BUSINESS:
Company Name: Tapes
Location: Birmingham
Approx Annual Turnover: £3000
Website: www.tapesmusic.co.uk
Blog address: www.tapesmusicuk.com
Background
Tapes is a black music record pool for UK artists and DJ’s. We are helping to break down barriers that exist within the industry by providing affordable and transparent marketing options for artists with a small budget, designed for increasing their exposure and income, as well as providing a place for DJ’s to discover and access new music. Tapes helps to get music to DJ’s, radio stations, bloggers and podcasters.
Why did you decide you needed to do something different?
Music needs feedback – DJ’s get inundated with music and feedback requests and it is very time consuming! We’re helping combat this by rewarding DJ’s that engage; a percentage of our revenue gets distributed to our DJ’s.
I saw and experienced the need firsthand and wanted to do something about it, so I came up with the concept of Tapes.
Process of innovation
First I figured out what the business model would be, who the early adopters would be, and did lots of research into tech and music tech. I worked with different developers who couldn’t get the job done how I wanted it. I worked with my intern at the time to rebuild the site but wanted something much more robust so turned my attention to the app.
There were a lot of tech challenges – finding the right people to work with as well as fine tuning the look and feel of the tech to suit expected industry standards – which took a long time to do.
There were financial challenges, too, such as lack of resources which meant that things take longer to achieve. I have managed with support from small grants.
Source of support
Furlough – pay my bills throughout the year
Arts Council – music projects
Coventry University – tech build
Aston University – prototype build
STEAMhouse – app development
STEAMhouse – IP support grant
These support avenues enabled me to continue working towards the end product, setting and achieving milestones in order to track progress.
Slingshot