Hosting my first ever "Music Hackathon"

I’m seeing more and more within the music tech space that is getting me excited. Both on the music creation side (AI, cloud DAWs, Grimes), and on the business side (Fl Studio is a small company generating $10Ms in subscription revenue). Music is one of those rare industries where people think of it as more of an art, despite it being worth an estimated $26B. Just alone the U.S.'s recorded music industry earned $16 billion in revenue in 2022. Growing 6% year-over-year from its 2021 revenue. To put that growth rate into perspective, the?music industry is growing about 5X the speed of the overall US economy in 2022.?

The U.S. has 10’s of millions of people paying for subscriptions to music services.. and the entire industry in total has sold well over 600M subscriptions.?

Not only is the music industry valuable, but the brand assets are unmatched. Both music, and the artist, are brands that can be ported over to different industries. It’s easy for your favorite artist to launch a clothing line because you already love their brand.?

All that is to say… the?music business is a great business.

However, it has an annoyingly cumbersome flaw… the financing model. Unlike Real Estate where there are predictable monthly rent incomes and sustainable asset values (most of the time), there’s very little chance of losing 100% of your investment. Music is nothing like that. In music, each artists has a slim chance to make it big. Therefore the music industry is more comparable to venture capital. A venture fund will build a portfolio of 50-100 startups, each with a very slim chance of making it big, but if they do… $$$.

I see a nearly similar model that’s possible within the music business. You build a portfolio of 50-100 artists, each one capable of producing their own music, and then you help them grow their traction. The best artists in the portfolio will grow, and then you lean in to help them further.?

Scooter Braun is responsible for finding and building Justin Bieber and Asher Roth. When you dig into the story of how this happened.. you realize he essentially created his own music accelerator. He found two undiscovered artists, he moved them into his house, and all day they worked on their music careers. Eventually, the song ‘I Love College’ began to pop up after months of work, and Scooter even to this day will credit that song for being the lucky break that not just made Asher Roth’s career, but also enabled their business to continue funding Bieber.?

So.. let’s do music the startup way.?

A week ago I posted to LinkedIn about hosting a music hackathon, I was pleasantly surprised by the response.?

So I hopped on a call with Shilpa and Vivek (two artists working at the cross roads of AI, Metaverse, and Bollywood style music). They asked me, ‘‘so what are we doing for the Hackathon?” and I said….

Music x Hackathon

Prize: An annual subscription to?Splice

Entry rules: anyone can enter, only one can win

WHO SHOULD ENTER? If you’re an?artist, a?producer, or even an?entrepreneurbuilding?music tech, you should?100% enter

How to win: The winner is voted on during a public online poll?

Cost to enter: $0, we just want people to have fun

How to enter: We’ll collect RSVPs for contestants up until May 25th

Rules of the Hackathon: After you enter, I will organize a meeting between all contestants on Tuesday May 30th. I will present an ‘influence’ which is what each contestant will be challenged to integrate into a song they create over the next 48 hours. Imagine this being a cooking show, and we give the chef’s a very specific ingredient which must be used in their dish. That’s what we’re doing but with music.?

At the end of the 48 hours, each contestant will submit their final song/video/piece of art, and then I will post them online for people to vote upon the winner.?

We’ll give the contest a week or two to collect votes across social media, and then I’ll declare a winner. The winner with the most votes will receive an annual subscription to Splice to cover all of their sampling needs, and the person who I think is the most creative will receive 10 $AUDIUS tokens — which is the premier crypto token for musicians

Entering this competition is?FREE. You can?RSVP?now by subscribing to our hackathon events for free

RSVP ahead of time so I can plan accordingly, looking very much forward to hearing/seeing what you create.

~Don

(*1) https://www.zippia.com/advice/music-industry-statistics/#:~:text=The%20music%20industry%20is%20worth%20%2426.2%20billion.&text=In%202022%2C%20the%20U.S.%27s,subscribers%20to%20music%20streaming%20services.

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