Distributed music promotion is here!
TrafficDJ is a music streaming app, that helps you discover, potentially earn rewards after each play, and spread great local music from Ghana!
The Future of Music Promotion
The music arts industry is very profitable, however, developing countries have struggled to turn it into a profitable art form for the majority who venture into it. The few who succeed either have to work too hard or be too lucky. The barrier to success for most stories is the lack of exposure creating a situation where we have great songs but no listeners.
The traditional remedy to this has been 'oh let's pay this DJ or presenter to play our song'. This itself is a vague contract with no deliverables since nothing makes the claim measurable. However we might be at the dawn of a new age in music distribution, there seems to be a simple idea that can resolve this challenge which would usher us into an age of breakthroughs for most up-and-coming artists.
For years and years, people have listened to several radio stations and tv stations for their source of new information (news). This 'monopoly' in news dissemination was in recent times broken by the rise of social media. The early days of social media showed some promise of redemption, but as time went on the same structures were normalized. Most media organizations got to the top, some very hard-working folks also broke through leaving us with the same problem stated in the intro. New artists still find it difficult to get their songs heard.
How does a new artist get their song to an audience(real people) with a decent budget?
Radio stations and TV stations hold the most power in music discovery. Research published by Mobile Accord(2017, https://bit.ly/2KfFzR3), showed that the biggest TV station in Ghana had almost 700,000 viewers, whereas the biggest radio stations had almost 120,000 viewers on average per day*.
Where can you find most listeners of radio?
All these listeners are distributed mostly between two-time slots, the morning slot (6 am - 11 am) and the afternoon slot (2 pm-7 pm). This time directly coincides with the time that people are usually in transit. So it's safe to assume most listeners would be in transit during those times.
Who is the biggest marketer of radio?
From the above, it's clear that the biggest marketer for these radio shows are drivers. Since most passengers don't have a choice in the selection of the radio station.
And that's how TrafficDJ was born - a music streaming app, that helps you discover, potentially earn rewards after each play, and spread great local music!
It's amazing that this era affords us the tools to build scalable solutions for challenging problems. Over the past few months, we have built a platform to enable distributed promotion of great local music from new artists.
Campaigns are created by artists on the TrafficDJ platform.
These campaigns come with a budget that serves as a potential reward after each successful play. The rewards are based on a probabilistic model that allows the campaign to draw in more people than expected so that the artist can have more reach with a small budget. Users of TrafficDJ get notified each time there is a new campaign. After a successful full play of a song, the user might get a cash-back reward!
