About a month ago, I launched a side project with a few other 2p2ers:

www.encorebeat.com

This project was created purely for fun, and we had no intention of trying to make any money off of it. We all just love EDM.

But to my surprise, the website got picked up by Product Hunt, multiple news outlets, and even a few other EDM blogs. In one month it has grown in a way that none of us could have ever imagined.

Right now we're only focused on creating the best user experience, but I wanted to ask what possible revenue streams seem the most logical & profitable down the line. We won't be focused on the revenue side for a while, but I wanted to start this discussion early - it might help us with developing the product in a more natural way.

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

look how hypem or wearehunted monetize.


don't you have a volume button?
anyway you can host the mp3s on your side instead of youtube (like hypem)?

I would try to work out a partnership with Musicians/Venues/etc to advertise downloads, concerts tickets and merchandise.

It would take some hustle, but it seems like it could be done especially with sustained growth. Start with lesser known names that you like and prove that it is a win/win.

Thanks for the feedback. This definitely sounds interesting - I guess since I'm not too familiar with the industry (other than that I enjoy the music), I need to learn more about which potential revenue streams generate the highest/most consistent revenue streams (i.e. is Shazam's referral fee for iTunes downloads more profitable/practical than teaming up with venues for concert tickets, etc).

If anyone has worked in this industry, I'd love to hear an in-depth analysis about the numbers involved for diff possibilities.

Can you indicate what sort of numbers you mean exactly?

Hi, I just want to say... put a volume button. 2 Things I really HATE: Autoplay songs in websites, and NO VOLUME BUTTON.
Cheers!
GL with the project!

According to this article, the EDM industry is worth 6.2B

• revenue generated from festivals ($1.03 billion)
• worldwide club dates ($2.4 billion)
• streaming/video services ($600 million)
• Soundcloud streams ($140 million)
• the sale of DJ software and hardware ($360 million)

I don't know anything about the industry or even whether the article I linked to is an authority page or not. But if it is accurate, then your monetization strategy should probably be building a niche in one of those categories.

Congrats, you have a product that has the potential to be very valuable. Now the difficult part is to turn this into a business that VCs are willing to invest.

If I was in your spot, I'd get my team in order, figure out how much I need to have X users, and go out and raise that amount.

If you don't act quickly, someone might enter the space and take it away from you, assuming this space is worth pursuing.

Lastly, what kind of numbers are you speaking of? From your tone, I hope it's at least 100K users.

I think the actual numbers are going to unfortunately be fairly insignificant in the lens of establishing a profit making business for multiple people. Hope I'm wrong though but I don't think so.

Sorry guys, I can't get into the exact numbers for signups. However, we may be publishing an article for Product Hunt, on the effect of PH on our site.

I will say that we don't have anywhere near 100k users though - when i said it was growing, i just meant it was growing well for a 1-month old site

If it's one month old you're likely jumping the gun without a serious volume of traffic. Press exposure unfortunately is 99% of the time not enough, and will only give a short term boost. It's easy to overvalue that sort of thing.

Focus on building the product and the user base.

Everything Gullian said

Thanks - we don't plan on implementing any revenue stream for a very long time.

This thread was just to discuss future options down the line, as I'm not super familiar with the industry.

Just do what most internet start ups do and focus on building "something cool" with a large user base that will "change how we interact with music as fans" and other fluffy crap that means nothing.

Eventually you will have a really cool "product" that some idiot who has access to way too much money will give you a bundle to invest in it, and a bunch of others will soon follow as you scramble to figure out how you will ever recoup a dime as an actual business.

First of all, very cool site!

If you want to monetize, there are three models:

1. The user pays you
2. Advertiser pays you
3. Investor pays you

For option 3 either option 1 or 2 should be feasible. A combination of all models is possible.

If your focus is growing at the moment then you should think of ways to generate more engagement and return visits. A cool feature would be to make it really easy to share the music with someone else that is not familiar with the site yet. Allowing users to interact with each other would also be good for engagement.

You are already selling on your website btw, the soundcloud box has a shopping cart logo which links to beatport webshop. I don't know how but find a way to hide this icon and create your own icon with your own affiliated link to Beatport. This is instant revenue without sacrificing user experience.
You can also place a shopping cart icon below the song title next to the comment icon -> this is free money!

Display advertising is a bit tricky with this website since you basically generate only one impression per visit (since you only really need the main page), this is not nearly enough for this business model. If you go with display advertising then it should be subtle and well target in order not to harm user experience.

Another thing you can do is create a blog. On a blog it would be no problem promoting other services. People are used to this and 90% doesn't realize that you generate money by bloging.

One last thing: When users sign up, put a tickbox for allowing to send promotions by email (tickbox ticked on by default). NO BODY is going to not sign up because there is a tick box, they will simply tick-off the tickbox and still sign up. Maybe you don't have plans for it now but please start building a database.
Even if you NEVER send them a single promotion email, -> perhaps your company is worth a $100k more to a future buyer if you have a database of 200k emails with promotion consent.

Careful with that, illegal in some places in the world (I think based on where you're operating from)

I would change it slightly to change the traffic patterns and monetize it immediately. You should charge them 1 dollar now to feature a song that you have not chosen. If no one pays the worst that can happen is that you end up picking all of the songs yourself, which you already tell them that you do anyway so they don't necessarily expect songs they submit to be used by you. So with a payment they can get their song in front of people right away. If you have any kind of traffic at all it is worth it for them. Especially the people on YouTube because they can make money from the views that they get both from your site and in general.

The best change I would make is to make the up-votes matter more. In that way you can drive a lot more repeat traffic.

So at the top of the page I would put all the new videos for that day including the paid for featured submissions. For maximum revenue you obviously don't want to cap the amount of spots that people can buy or daily new songs.

Then below that you want to merge all the previous daily lists into one giant running list. The most upvoted songs ever will be at the top of this list until they aren't the most upvoated anymore. In this way the people that pay for a featured spot are still on there and if their song is good it will make it to the top of the list for a long time and generate much more than 1 dollar in value of traffic for them. Even if they manipulate the rankings by getting all of their friends to upvote it will still drive traffic to the site.

I worked on a similar project http://tonightsplaylist.com during a Seattle Startup Weekend(hopefully okay to link). Eventually people lost interest and we never fully developed the idea. My guess is the same will happen to your site with time.

There's so much legal BS you have to go through with any site like this, that legally you probably can't play any of the full songs you are currently playing (we scraped ours through youtube). If you use grooveshark you're probably breaking the law.

You could make some money by displaying only the samples of songs with links to buy the full song through amazon.com or itunes.com like pandora does but no one wants to listen to short samples of songs they want the whole thing.

Our plan for monetization was to get commission on concert tickets by pulling people's IP address and letting people know when their favorite bands they like come to town. Ticketmaster eliminated their affiliate program a couple years ago. There was another site that paid a commision on concert tickets we found but didn't implement(coudn't find it in my email after 5 mins of searching I'm sure someone else can post). Songkick.com's API may be helpful if you go this route, but they have restrictions.

My guess is the best way to make money is actually just pandora style charging subscribers or display or sound ads but you'll never get enough users to make it worthwhile. Good luck.