Investment notes: SoundSmith

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September 26, 2022
SoundSmith

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A marketplace connecting musicians and social media content creators to promote music

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SoundSmith helps musicians promote their work by connecting them with the right influencers.

In this day and age, the music industry heavily relies on the influence of social media to keep a competitive edge. A great song or album alone is not enough to achieve success.

Currently, musicians and their managers have to directly and individually find influencers, establish relationships and do business with them. The same goes for the influencers and their managers.

There is an immense opportunity here for a marketplace to bring all of these efforts under one roof to benefit everyone involved. This marketplace is SoundSmith.

The team’s Startmate mentor squad includes Dean McEvoy, Nick Drewe, Ben Grabiner and me (Hamid Nazari, squad partner).

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đź’ś What we love about the founders

The SoundSmith team is an all-in-one package: strong technology and software delivery capabilities by Gajan; strong marketing and brand identity vision by Michael; and strong leadership, product ownership, customer management and investor management by David.

These three founders are passionate about helping musicians of all sizes achieve success.

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SoundSmith founders Michael McSweeney, David Hartley and Gajan Nagaraj

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đź”® What's the magic?

When it comes to SoundSmith, there’s a lot to love. The pricing model is attractive. It’s a greenfield area with little competition. The business has been global from inception, with over $6.9B spent yearly on influencer marketing globally. The team could easily extend onto creative spaces other than music.

These are three Gen Z founders who get it. They’re passionate about solving this problem with the help of  technologies and platforms of today. The old school methods are not as effective anymore.

And they’re seeing early traction too. Musicians have organically found SoundSmith and used it to promote music, while large influencers with millions of followers are joining the platform looking for opportunities for work.

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🚀 Why now?

It is undeniable that achieving success in the music industry is impossible without the help of social media.  If you hear music from unknown artists on the radio or television these days — music that you would not have heard of otherwise — this is the effect of TikTok. 

Traditional platforms are only trying to stay relevant. This is a beast that needs taming. 

SoundSmith fills a massive hole by connecting musicians to the right influencers, and vice versa. And there’s musicians aplenty. With 60,000 songs uploaded to Spotify every day there is always new music that needs promoting. 

On the flip side, there’s indefinite demand, statistically, and as proven in the history of humanity thus far. People can’t ever have enough new music — especially on social media with over 75% of users on TikTok discovering new music through the app. 

Now’s the time for SoundSmith to chase a ginormous market cap of $5.8B spent on music marketing and A&R yearly, with over 8 million independent artists globally and 45 million creators (with a follower count over 10k).

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Written by
Written by
Hamid NazariHamid Nazari
Hamid is a seasoned DevOps advocate with a software engineering, analysis and computer science background. He is Operations Director at Innablr and a Startmate Mentor.

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