Today is the 2nd of February and we are celebrating a year since BeatPick first went live!!
We thought you might like a little update on the State of the BeatNation. We are currently quite satisfied with how things in this experiment of ours are going, but we definitely do not feel it is enough. We see 2007 as being an extremely crucial year for BeatPick and are gearing up to really push through with all our different projects we have launched.
During these last few months we have had the pleasure of receiving more than 2000 music submissions and as a result we have incremented our roster from 30 to almost 100 artists. Our thanks go out not only to the artists we have signed up to the label but also to the ones we did not select. Music is at the core of our business and without submissions we would not be able to exist.
Furthermore our team has grown from two people that we were (David and Frank) to four (Katy, who you already know, and Curzio) and we are now looking at becoming five or six once we hire our new programmer and sound engineer.
We have had a variety of different success stories in the last six months or so. We closed some licensing contracts with clients like Ralph Lauren, Scott Winter Sports and Mercedes. Mainly though it has been the small and mid-level businesses that have really been helping us get out there and spread the word.
One of the main things that we have been doing has been an intense online marketing offensive that has really helped to get the notoriously fickle Internet community talking. We’ve been interviewed on more than one occasion (see djmag, openbusiness, creative commons for example) and have had our site linked to thousands of others, thus helping us move up the google ladder until we reached the first page for the searches “music licensing” and “license music”. On top of all this our myspace profile has been growing and growing attracting both talented musicians and interested music-lovers.
One of our more positive developments has been that we have opened a new office in Rome, Italy, from which we are now working towards acquiring a position on the Italian music market. This was made possible thanks to an Italian software house that bought part of the BeatPick Ltd Company. Don’t worry though, we have not sold out: our new partners are deeply pro-open source and fair trade and jumped at the opportunity to be part of our Creative Commons project. This partnership will allow us to create an entirely new beatpick.com website in the coming months (we do realise that at the moment as it stands the website does indeed have quite a few glitches).
The new BeatPick.com will have numerous new features and will try to aim to be more user-oriented and also to factor more video content into the equation. The new Italian office is also helping us to work on a whole series of interesting offline deals: music for gyms, music for mobile phones and music for hotels. With this we are hoping to begin to build a more solid economic foundation, from which we will be able to grow and develop but importantly to significantly raise our artists’ profiles and that of creative commons. We are currently really trying to drive home the point that it is possible to create a sustainable business under the creative commons system and that it is increasingly possible to distribute music without being part of a collecting society.
We are beginning a collaboration with one of Italy’s most famous Universities (La Sapienza in Rome), to run a series of seminars and conferences on creative commons, collecting societies and exclusive relationships with artists. On top of that, we will be conducting a series of lectures and tutorials to help university students to start-up their own Internet companies (the plan is to pick two promising students from the tutorials to come and work as interns for us at the end of the course).
So there it is. It looks like we have exciting times in store for us and so we’d like to once again take the time to thank all the people that have been helping us to run this company and develop its core ideals. We hope that this is still only the very beginning.
The BeatPick Crew.
Yes indeed, our very own