Business Plan Musicking.com

Prepared by Christina Hough

April 1, 2015

Table of Contents

Executive Summary................................................................................................................ 3

Vision Statement...................................................................................................................... 4

The Product............................................................................................................................... 4Product Services and Features...................................................................................................................4Technical Considerations.............................................................................................................................6Legal Considerations......................................................................................................................................6

Market Landscape................................................................................................................... 7

Business Goals.......................................................................................................................... 7

Promotions................................................................................................................................ 8In-Person Outreach.........................................................................................................................................8Online Promotions...........................................................................................................................................9

Promotions Budget.............................................................................................................. 11

Conclusion............................................................................................................................... 12

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Executive Summary

Musicking.com is a web app and social media platform for adult music learners. While learning an instrument is difficult, the goal of Musicking.com is to help music learners, or “musickers,” stay motivated to practice and improve, by making the learning process more tangible and shareable.

Many music teachers report that their adult students are among the most self-critical – adults are more likely to have clear ideas of what they want to achieve musically, but become discouraged when the necessary technical skills develop slowly. Musicking.com is designed to help make the learning process itself a means of creative and reflective self-expression, by giving music learners tools for illustrating and sharing their work.

As a web app and social media platform, Musicking works in two ways:

1. It is a journal for recording your musical goals, and your progress towards these goals. When you practice, go to the app and log the hours you’ve practiced, and what you worked on. You will be able to see your progress as a multimedia timeline. You can add to this your own commentary in the form of video or audio recordings, and written posts. This lets you demonstrate your thinking and tell your own story as a context for your music making. Your efforts are reflected in a visually interesting representation of your hours practiced, as well as in your chronological collection of recordings and comments. The longer you use the app, the richer and more interesting your timeline will become.

2. It is a support network, where musickers can connect with one another and share their advice and experience. Musicking.com includes public forums, user groups and virtual events where musickers can show off their work, seek feedback and advice on a work-in-progress, or compete against each other in musical games. Learners and teachers can also connect here, as teachers are given the option to identify themselves as such and link to their own products or services in their profile. Learners can also choose a paid subscription level which offers some of the benefits of a private teacher at a lower cost: basic subscription levels guarantee that an experienced music teacher will periodically view recordings on their Timeline and set personalized challenges that will help them reach their musical goals.

Musicking is ideal for people who are teaching themselves to sing or play an instrument, or for people studying with a teacher. Musicians at any skill level can benefit, because there’s always room to push your skill farther, or take on a new learning challenge. In addition, Musicking is a great place for skilled musicians and teachers to advertise their expertise and find new business.

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Vision Statement

The key to playing an instrument well is regular practice, but finding the motivation to stick to a regular practice routine can be challenging. This is true for many music learners, but perhaps especially for people who are teaching themselves. Our website will help motivate music learners by allowing them to track their practicing, and show off their progress, and offer one another advice and encouragement. We aim to create a community whose members are motivated to guide and inspire one another in their music making.

The Product

Musicking.com helps motivate adult music learners by encouraging them to share their progress and their musical insights with others. You can do this in two ways. One is by creating your Musicking Timeline, a visually rich, multimedia documentation of the work you’ve put into your music. You can share it with your teacher, your friends, or make it viewable by other musickers.

The second way is to participate in the Musicking community. Musickers can read and participate in forum discussions, join groups, and participate in virtual events where they can share works-in-progress, polished pieces, or compete in musical games! Events are created by musickers for musickers, and are one of the best ways to overcome “stage fright” and get encouragement and feedback from your peers.

Musicking.com is also a great place for students to find teachers, and vice versa. Any musickers can register a music teacher and advertise their services through participation in the Musicking community. They can also purchase a teacher’s subscription and take advantage of our services for teachers, or apply to work for Musicking.com as an online music coach.

For busy students, the music coaching available through a student’s subscription might be the perfect compromise between scheduling regular private lessons and trying to learn on your own.

Product Services and Features

The Musicking Timeline: Whenever you practice, you’ll open the app and enter how long you’ve practiced. You can also make blog-style entries describing your goals and approaches, and upload audio or video recordings demonstrating your progress. Your Musicking Timeline displays this information in a visually interesting way, allowing you to share your accomplishments with your friends. The longer you use the app, the richer and more interesting your timeline will become.

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Forums: These allow for public discussion of topics of interest to musickers. Forums are organized according to medium of music performance (the instrument they play, for example), or musical style. Forums and subforums take into account the diversity of the Musicking community, while allowing members with shared interests and experiences to find one another.

Groups: Groups offer an even more flexible way for musickers to organize themselves according to interest, location, or any other criteria. They are user-generated entities, and can be either public or private.

Virtual Events: Virtual Events can be created by any user. Participants upload audio or video recordings of themselves within a specified time period, and may listen to and comment on the recordings of others during that time. When the event expires, the recordings and comments are deleted (though you can always upload your performance to your Timeline if you want it to live on!)

Events can adhere to any theme or special rules as designated by the event creator, who will have a moderator’s powers to remove comments or recordings as appropriate. They can also be public or by invitation only, and the organizer can specify a maximum number of participants and have them register in advance.

There are four types of virtual events:

Virtual WIP Workshops: These events are for participants to share works-in-progress and get feedback and advice from other participants.

Virtual Masterclasses: Similar to the WIP Workshop, these events are created by users who have registered as music teachers, and may be free or paid. The event organizer is expected to offer feedback to each participant.

Virtual Open Mic Nights: Participants share recordings, but are not expected to offer any feedback beyond optional congratulations and virtual applause!

Virtual Competitions: It’s up to the event organizer to provide rules and a method for choosing a winner (if applicable). Virtual Competitions can range from fun music games to American Idol-style face-offs if the organizer so chooses.

Subscriptions: There will be two categories of subscriptions available to musickers: teachers’ subscriptions and students’ subscriptions.

Students: For a very affordable monthly subscription, a musicker can get a music teacher to regularly listen to or watch their recording and leave detailed feedback, as well as a personalized study plan to work on for next time. A higher subscription level will include real time online music lessons

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which can be scheduled for whenever is convenient for the teacher and student.

Teachers: Music teachers can register as a teacher for free, and include a bio a list of credentials, or a link to their website in their profile. Their user name and avatar will be labeled “Music Teacher,” and they are welcome to use their (productive and non-spammy) participation in the community to draw new business.

They can also purchase a teacher’s subscription, which allows them to organize and collect fees from paid Virtual Masterclasses, and use Musicking.com’s scheduling and payment management system to organize private music lessons (either in-person or via Skype). They will also be allowed to organize music competitions to promote their lesson materials – prize giveaways will otherwise not be allowed in Virtual Competitions – and have those competitions appear in our “Giveaways” list.

Any music teacher may also apply to work for Musicking.com as an online music coach.

Technical Considerations

Musicking.com will consist of a responsive web app, and a mobile app with the ability to push and pull practice log information associated with the user’s account. The user will be able to enter a new practice log while the device is offline, but will need an Internet connection in order to sync to the user’s account.

Legal Considerations

Musicking.com will adhere to all privacy laws, copyright laws, and laws governing the use of children’s personal information.

We will consult mechanical license administrators with respect to covers of copyright material that appear on our website, and will pay the required licensing fees (similar to Banjohangout.org’s arrangement). A copyright notice will be displayed every time a user uploads a recording, and there will be clearly-states procedures for rights holders who wish to have illegal recordings removed from the site.

We will also host both audio and video content, and will need to encode both in such a way as to play in all reasonably modern browsers.

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Market Landscape

Musicking.com’s closest competition consists of a series of community forums (such as Banjo Hangout, Piano World, and Violinist.com) and online music schools (such as LessonFace). There are also a few mobile apps for logging music practice sessions (such as the unimaginatively named Music Practice).

Online forums for music makers often host lively communities, but their features are limited by their grassroots nature. They usually use outdated forum designs, ad banners to generate revenue or pay for hosting, and new features are limited by the coding skills and available free time of each forum’s members. They are often extremely niche, focusing on a single instrument, and usually have an implied focus on a single musical style, or constellation of related styles.

Online music schools are similar to in-person music schools. Though there are challenges associated with teaching music over Skype or similar video conferencing technology, there is clearly a market for it. The benefit to both teachers and students is greater scheduling flexibility, no travel time, and the ability to stay with the same teacher regardless of changes in location.

We believe there is an opportunity for Musicking.com to find a niche that offers even greater flexibility at a lower cost compared to a private lesson, with the restriction that the coaching is asynchronous rather than real-time. Fitocracy appears to follow a similar model for fitness coaching, advertising personalized fitness coaching for as little as $1 a month. We should be able to charge even somewhat more than that, while still offering a service that is appealing to enthusiastic but busy music learners.

Apps for logging music practices tend to be very basic – after all, they are simply the digital version of the lesson notebooks that music teachers have been using for years. Musicking.com’s Timeline will be much more visually appealing and interactive, transforming the “music notebook” from a simple personal reminder to a shareable part of someone’s online identity.

Business Goals

Musicking.com will follow a freemium business model in order to generate revenue. There will eventually be two types of subscriptions: one type for music students, and one for music teachers. However, the key early goal will be to grow the community, since a lively community is important for a successful user experience.

The success of the web app will be measured against the following objectives: Within the first ten days of the website’s launch, at least 300 people will

create user accounts.

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Within the first six months of the website’s launch, it will have at least 5,000 active users, with “active user” defined as an account-holding user who logs on at least once every two weeks.

Within the first six months of the website’s launch, 80% of account holders will have used the app to set at least 2 goals, and at least 60% of account holders will have registered some other type of activity in relation to this goal (i.e. record whatever form of “progress” the designers choose to let the users track).

Within the first three years of the website’s launch, it will begin generating enough money to pay all operational expenses, including the salary of at least one full-time community manager.

The first two objectives are ways to measure the viability and vibrancy of the community, which is expected to be central to the user experience. The third measures the usefulness of the goal- setting tools. The final objective is vital to the financial sustainability of the project.

Promotions

The promotions strategy will involve reaching out to both music teachers and existing music-making communities, both in-person and online. The messaging overall is that Musicking.com is a diverse community where all kinds of music makers can challenge and inspire one another. Our members range from complete beginners to professional music teachers and musicians, and all kinds of styles and approaches are welcome.

We may also explore parallels between staying physically active and staying musically active, citing research that musical training may help protect against the effects of aging on the brain.

In-Person Outreach

Local music-making communities. A section of the website will be a directory of local events and meetups for amateur musicians. We will contact the organizers of as many such local events as we can find, and invite them to add their club/meetup/event.

We will assign a budget of $3,000 to hire someone to research, contact, and follow up with these communities as necessary.

Music educator conferences and music tradeshows. Messaging will stress the value of creating a Musicking account for both students and teachers. For students, we stress the value of staying active in music throughout your life, and the value of

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the Musicking Timeline (which can be set to private) for making effort and progress more tangible to students. For teachers, we talk about the practicalities of offering online private music lessons, and stress the value of registering as a teacher on our site for finding new business and demonstrating expertise.

We would ideally like to focus on events for musicians, private music teachers, and adult learners, but further research will help us understand where best to focus.

We will assign a budget of $5,115 to cover the cost of researching and exhibiting at 2 events.

Online Promotions

Paid advertising: We will use a Google Adwords campaign to target relevant search keywords, setting aside a budget of $11,475 to research, buy and monitor ads for one year.

Social media hashtag-of-the-month: As part of our routine community management, we will also come up with at least one new theme/hashtag a month – for example, “To read or not to read? #MusicNotationAndMe.” Users will be encouraged to share their thoughts and/or recordings on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram using this hashtag.

This tactic relies on users to promote the website to their own networks, while providing content that is engaging and interactive. As with the example above, inoffensively controversial topics that cover the diversity of musical backgrounds might prove particularly effective in soliciting comments.

We will assign a budget of $12,000 over one year for a community manager to create, promote and manage these campaigns.

Musicking Together Virtual Collaboration Contest: This campaign will be aimed at any musicians over the age of 18, but with the primary goal being press coverage. In addition to our regular messaging, we will also use this campaign to promote a better understanding of Creative Commons licensing.

The campaign: we will commission a songwriter to write a song consisting of lyrics, melody, and basic harmonic arrangement. We will also pay the songwriter or another musician to record a video of it. We will post the video on YouTube with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, and issue the following invitation:

For musicians: Record yourself performing along to the original video. Any type of contribution is fine – vocal, instrumental, interpretive dance…it’s up

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to you! Upload your video to YouTube or your audio track to SoundCloud, add the tag “MusickingTogether,” and include the following text in the description: [Creative Commons Attribution license covering the recording + Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license covering the song itself, with appropriate legal wording].

For producers: Search YouTube and SoundCloud for the tag “MusickingTogether,” and use the recordings to create your own mix of the song! Upload your mix to YouTube or SoundCloud, and include the following text in the description: [same license information as specified for musicians]. Also, for each contribution you used, list the contributor’s user name and a link to the original material on YouTube or SoundCloud. Remember, they’ve given you permission to use their recordings, but only if you give them credit!

The contest will be promoted as much as possible in the media (social and otherwise), and directly to music-making communities. Promising recordings will be Tweeted with the hashtag #MusickingTogether. Winners will be chosen from among the mixes, and the producer and each contributor will win a year’s free website subscription, as well as special branded merchandise.

We will consult with a lawyer regarding our interpretation of copyright law, but we believe this will allow others to legally record and remix the song while we retain the license to use it for commercial purposes (according to the terms of our contract with the songwriter), while also legally allowing us to use the community’s contributions for our own promotional purposes.

Winning videos will be required to cite each of their sources as per their Creative Commons license. Improperly licensed mixes, and mixes including improperly licensed contributions, will not be considered as contest entries.

The legal implications of the Creative Commons Free Culture license will be explained in the contest rules in plain English:

Using the license above means that you can’t legally refuse us the right to use your mix, even if we use it to promote our website.

If you’d rather use a different type of Creative Commons license for your mix, that’s fine, but it means your mix won’t be considered as an entry in the contest.

Don’t forget that it’s still illegal for you to sell your arrangement of the song, or use the song for any other commercial purpose. You are free to distribute your arrangement non-commercially regardless of the license you choose to use.

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We will assign a budget of $6,075. This will cover the commission fee, hiring the songwriter and a videographer/editor to shoot the initial video, and hiring a publicist to promote the contest for 6 weeks.

Promotions Budget

LABOUR

CATEGORY NOTES QUANTITYUNITS RATE

TOTALhrs, days, wks, mths $ COST per unit

PRODUCER(S) 0 ACCOUNTANT / BOOKEEPER 0 MARKETING CONSULTANT(S) (specify) 0

RESEARCHER(S) 120 Hours 25 3,000

RESEARCHER(S) research and apply for exhibit space for 2 conferences 5 Hours 25 125 RESEARCHER(S) research and monitor AdWords campaign 120 Hours 50 6,000 WRITER(S) 0

DESIGN LABOUR 0

ANIMATION LABOUR 0

PROGRAMMING LABOUR 0

VERSIONING/TRANSLATION 0

WEBMASTER 0

COMMUNITY MANAGER 240 Hours 50 12,000

PUBLICIST Publicity for the Musicking Together collaboration contest 6 Weeks 500 3,000

MARKETING SPECIALIST 0

MEDIA RELATIONS SPECIALIST 0

FOCUS GROUP(S) 0

SALES PERSONNEL 0

SONGWRITER Fee to commission a song for the Musicking Together contest 1 Flat Rate 2,000 2,000

VIDEOGRAPHER/VIDEO EDITOR Shoot and edit the initial Musicking Together contest video 4 Hours 100 400

MUSICIAN Songwriter to record his/her original song 2 Hours 50 75

3 200 600

TOTAL LABOUR $27,200

EQUIPMENT AND MATERIALS

Instructions: Equipment and software must be pro-rated AND amortized at market value for duration of use on project

CATEGORYDESCRIPTION

QUANTITYUNITS RATE

TOTAL(provide detailed description of equipment) hrs, days, wks, mths $ COST per unit

COMPUTER WORKSTATIONS (specify) 0 DIGITIZATION and SCANNING EQUIPMENT 0

DATA STORAGE DEVICES 0

SOFTWARE LICENCES (specify) 0

ADDTL. SUPPLIES and MATERIALS 0

OTHER (specify) iPad kiosks for tradeshow booth 2 150 300

0

research, contact and and follow up with local music clubs and communities

1 community manager working approximately 20 hours a month for one year on hashtag-of-the-month promotions

LEGAL ADVICE ON COLLABORATION CONTEST COPYRIGHT COMPLIANCE AND MANAGEMENT

(Continued on next page)

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SALES PERSONNEL 0

SONGWRITER Fee to commission a song for the Musicking Together contest 1 Flat Rate 2,000 2,000

VIDEOGRAPHER/VIDEO EDITOR Shoot and edit the initial Musicking Together contest video 4 Hours 100 400

MUSICIAN Songwriter to record his/her original song 2 Hours 50 75

3 200 600

TOTAL LABOUR $27,200

EQUIPMENT AND MATERIALS

Instructions: Equipment and software must be pro-rated AND amortized at market value for duration of use on project

CATEGORYDESCRIPTION

QUANTITYUNITS RATE

TOTAL(provide detailed description of equipment) hrs, days, wks, mths $ COST per unit

COMPUTER WORKSTATIONS (specify) 0 DIGITIZATION and SCANNING EQUIPMENT 0

DATA STORAGE DEVICES 0

SOFTWARE LICENCES (specify) 0

ADDTL. SUPPLIES and MATERIALS 0

OTHER (specify) iPad kiosks for tradeshow booth 2 150 300

0

TOTAL NEW MEDIA EQUIPMENT AND MATERIALS $300

CATEGORYDESCRIPTION

TOTAL(provide detailed explanation)

WEBSITE: SERVER EXPENSES

WEBSITE: ADDTL. SOFTWARE

WEBSITE: ADDTL. MAINTENANCE

OTHER (specify)

TOTAL EXPLOITATION & MAINTENANCE $0

MARKETING, PROMOTION, PUBLICITY

CATEGORY DESCRIPTION TOTAL(provide detailed explanation)

OTHER PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL COLLATERAL MATERIALS

INTERACTIVE / WEB ADVERTISING Google AdWords campaign averaging $15/day for one year 5,475

TV ADVERTISING

PRINT ADVERTISING

RADIO ADVERTISING

OUTDOOR ADVERTISING

SPONSORSHIPS

ANCILLARY PRODUCTS

TRADESHOWS/CONFERENCES

Exhibition fees For 2 events 1,200

Posters/banners 350

OTHER (specify)

TOTAL MARKETING, PROMOTION, PUBLICITY $7,025

ADDITIONAL ADMINISTRATION

Instructions:Costs in this section must be specific to the project, everyday company costs are exempt

CATEGORYDESCRIPTION

TOTAL(provide detailed explanation)

LEGAL ADVICE ON COLLABORATION CONTEST COPYRIGHT COMPLIANCE AND MANAGEMENT

Conclusion

Musicians are notoriously difficult to sell digital products to. However, given its appeal to a broad range of music-makers, Musicking.com will be in a much better position than most digital products in this category to attract and retain a broad user base. Our Timeline and Virtual Events represent an innovative approach to online music learning that will benefit self-taught musicians, music students, and professional teachers alike. They will be the starting point for building a broad,

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diverse musical community, while specific learning needs and musical niches can find expression in user groups and forum discussions.

There is clearly a widespread interest in the music learning and music making as social, communal activities, as demonstrated by both the vibrancy of many online music forums, and the popularity of activities like pub ukulele nights. Musicking.com will be well-positioned to tap into this enthusiasm, becoming an online hub for music teachers and music learners, helping to sustain people’s interest in a long-term, active engagement with music making.

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