If you are one of those diversified music lovers who has been subscribing to youtube channels like CokeStudio or has been wandering on SoundCloud to search for elegant vocals and vibrant rhythms then MusicFellas is just the place for you.
Or you are one of those artists who has been performing in cafeterias, uploading videos on youtube or roaming around recording studios to spread your voice and get heard by a more wider audience, then MusicFellas is your park avenue.
Started by two music loving techies Mayank and Gaurav with a deep desire to improve the music scene.
Mayank Jain is a Mechanical Engineering graduate from IIT Roorke ad after graduation he joined JP Morgan as Private Banking Technologist, but since he loves experimenting new stuffs, he jumped on the entrepreneur track.
Gaurav Shahlot is a Computer Science graduate from BITS Pilani, worked in Oracle in Business Intelligence but had a passion for startups and music and thats whats lead him to co-founding of MusicFellas.
We had an opportunity to quiz Mayank and understand more about MusicFellas, their USP, experience and future plans.
Your concept of MusicFellas seems to be very much similar to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s HitRecord.org, how would you describe your USP?
Our USP is a well designed, transparent system of making money for artists. Intention is to make music discovery for indie artists easy. And it isn’t one single thing but the experience of having all things together. Whether it be social discovery, full streaming+downloads (which by the way, we are probably one of the few if not the only ones doing that), and completely free for artists. The intention has been to give the best listening experience possible.
Was it difficult to convince artists to signup? How many artists have signed up till now?
About 500. Initially, it was a little tough because we were a new player. But as people go to know us a little better, things have improved and now even the big names are approaching us directly.
Seems you guys are really doing good on the Social Media front, your blog posts are truly interesting, why choose tumblr for blogging?
Thanks! Tumblr was easy to setup and maintain. We wanted to spend a lot of time on creating good content instead of spending time building a site to showcase it. Tumblr gave us access to good themes and the already existing community helps too.
Since the initiation how has been the entrepreneur experience till now?
Super-exciting. There have been so many highs and lows that the life is always interesting. It’s scary at times but the good days make all of it totally worth it. And goes without saying, I have learned so much.
What are your future plans? What would be the innovative step that you would plan to take to help an Indie artist reach a more wider audience?
iOS app with which we’ll launch a mobile subscription. And a lot more tools for the artists to promote themselves including embeddable widgets which could also be used by bloggers like yourself.
What do we think of MusicFellas?
In this new era where the music industry is on a uber close competition and celebs media hyping every status quo, here is someone who loves discovering novel and beautiful vocals and symphonies and wants you to experience the same. The one thing that caught our attention was their work on UX and UI, brilliant use of minimalism. This is one startup to keep an eye on, and we’ll surely do and we may catch them again to learn more about their experience on this musical entrepreneur journey.
Photo Source: Kay Rod
