B2C And B2B: How Beatchain Plans To Boost Artist Careers With Two Platforms In One

Beatchain, a new DIY platform for artists, is potentially interesting for managers and agents, too, seeing that it atomizes essential tasks like management of social media and ad campaigns.

There’s a natural divide between the major industry and the DIY industry. The latter prefers to work without or with just a few middlemen, and has a general distaste for any kind of corporate structure.

The former provides artists with an established network of expertise, contacts and resources, usually aiming for worldwide careers.

Because of this discrepancy, startups promising to solve the music industry’s problems seldom seem to make waves among the majors. Either they create solutions to problems that aren’t perceived as a problem by the industry at large, or they get swallowed up by one of the big players, who want to develop their solutions in house.

Beatchain wants to deal in both the DIY and major sectors and offers two platforms in one.

The artist focused b2c platform lets artists manage all of their social media, including sponsored advertising, distribution, website hosting, and mailing lists – all the tools they’re currently outsourcing to other (expensive) companies – from one central point.

The b2b software provides adtech for anyone that needs to promote multiple shows or events. It places hundreds of ads across hundreds of ad sets simultaneously and self optimizes all of their running, based on a machine learning rule set that is going to become AI going forward.

Beatchain also allows managers to platform manage the scheduling for all of their acts, including music distribution, website hosting, gig planning, etc. Say an artist has 10 or 15 tours on the go, they can plan all the postings for all the events with all the content they have on all their channels from one central point.

The b2b parts have been developed in close communication with industry representatives, including Eleven Seven Label Group’s Allen Kovac, and renowned entertainment law and music attorney Paul Schindler.

Advertising budgets can be selected easily, depending on whether the focus is on reaching existing or finding new fans. “It will monitor their performance, take budget away from those campaigns that aren’t doing well, and put it into the audiences that are doing best,” Mendoza explained.

He likened it to the boost button on Facebook, but much more advanced: “When you come to the more b2b driven stuff, we have a full adtech solution that lets you choose what KPIs you want to use: do you care about click through rates, engagement rates, video views, or a combination of those things? You can set all that, and you can set what it’ll do based on how those targets are met.”

Mendoza received a lot of feedback from artist agents, who were unsure of how well their Facebook ad dollars were spent. “They gain some likes and followers, but that doesn’t mean anything, because you don’t know where those followers are, whether they’re engaging. It’s not targeted enough, you don’t get any reports back,” Mendoza explained.

Beatchain organizes every online source out there and uses all the public APIs of Spotify, Songkick, Bandintown, etc. to gather data and give artists and their teams an accurate depiction of how they’re performing, also in comparison to the competition. 

Beatchain was conceptualized when Luke Medoza and his father Ben, who is the founder of MDSL, a company providing technology expense management solutions, market data management and related services, met musician Steve Jones. Steve believed data could help artists build fan bases and sell out shows even without a record label or promoter. With Mendoza’s analytics background and Jones music knowledge the company was born. Today the team surrounds themselves with top-notch developers, data scientists and machine learning/AI experts, to make sure Beatchain doesn’t end up becoming the latest start-up that gets overlooked in the crowded DIY space.

“What we’re trying to build is a really simple way of understanding an artist’s digital footprint and encourage them to take the next steps in either growing their fan base, putting on their first show, etc,” Mendoza explained.

The plan is to offer DIY ticketing in the market segment not controlled by Ticketmaster or AXS, i.e. 500-cap and below. Beatchain would be taking a cut of 5% of each ticket sold. Said Mendoza: “With every tool we’re currently building, we’re looking to undercut what artists are currently using in the market. It’s like Sprout Social, Mail Chimp, Hootsuite, SendGrid and Squarespace all in one place, but instead of paying 150 quid a month, it’s 14.99.”