Happy Monday music fans,
What is it like to love something so much that you work on it for more than a decade, regardless of hardship? We’ve talked to musicians, like Little Kid, who have been there/done that. But never before have we talked to successful music startup founders.
Raf Fiol is the founder of Kompoz, an online hub for making music with other collaborators. Kompoz has over one-hundred-thousand users across the world, and many are part of its thriving community of musicians.
This is particularly impressive because succeeding financially on the musical internet is really, really hard. Just ask any musician.
On Wednesday we are releasing our interview with Saint Tone, who has been active since the Eighties and has performed at places such as President Obama’s first Inaugural Ball. Much of our conversation was about being a musician during the chaos that is the musical internet, from a distribution standpoint. We’ll talk more about that on Hump Day.
Today, though, we are talking about starting a business that fulfills a huge need for musicians despite limited capital flow in the music market. Kompoz was founded out of love by its founder, who is indeed a bassist. (We promise: this is NOT sponsored content!)
Before we get to our interview with Raf, here’s some music news you should know..:
Saint Tone, the artist who we’re interview-dropping this Wednesday, has released a new album called Awake. It is available on all major platforms and is Saint Tone’s eighteenth CD.
Israel-based rapper Benjamin Elia$ just released On The Way. Our favorite track from it is THE MESSAGE featuring Anna Moore.
Garage-punk band VAGUESS releases Directions for Use:. VAGUESS is based in California and they’re L-I-V-N ;). Fences has a catchy riff.
Mexico-based funk-jazz band El Coyote Cósmico releases Mixologia single. It rocks!
The Riff: When did you first have an idea for Kompoz to begin with?
Raf: So this started back in 2007, 13 years ago. I was actually online—I think the site was called My Virtual Band and it was a forum based, threaded discussion, where people were just posting MP3s and saying, “Hey, what do you think? Can you add some drums to this?” or “Can you add some bass to this?” and I loved it because there were some really cool songs being developed. The forums were kind of confusing, because you sort of lose where the song was based on which comment you're reading, in which thread and that’s hard to follow. So I thought, “Hey, why don't I build a project-based, music collaboration platform, based off the same concept?” So that’s when it started, in 2007 and it's gone through a couple of iterations since then and we're now working on our 3.0 platform and I'm really excited about it.
The Riff: That's awesome. So let's talk about the environment or the ecosystem in 2007. Were there not similar products on the market? Was this really the first time that such a product, for crowdsourcing music from different musicians, was out there?
Raf: I think so. I think it was the first site purpose built for it. Again, there were people doing this already just via file sharing, emails and the threaded discussion forums, but I think it was the first purpose built site, specifically for music collaboration. There was another site that started up—I can't remember they were right before or after us or about the same time, but they were called IndabaMusic. That site pivoted a bit on their business model and they started going more towards remix contests and working with famous artists to come up with just a platform for promoting music. They were then acquired by a company called Splice, which is also a collaboration platform, but they've also pivoted. They've been moved more towards samples and plugins for music audio systems and they've taken a completely different direction. So it seems like every once in a while a new platform will pop up and then they go away or they change their business model and we've stayed true to that.
The Riff: That's awesome. So you just digitized the habit that was already going on.
Raf: Yeah, that's exactly right. We just provided some tools to make it a little bit easier for people. The whole object of Kompoz is for you to connect with other musicians around the world and essentially crowdsource music; that's what it is. It's all about that and we don't do covers, we don't allow covers on the site, it's all original music.
The Riff: Let's talk about distribution of that music, then. So, if I were to go on Kompoz.com right now, am I able to listen to complete songs, complete EPs or am I only able to listen to certain parts of the music that I could include in someone else's music?
Raf: Great question. The primary purpose of Kompoz is to build music together. However, we do have a publishing component, where once you finish your song—by the way, we have tools in there for creating split sheets, where you can actually identify the musicians that worked on a particular project, give them credits and attributions. Then, you can publish that to our companion website, we have a site called SoundBlend.com, where the finished songs go to. From there, you have options to buy it, download it, license it for videos and things like that. In our new platform, we're actually going to be bringing that back into Kompoz. We're going to have a radio section that is going to be a lot more like Spotify, where you can create playlists and create collaborative playlists that you share with your friends and things like that.
The Riff: So you got inspiration for Kompoz from your own musical journey, correct?
Raf: Yeah, absolutely. I played bass and a little bit of guitar and I was involved in sharing files with friends and that's when it occurred to me to come up with a platform for that.
The Riff: Let's talk about the early days of Kompoz. Did you just bootstrap this? By the way, is this adventure completely bootstrapped? Are you the owner or do you have outside investment?
Raf: I was the sole owner until 2014, when I had a gentleman out of New York invest in the company. So he's my current partner right now. Other than the two of us though, we're the complete owners, but we have other people that help us out with different features.
The Riff: So how many customers did you have when you first launched in 2007?
Raf: Just me. Day one it was just me and I was just sitting there at the computer waiting for somebody else to sign up. Then somebody did and then another guy and then within the first year, I think we probably had maybe 10,000 people by the end of the first year.
The Riff: Wow, that’s good.
Raf: Obviously, people come and go and some people are very active, and some people are not, but I think our total numbers are close to 110,000 at this point. Also, there are about 68,000 songs that are in progress and the number of tracks that have been uploaded, it's just astronomical. It's really cool. Thank God for Amazon and all of their technologies that allow us to host all of these files and make it possible.
The Riff: What would you say is your core feature if you had one?
Raf: I think it's definitely the community; that's the value of it. As a musician at home, I can record some guitar, I certainly can't sing, I can play bass, but I don't play drums and I don't play saxophone and anything like that. So I have a lot of ideas for songs, I record some guitar and post it on the site and then sure enough, over the next week or so, you start getting people adding to your song and it's just such a great rush. It's such a high to see your songs develop and sometimes in ways that you might not expect. This has happened to me, where I started a song and in my head it's a reggae song, but then somebody else posts something that takes it in a completely different direction and I love it. It's just so great. Also, it's not like your song is static, either, right? Because once it's out there and you've got hundreds and thousands of people from around the world coming up with ideas, obviously, not everybody's posting to my project, you might get, 10 or so people that that will contribute ideas.
We have this feature called a Spin-off which is also interesting, which is, “This song is cool, I'm going to spin it off, create a different version of it and maybe take it in a different direction.” So your song evolves and morphs in lots of different ways. The question you asked about the digital audio workstation, the Dow Software, we have made a point of staying away from that. Our guiding principle is that the tool should not get in the way of the creative process. When when inspiration strikes, you don't want to be trying to figure out some browser-based, online mixer. So our approaches use whatever software you want. It's on your time at home, in the comfort of your home, you can use Pro Tools, I like Apple logic; some people might use PreSonus Studio. Lots of different software available out there, use what you want and then just upload the finished track up to Kompoz and invite others to join it. That's really our mission. That's our platform. So that’s where we are.
This interview was edited for concision and clarity.
Screenshot of Kompoz’s homepage by the author.
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