The Creation Of Dalla
Aayushi, in her own words, shares her experience at the Yopreneurs program and how her perception of education evolved.
What happens when someone gives you the freedom to think? What happens when they give you the courage to follow their own dreams?
I went to a very traditional school, one that thought “Maths Lab” was the only necessary co-curricular activity, and believed that books were more important than an open playground. Creation and rebellion were discouraged, and rote learning and teachers’ pets thrived.
All of my friends experienced the same things as me, all of us thought education was boring and that learning could never be fun. After 10th grade, the thought of college discouraged me, and the thought of having to go through the entire system for eight more years, only to be stuck in a dead end job horrified me.
When I confessed my fears to my parents, they were as confused as me. No one ever thinks beyond the scope of traditional education, no one explores possibilities, because our minds are slowly being conditioned to follow orders, and creation is heavily frowned upon.
It was during this period of confusion, my father told me about Yopreneurs. I didn’t know what to think. The program, to me, seemed revolutionary, but again, it meant studying. I had my suspicions about the whole ordeal, and called them to confirm them. Instead I was pleasantly surprised.
The person who talked to me on the phone treated me like an adult, and asked me about my hobbies and interests. I decided to take the leap of faith and registered for the program.
The seed of Dalla was first sown during the Yopreneurs Camp. All of our members liked listening to music, but we all agreed that the mainstream music we heard on the radio everyday was bland, one-dimensional and lacked depth. It sounded repetitive and generic. We all wanted new music to listen to, with music that explored a vast variety of genres, and not just typical pop love songs.
The concept of Dalla was very simple. We wanted it to stand out. We wanted it to be different from other streaming services available in the market. We wanted to give consumers and artists a premium experience for little or no cost. And this is what makes us stand out. “Dalla”, is a Korean word, which, in itself means different. We wanted the word to be simple and catchy, and most importantly, we wanted it to stand out.
We wanted our music streaming platform to be different from the rest. Our facilitator, Anshumaan helped us identify the problem we faced everyday with the most common music streaming platforms, and suggested workarounds and solutions. Most music platforms today are listener centric, and very few are artist centric. The major problem with this is that listener-centric platform treat the artists concerns as secondary, and often neglect them, while artist centered platforms have expensive subscription plans and are often unaffordable to fans who want to support their favourite musician.
We didn’t think this arrangement was fair, and it didn’t benefit anyone in the long run hence we decided to introduce a revolutionary new model of music streaming that provided listeners with a premium experience or free or at a very small price, while planning to give artists the most competitive pay per stream ratio in the market. Dalla was created to focus equally on the listener as well as the artist.
Most music streaming platforms today allow all artists to upload their music on their platform without proper quality control, which leads to heavy saturation on the platform, with very little quality music available. In such a scenario, the listener is hard-pressed to find good music on the internet and have to search extensively in order to find a diamond in the rough. The other major disadvantage of this model is that many talented artists do not get much needed exposure and attention, while artists from big labels can advertise their music in order to get higher number of streams and revenue. This causes good music to remain buried under lots of mediocre songs, and artists often lose the motivation to keep making more music.
To tackle this, we decided to handpick the artists allowed on the platform, so that only the best could come through, and to give consumers the best experience. This would ensure a decluttered, unsaturated platform for genuine talent, and provide the listeners with a premium, high-quality experience. Our main aim was to give underrated artists a platform to showcase their music, away from the chatter and the noise that is present on popular streaming websites.
Our team has four passionate members. Aayushi(me), Aboli, Khushi and Satyanarayan. Since we have vastly different personalities, there was often a conflict of opinion in every step we took. We all had the same goal, but different methods and ways to reach the same goal.
When we approached Anshumaan about this issue, he suggested that we divide ourselves into subgroups, depending on what we were good at, for ease of workflow.
Satyanarayana and I were in one subgroup, and we managed the technical aspects like budget and artist revenue. Khushi and Aboli were in another subgroup, and they managed the creatives like website design and app layouts. Curating the artists we took onboard was a team effort, and we voted on which artists we wanted to include. Aboli selected, scouted and shortlisted artists, and we would all listen to them together, and decide who we wanted to include on our platform.
During the two weeks of the Yopreneurs Camp, we were successfully able to bring 21 independent artists onboard. All of them were very enthusiastic about being a part of Dalla, and truly believed in the concept.
When we neared the conclusion of the camp, we were mentored by a dynamic lady called Manasi Jain, who is the marketing manager of JioSaavn. She carefully listened to our entire model, and told us the positives and drawbacks. She then suggested ways to make our model stronger and cleared a lot of our doubts and queries, then she encouraged us and praised our hard work. It was an eye opening experience for us.
The camp changed my view of what education could be. I realised that studies in school and the camp had the same end goal, but vastly different paths of reaching that goal.
