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If you are an amateur Musician with a great album to make people tune in to, then Musicfellas.com can potentially be the perfect platform to reach out to your audience. Founded by 3 Techies, Mayank Jain, Gaurav Shahlot and Shubhranshu Jain, Musicfellas.com is a social, music discovery platform for independent music. At Musicfellas, artists are able to monetize their content in a fair way, reach a large audience and users are able to discover new music.
Like many others, at first glance, I mistook Musicfellas for a digital music store for Indie Music. But far from it, the core emphasis is on providing a meaningful conversation to the music creators and listeners. With an extremely modern design in UI, the website is a perfect engagement product where the user can follow fellow listeners, share their playlists and bands, favorite and comment on songs. Differentiating his “site’s social network feature” from others, Mayank explains “The simple reason that this could not be done over existing social networks is that we share our music tastes with very few people and in a community of music lovers, serendipity always helps discover new talent and content.”
From the outset itself, the website looks very simple, clean and nice. The website lets you search for (rather discover) some awesome Independent artists, listen to their songs and buy them. There is a ‘Radio’ feature which lets you listen to songs on the website based on the genre you select. For the artists, they can have their content as a paid or free download. Bands like Parikrama are already offering their album for free while music from bands like Indian Ocean is available for free steaming. A number of indie bands and artists like Punkh are offering their music as an album or individual tracks. The prices are fully decided by the artists for their content and they provide the content DRM-free for the listeners to enjoy platform agnostic. Average price for every song on the service is around Rs. 10 – Rs. 15. This is pretty cool and provides a very good platform for local and underground artists to make money and be supported by their listeners. Musicfellas takes a share of 30% on the music sale which acts as its revenue stream.
The Indie scene in India is fast shaping up and Musicfellas aims to play a major role in that. Mayank believes that, “The market potential is huge. More and more artists are coming up and even the ones who had previously released their music on labels are coming back to doing it independently. And the users are ever growing and willing to experiment with new music more than ever before.”
The company started in June 2012 has gone on to come the top choice for independent music in the country. As Mayank proudly says, “We have grown multiple folds in the past few months. We have a roster of about 200 artists and also enjoy a large number of users.”
Go ahead and give Musicfellas a try for the good, old sake of entrepreneurial spirit and music loving.
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