Yet Another Music Site?
Posted by Erik Peterson | Filed under business, industry
Rob and I are were well aware that we weren’t the first couple of guys to begin the journey of a music 2.0 start-up. Of course, the competition has skyrocketed since we began, but we wanted to take a different approach from the get-go. When we started Plugola, there were only a couple web sites that made it possible for independent musicians to upload and distribute their music digitally. We compared all the indie-music websites and services that allowed artists to spread their music, and analyzed what they were all lacking and why some sites/services were popular.
First, we noticed the lack of fan participation allowed on most sites. For the community-based music services, where fans were also given their own profile (as well as the artists), there was not much for the fan to do in order to help spread the word about their favorite artist. Sure, fans can discover new music from emerging artists, but then what? Services that allowed musicians to digitally distribute their own music allowed very little fan participation, if any at all.
We also took note that digital distribution services didn’t give their artists much in order to promote the location to download their material. That’s when we decided it was a necessity to give members more than just a digital download service and store. Our intention was to create an online social music community of like-minded individuals, both artists and fans, with similar tastes in music. Also put into place were options to legally share and spread music in a controlled environment, as well as off-line promotional tools.
We still have a long way to go in order to get the PLUGOLA network running to full capacity, but we believe PLUGO.LA is a good start in the right direction.
