Most people love music and love to learn more about their favourite artists. What if there was a place (like IMDB does for the movie industry) where you could find all information in one place? Musikki aims to do that with their site and upcomming app. I talked with João Afonso, founder and CEO of Musikki.
What is Musikki and how did the idea come about?
Musikki is a living music platform that brings together all the World’s musical knowledge, content and services. You can find everything about the artist, album and songs you love; buy and listen; follow artists and get notified of upcoming releases and shows.
This all started with a pain I felt. As an avid music consumer I’m always looking for new music everyday, but the diversity of music sources out there makes it completely impossible to keep track of everything that is being released. And even when you discover a new artist, the information is completely scattered with videos in one place, bio in another, discography and reviews elsewhere and so on. This all felt strange because if we think about it, there’s always something connecting every piece of music information and content: the artist, the album, the song or the event.
I then came to this concept of a dynamic artist page that would be built the second the user hits “search”. I built an alpha prototype based on API requests and showed it to two friends of mine, Juliana and Pedro. They loved the idea and we decided to make it happen. We improved the prototype and applied for a business idea competition in the end of 2010. We weren’t even selected to enter the competition but something cool happened, we had to open the site to public and people started to use it and shared it on social networks. After a couple of months we were being mentioned on Mashable and Hypebot and had users from more than 100 countries. The jury didn’t like us but the users did! Even better!
How is all the information gathered and updated?
We developed a music relational search algorithm that associates scattered content to the right artist, album or song. Besides aggregating information (e.g. discography) and content (e.g. videos) we also aggregate services making it possible to buy music (Amazon, iTunes, etc.) or listen music through streaming services like Spotify or Deezer. We also created our own “music crawlers” that go look for news and reviews, something we couldn’t get from existing APIs. On top of this APIs + crawlers system we’re adding relevance and curation layers which allow us to select the best possible information from all the data we collect.
You stated in an recent interview that your goal is to be the main music destination on the internet. How and when do you plan to reach that goal?
The easiest way of achieving that would be by spending millions of euros in promotion but… we’re a startup, which means we have a very, very tight budget! We just have to find creative ways of achieving the same goals. The way we’re doing is by partnering with some of the music industry’s biggest companies. We provide them music data through our own proprietary API, which they can use to improve their own services, and in return they will redirect users to our platform. It’s a trade-off, music data for traction. But that’s just how we plan to get our first millions of users, we will obviously need to build on that if we want to get the hundred of millions we’re after. It will obviously take a few years but we firmly believe we can get there.
You are moving to London soon. How will this help your growth?
London is crucial to execute our go to market plan! It’s where the music industry is more concentrated. I can easily meet with artists, labels, media agencies, other tech companies, brands and even investors. As I previously mentioned, we need to partner with other music services, get to key opinion leaders, etc. and being in London increases the chances of that happening. If we want to become a relevant service in the music industry and everybody else in the industry is in London, then London is where we need to be.
What was the biggest challenge you faced to get the startup going?
I think it was to get the first costumers. When you create a new product, you can try to control most of the variables, predict this and that but one thing you can never control is how the “costumer” will react! Will people use it? I mean, the product might look and feel awesome but does the user really want this? When we saw that they did, everything became easier. “Hey, look we’re not crazy after all, this might really work!”
What other startup is on your radar and why?
Mailbox, which was already acquired by Dropbox, because they solve a pain that I feel everyday! My inbox is a complete chaos and the way they’re tackling that issue is really, really interesting. It’s only available on iphone and ipad but as soon as they release it for mac, I think I’m completely ditching “traditional” mail clients.
To find out more about Musikki visit https://www.musikki.com/
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