Show.co, A Platform For Your Music Marketing Campaigns #SAtN

AAs mentioned earlier, we’ve recently returned from Berlin Music Week 2014 and brought back home numerous interviews for the Stand Above The Noise series. Today, I start to reveal the new videos – also passing the 20 episodes mark!

At the conference, we had a chance to talk to Jørn Haanæs, the CEO of Sounddrop – a company that builds marketing tools for the music industry. The most recent product of Soundrop is Show.co – a platform that helps artists and labels build beautiful landing pages and widgets that showcase content without friction, collect important data and monetize listeners and fans.

Jørn spent 6 years at Warner Music Norway, most recently serving as Marketing Director, until he joined Soundrop in 2013.

In the interview, Jørn explains what Show.co does, how it compares to competitors, and how music is discovered and consumed these days.

00:00:23 – Jørn Haanæs & Soundrop introduction
00:01:33 – The story of the recently launched Show.co
00:01:53 – Reasons behind entering the already competitive market
00:02:53 – What exact features Show.co provides
00:03:59 – Explanation of the pricing model
00:05:01 – Target audience of the product

Full transcription:

My name is Jørn, I am the CEO of Soundrop, and I care about music, and technology, and marketing in a digital space. That’s been my whole career. Previously in my last position at Warner, I’ve been working my whole life with digital music, so that’s what I’m passionate about, and that’s where I think I can contribute.

Jørn Haanæs

Soundrop started in 2011 as a social listening service within Spotify. We built a really cool social listening experience where people could check out music together with other people, vote on tracks, and just have a good social experience really. It really caught on and it was a cool thing, and we also expanded it to Deezer, as well as a beta version with YouTube, and that was a really good project. It’s still running and it allowed us to go deeper into what we really care about which is the relationship between artists and fans, and the space of promoting and marketing your music effectively.

That led us to start building show.co. We started building it in January this year, and our goal was to figure out how we can help artists and labels, and management companies, agencies, how we can help them promote and market their music more effectively, because we saw there were some big gaps in how that’s being done today. We thought we could make an effort and we thought we could make a difference.

Our view on this was that there are many players, but none have really thought about the modern way of consuming music, and certainly not the way music lives out on the web where people actually discover music. We thought that this was built too much on the premise of the older music industry. That’s where we thought, “Let’s make a tool that really helps people build artist and fan relationships through digital streaming, and let’s do something that really understands the quickness of discovering new songs.”

It needs to happen right there and then where the user is, and on the user’s premise. We thought there wasn’t really a good frictionless experience available. There wasn’t any tool that really focused on what’s happening now, the campaign aspect of it, what you’re doing right now. Other tools were more or less; this is a static landing page where you could do something. I mean the old way of doing things.

Essentially we help you create a landing page, and a destination for your content. That’s a landing page, or it’s a widget, or it’s a social post, basically wherever you share this URL, that’s where the music and the experience takes place, because we believe that if you remove all the levels of friction and just make sure that the content really hits the user first, then you trust on the very best thing you can actually promote, which is your own content. It’s not talking about it, it’s not saying that if you just log into this app, or download this thing, or do something else crazy, you get to access it.

Just here’s the music, start playing, and then when you start playing you get people hooked. That’s when we can surface more interesting calls to action, like follow this artist on SoundCloud, or save this track to your Spotify playlist. Do any of those things that really make a difference, and I also realized the fact that you’re listening to the song now, so that means you’re hooked.

We think that once you’re doing something it’s about doing it right now, and it’s really capturing whatever momentum you’ve got going right now. The good thing about our weekly pricing is that, I mean once you’ve paid for a campaign, the campaign stays up, and that means there are no broken links, the content will be there. What we remove essentially after you stop paying is the analytics part of it, so you don’t get to see what happens with it in a detailed way, and you also don’t get the calls to action etc., but the content is still there, so that means it’s a safe thing for people to do.

We also believe that with our way of looking at things, it fits really well with whatever happens now, as in a Twitter post, it hasn’t got a long shelf life. A blog post somewhere, it really is read right now. Perhaps someone will read it and six months from now, well they’ll still get the music, but wherever happens now is what’s important.

Actually we’ve seen customers from all over try our product and pay for the product, and we think that’s really cool, because we believe that what we’ve built, it applies equally as much to Universal who’s trying it, as well as small, independent artists who are struggling to get their very first streams on Spotify. The cool thing about what we’re doing is we’re saying that this is a smart way of taking care of your online presence, and that you actually own the space that you send people to.

It’s about making sure people understand the value of data and data collection, and taking a responsibility in that, because we believe that in the digital world the single transaction doesn’t really get you far. It’s about building an artist-fan relationship, and that needs to be built over time, which means that for every bit of communication that you do, and for every bit of planning you do, make sure you grab the data that’s there. Make sure you grab the engagement that you can, and make sure that you serve your fan base, and we think we’ve built an awesome tool to do that, and it’s equally good for the big labels as for the small agencies, because they all care about the same thing, it’s to promote and market their music and it’s to get real results. That’s what our tool does.