28: DarwinBeats with Cou Kalantary

[powerpress]

DarwinBeats is a new iOS app that links independent and up-and-coming artists with their listeners. With a simple thumbs up / thumbs down interface, new music can soar to the top of the charts, gain followers, and build an artist’s fan base. In this episode, I spoke with Cou Kalantary, the founder of DarwinBeats.com.

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In This Episode, You Will Learn:

• DarwinBeats started as an idea from high school that led Cou’s band to a talent competition that led to local success and some radio air play.  After that, the band split to pursue their “normal careers,” as though music wouldn’t support them. Cou’s realization is: The problem with the music industry is that making great music is often not enough. There’s a whole level of promotion and marketing and networking after the fact. With DarwinBeats, his goal is to put the power in the hands of the musicians and the listeners. Quite simply: create good music, get recognized, and grow your audience.
• The companies behind streaming services are fighting each other to have more market shares. Darwin beats caters to the independent and up and coming artists to help them get noticed… In a “Natural Selection” frame of mind, DarwinBeats invites you to upload a track, get up votes, get more listens, and eventually earn royalties based off the likeability factor of your track… Like Reddit, you don’t have to promote your song beyond uploading it. With the algorithm, the most-liked songs will continue to rise to the top of the list and get more recognition, while the less-popular tracks get lowered on the list. (However, Cou has made certain that the lesser-rated songs still get air time in order to make everything fair.)
• Cou has noticed a trend that, with Apple Music and Spotify and the future of the music scene, more and more services are competing to bring listeners the same content, just repackaged differently. And it is all catered to the already-established artists. With independent apps putting the power back in the hands of the artists, we now have more tools to get our music heard and to grow our fan base.
• One goal of DarwinBeats is to promote an artist’s location and tours, in order to better engage with the audience the artist has grown through the app. If looking at financial success, the money is no longer in album sales and digital downloads. It’s in growing a loyal fan base and then being available in person for gigs and meet-and-greets.
• The royalties are paid out based off success of your track. This serves as an incentive to continue to produce great music so that you continue to get up-votes and engage the listeners.

Quotes:

The problem with the music industry is that making great music is often not enough. Click To Tweet

Create good music, be heard, and grow your audience. - @DarwinBeats Click To Tweet

Links:

Thanks for Listening!

Thank you so much for tuning in to my conversation with Cou! If you want to add your voice to the conversation, please leave a comment below and we’ll keep talking!

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Thanks again for joining and special thanks to Cou Kalantary of DarwinBeats.com! Until next time!