “Tastetakers”– the consumers — should be able to find their own “Tastemakers.”
It’s really about human curation at scale. I believe no one has done that before. It’s been tried with playlists but they aren’t very interesting. There’s no room for personalization, and to be honest, they’re mostly just a bucket–like a container of content. You have your hip-hop playlist, your party playlist, your running playlist, and then you do “shuffle” or “play all.” You have no real reason to engage yourself in a playlist. But with a mix that’s totally different.
To get involved in the music industry and make a DJ name for yourself, download the PACEMAKER app from the Apple Store here.
Originally published at unrtd.co on May 25, 2017.
