Featured Pitch: OurStage
Web Site: www.ourstage.com
Headquarters: Chelmsford, Massachusetts
Year Founded: 2007
Founder: Ben Campbell
Investor: Signature Capital
Employees: 36
By Ben Campbell, Founder and CEO
OurStage is a brand new way for the world to discover the best new music—and for the industry to discover the best new artists. Our goal is to solve the single greatest challenge facing the music industry in the new world order—separating out the truly great artists from the millions of people marketing their music online today. At its simplest level, OurStage uses the work and the wisdom of the broader Internet community to rank from best to worst (not rate as in one to five stars) the music of thousands of emerging artists each month. We use this information to produce rankings or charts to allow consumers to easily find and stream the very best new music—and to allow industry players (venues, sponsors, music labels, etc.) to identify who the best new artists are, and subsequently give them job opportunities. The ranking process is done in our unique judging engine, which leverages an extraordinary series of proprietary anti-gaming technologies, preventing overzealous individuals from unfairly inflating the ranking of any given artist. We are totally artist-agnostic. In other words, we are not focused solely on “independent” artists. We are focused on new artists and new music. Artists on OurStage may be free of any association with any label, may be signed to a small independent label, or even signed to a major label. We are about discovering the best new music, regardless of the source, as opposed to discovering the historical music catalogue of the major record labels, which is what most other “music discovery” sites do.
OurStage has enjoyed dramatic growth and general market acceptance since our launch less than two years ago. We currently have more than 50,000 member artists, 250,000 registered users and two million unique monthly visitors. In addition, several artists have achieved career-altering success as a result of exposure on OurStage. Artists have garnered record label and publishing contracts, booking agent deals, mentoring sessions with major artists, profiles in national publications, and performance opportunities to tour and open for major acts and participate at major music festivals.
In early 2008, we began a very successful partnership with the world’s largest music site, AOL Music, to share some of our content with their community. We’ve recently partnered with the world’s largest concert promoter, Live Nation, to offer opening slots at major performances to top-ranked OurStage artists through our talent and gig finder service, Marketplace.
We completed our $13 million series A funding through Signature Capital earlier this year. Company revenue is primarily generated using various models including selling and distributing ads, revenue-share with artists that monetize content, custom (sponsored) competitions and premium subscriptions for select features within Marketplace (coming soon).
Looking ahead, OurStage is broadly focused on two main areas:
1) Building out existing features (i.e. Marketplace) to ensure they are the most valuable, effective, easy-to-use industry resources for both artists and industry players.
2) Developing the most innovative set of fan-centric features to ensure that OurStage continues to attract millions of fans each month and provides the very best new music, artists and information on all things related to music discovery.
OurStage is independently owned by a small, passionate group of employees and private investors (that are not associated with the music industry).
You can find out more about OurStage by checking out our “About Us” video here: http://www.ourstage.com/about/us
