Indie Ambassador

Recently named to Billboard’s list of Top 10 Music Startups of 2010, San Francisco-based RootMusic has come a long way in a relatively short time span.  As the first truly customizable artist app on Facebook, their flagship product BandPage allows artists to easily post tour dates, videos, photos, and music to Facebook band pages for free.  A paid version is also available for $2 per month. In addition to the aforementioned features, Root Music has recently facilitated a way for artists to receive performance royalties through song and video plays on their BandPage app.  They're calling the update YouTube Tracks and it allows bands that have a YouTube partnership to get paid for video plays on their Facebook pages.  Pretty awesome!

Having launched just 5 months ago, BandPage is currently the fastest growing music app on the social networking giant.  We talked to Root Music's Biz Dev aficionado Matt Conn last week to get a better feel for their recent updates on BandPage. Check out the interview and tutorial video below and let us know what you think of BandPage in the comments!

-Aidan

Aidan: Let’s talk about RootMusic’s background for a second. Is BandPage your first product?

Matt: This is our first product. We started the company late last year, and based it around the idea of building something like this that would be really clean and, like the way an iPhone may not be as open as other platforms, but you have a lot of power. You can’t go too crazy and make edits that will ruin the page or give errors to the end user. We wanted everything to have a clean user interface. Musicians are very creative people, but musicians are not engineers. They may know how to design, but they may not know how to utilize html properly or they don’t know how to really utilize a lot of advanced web capabilities unless they’re a designer and also a musician. We wanted to make something that any musician could hop on and create and make functional.

AR: Did you guys develop BandPage from a musician’s perspective, or just as fans trying to create a better way for musicians to promote their product through Facebook?

MC: Our CEO, J Sider, managed bands and was on the road for about 5 years working with different level acts from long tails up to bands with hundreds of thousand of fans. Basically he saw all the inefficiencies of the booking process and just in how bands were getting screwed every day and thought there has to be an easier way, especially with the way the web is. Musicians’ tools hadn’t really caught up to some of the other tools the web has offered us. He was living in Virginia, and said “I’m going to come to San Francisco, I’m going to find the best engineers I can find, and try to make a platform for musicians to take advantage of web 2.0.”

AR: Ideally, every band would have their own personal, customized website, but that takes time, money, and skills that few have. Should an artist’s BandPage compliment their custom website or replace the need for it altogether?

MC: I think that an artist’s website definitely has things that make it worthwhile, but our experience is a little bit more straightforward where you know what you’re going to get when you come to BandPage. Like with the Arcade Fire HTML 5 video that’s not necessarily something you’d be able to use on BandPage, but as HTML 5 becomes more standard with all these crazy things, artists’ websites as they evolve, will have a different kind of feature set than you would find on Facebook. But I think that BandPage takes the place of a lot of personal sites that are out there because right now it’s mostly just videos and tour dates and things like that. What’s also great about BandPage is its connectivity throughout the rest of Facebook.  The best way to get your music noticed is not by just sending it out to random people and hoping they listen, but by having someone that likes your music enough to send it out to trusted sources. If you get a song shared with you from a friend or you know that a friend “likes” a song, you’re far more likely to check it out. We’re trying to utilize that influence. We want fans to share tracks and like tracks, because that way they can drive songs virally.

AR: To what extent is BandPage customizable right now?

MC: At the moment, there are 2 versions of BandPage: BandPage Basic and BandPage Plus. BandPage Basic is completely free-- there’s no advertising anywhere on BandPage unless you’re using YouTube Tracks which has YouTube advertising in it which you can get performance royalties from—and that’s customizable to the extent that you can add any twitter feeds, shows, videos, YouTube Tracks, things like that. BandPage Plus is $1.99 a month, and lets you do different custom backgrounds, a banner, different colors and fonts, things like that. In our plus version, everything is aesthetic. We wanted everyone to have the same access to all our features. We didn’t want to punish anyone for not paying, but also give extra fun things to people who want to support us.

AR: With MySpace’s recent decline in relevance, do you see Facebook and their hold on the social network market as a better platform for BandPage? What makes BandPage better than a custom MySpace profile?

MC: The best thing about BandPage isn’t that it’s more customizable than MySpace, because I’ve seen plenty of really nice looking MySpace pages. But with Facebook, that’s where all your fans are; it’s where you can reach the most people. You can reach a much higher number of fans on Facebook, and Facebook has a lot more shareable features, like being able to post to someone’s wall or seeing what your friends “like.” These are all things that are becoming more ubiquitous, and it’s just going to keep growing.

AR: There are a few other applications like BandPage on Facebook, most notably ReverbNation’s My Band. What does BandPage offer that My Band doesn’t?

MC: I think that when you look between the 2 pages, an aesthetic difference is apparent. We wanted ours to be a very clean, branded experience where you can customize it out. We wanted to concentrate on the core features of the product like having your Facebook wall there, a twitter feed, shows with buy links, etc. and having it all be very organized.

AR: Is it possible to see BandPage on mobile devices yet?

MC: It’s not available on mobile devices yet. It does work on some mobile devices like the Droid2 that can handle flash capabilities, but we don’t have a mobile app yet. It is something that we have been looking into, but for now we really want to make BandPage on Facebook the strongest and most powerful program we can before we start putting engineers onto other platforms. We’ve seen it in the past where applications have a really good idea, but as soon as they get their user base going they spread themselves too thin resulting in 10 mediocre products versus 1 or 2 really great products. Down the line we’re going to explore mobile more heavily, but right now we want to build up all our big artists and become the #1 music app on Facebook. Since launching 5 months ago, we’re up to 3.3 million monthly active users and we have a little over 30,000 bands. We have really high numbers of active users to the number of bands because we really encourage our users to have Autoshare enabled that way any time they add a track or a show it posts up to their wall and everything on the page is dynamically shareable. We don’t want it to become a static website where people visit it once and then forget about it.

AR: It goes without saying that music is everywhere, and today it’s pretty rare that artists get paid any type of performance royalties online. You seem to have fixed this problem with YouTube Tracks. Mind telling us how it works?

MC: Sure. I read that something like 25% of all YouTube videos are just music videos or tracks with a black background or lyrics. It’s used for single songs because it’s the quickest way to find any song on the Internet and stream. For a lot of artists, they don’t have their YouTube material hooked up to the partnership program where they can get ad revenue from it, and even if they do, it’s not a branded experience. On YouTube, after someone listens to the track, they’ll go find another video, possibly unrelated. They’re not looking at your tour dates or other things about you. We wanted artists to be able to utilize their videos and songs on YouTube and get performance royalties from them which are made possible through the YouTube partner program where YouTube makes money off the advertisements that play off the video and then artists get a cut of that. We’ve integrated that into Facebook, so now any time you have your regular tracks playing on your BandPage, if one of the tracks is a YouTube track, the song will continue to play as if it’s a regular file, and as you browse to other parts of the fan page while it’s still playing, you’ll see it up in the banner. That way, you can play it like a regular song as you play with the rest of the page, and the artist gets that ad credit.

AR: You’ve already solved two enormous problems for independent musicians with BandPage, where is RootMusic moving next?

MC: We definitely want to keep on innovating and creating more features that help drive fans, traffic, and more likes to our artists’ pages. We don’t want to stop innovating; we don’t want to just say “we have a good product here and move on to the next one.” We have a number of big projects coming up that have the general goal of allowing artists to capitalize on the Facebook platform. Some things we announce in the future will be obvious; some will come out of left field and are going to shock some people.

BandPage Tutorial w/ Root Music CEO J. Sider