Thenewnewmedia

I’d like to continue my discussion on user-based innovation by turning to Indaba Music, another great example of a user-centric company. Indaba Music (Indaba means collaborative forum in Zulu) was founded by Matt Siegel and Dan Zaccagnino in January 2007 and is based right here in New York City. Last Fall, I was invited to spend some time at the company’s loft on the Bowery interviewing the members of the team and getting a feel for what they were trying to accomplish.

Matt gave me the address and as I walked down the street, I began to think about the ramifications of all of this. I remember the days when the Bowery was a place where you went during the day (never at night – it was just not safe) to buy kitchen equipment at reduced prices and lamp shades. Now I was going to visit a high tech company in an up-and-coming neighborhood. Silicon Alley 2.0 has expanded all over Lower New York City so why was setting up shop here any different than in say Soho or Chelsea? I am not sure but it seemed to me that it was a testament to the resourcefulness of the Alley entrepreneurs that they would set up shop wherever they could find space that was suitable for growing a company and in an important way, contribute to the revival of a neighborhood.

.In any case, I am not sure what I expected but I have to admit that I was a bit unprepared for a graffiti-filled front door entrance. I rang the bell and was buzzed in. I opened the door and was confronted by a very long flight of stairs. My trek up the stairs was not for the faint of heart I assure you. But I was ultimately rewarded at the top as I entered a beautiful loft which houses both the company and a few of its team members.

I am writing a more involved case study of Indaba which will have excerpts of the actual interviews I conducted with members of the team, but I would like to share with you some of my ideas about it. Indaba grew out of Matt and Dan’s desire to provide a platform on which music professionals and listeners could connect with one another. In particular, Indaba focuses on professionals who are known in the industry as session musicians. These musicians are not part of a band; instead they are professionals who are hired by composers or bands to play a particular part of a musical composition. For example, a composer might need a piano player for his offering and pay a sum of money for an outstanding professional to fulfill this need. Many of these session musicians have their own personal recording equipment but must travel to the studio where a musical composition is being recorded. Also, they are limited to the musicians whom they know through personal contacts and who live in geographical proximity.

Indaba’s founders decided to expand the geographical boundaries of these musicians and enable them to stay at home and contribute their expertise without traveling to the studio to do so. They capitalized on the fact that digitalization has enabled musical composition to be recorded in ‘layers’, that is, musicians who would normally need to be in a studio at the same time, can now use technology to record their part of a musical offering separately. In order to make this collaboration a reality, Indaba’s team developed a technology platform comprised of several proprietary software applications that would allow musicians to collaborate in a virtual way. For example if one musician puts a track on the site, he or she can invite other musicians to contribute and add their tracks to this musical composition. The result of these sessions is an entirely new piece of music created by the members. Once the piece is created, those members who have participated in the creation of the music decide informally on who holds the intellectual property rights to the composition. 

Indaba is not just about collaboration. It is also a site which offers a great way for people to form communities and to network with one another.  Like other social media sites, users can develop their personal profiles which can be viewed by other users seeking a particular kind of musician. These profiles tell others who the musician is, their musical preferences, influences and skill levels. Indaba members can then search for other musicians by genre, instrument, skill level and location or for sessions that are open by other criteria. Indaba also has forums and blog posts for discussing topics of interest to their user base and periodically has contests to generate interest and collaboration among the users.

So how is this site another great example of a user-centric company? For starters, Indaba’s users are central to the strategy of Indaba . A great thing about Indaba is that the site attracts both male and female members, as well as musicians who compose and play in a variety of musical genres and come from various countries.  Matt and Dan envisioned that professionals would collaborate with professionals on the site while amateurs would collaborate with amateurs. Instead, to their surprise, professionals often collaborate with amateurs. Another thing that happened which surprised them is that barriers of age and location have broken down as young musicians collaborate with older ones and musicians in countries around the world use Indaba as their platform of choice for collaboration. Users who are relatively isolated from the large concentrations of musicians that can be found in a metropolitan area can connect professionally as well as personally to a much larger virtual community than would be possible if they were confined to purely physical interaction.

The management team at Indaba really listens to its users, another characteristic which distinguishes these user-centric companies from other organizations. In fact, many of the products created for the community are done n response to a user’s feedback or suggestion. For example, one user wrote to the company suggesting that it would be great if members could exchange chord charts and lyrics of songs along with the music itself. While the team had thought about that idea and had shelved it in favor of other features, the user’s feedback helped them prioritize what features to build next (which included the ability to exchange chord charts and lyrics). As the community grows, it is not only a source of innovation for the management team but also in many ways, this user community is an extension of the team which leads the company.

Like Upoc, which I discussed in an earlier blog, Indaba could only exist because of the technical platform that it created to service and connect its users. The company offers its subscribers services such as file transfer capabilities and such features as the ability to listen in at a session before becoming involved in it in order to see whether a user fits in with the music being created. According to some users who I talked to, the reason they like Indaba is that the site is ‘user-friendly’, that is, the site has been designed so that users who are not technologically savvy can easily use the site’s products and services. For Indaba’s management team, the goal is to create an interesting and vibrant community and worry less about developing a fancy technological platform.

One thing that struck me about Indaba was the informal feel of the culture and organization. No one has a title and everyone seems to feel comfortable about contributing toward making the company better. Matt and Dan have gathered around them a group of people who are not only dedicated and experts at what they do but really understand how to work as a team. I sat in during a team meeting and there was a feeling of harmony even as work got done. For me, it was déjà vu all over again as I remembered how many companies during the hey day of Silicon Alley and the dot com boom operated – laid back, non-hierarchical coupled with enthusiasm and a great desire to be successful. I remembered the pictures of Yahoo employees sleeping under their desks as I toured the loft and peeked into the bedrooms of two of the team members who are there 24 hours a day. Of course, as the company grows, it may not be so simple to preserve this kind of camaraderie but in the meantime, it is wonderful to know it still exists.

While it is great to have a laid-back culture and lots of enthusiasm, companies like Indaba still have to sustain themselves and make money. This company’s business model is still evolving. They do charge a subscription fee for premium users who transfer more than a certain amount of files per month and require more space on the company’s servers. The company also generates leads for the site by buying Google adwords. This strategy has helped the company grow exponentially.

From my perspective, what makes Indaba distinctive is that the collaboration among its users has led to the creation of entirely new products. Indaba is the leading edge of the next wave of music business which goes beyond what the record labels have seen as their business model - the distribution of music created by artists under their control - and beyond the dramatic changes we have all witnessed in the distribution of music - Napster, Kazaa, and iTunes. Indaba has begun to shift the use of the digital platform toward the creation and production of new music in a way that was not possible before. With users collaborating over the Net, there is a new source of creativity and innovation in the broadly defined music industry which encompasses not only major labels and individual artists but also Indaba-like communities of musicians who can collaborate on a digital platform.

Indaba faces lots of challenges as it moves forward. Can it continue the team-based management approach that has defined its organization thus far? What will happen when the community grows by thousands? Will they be able to listen to their users as intently and respond to them? Will other competitors come into the space? How will they actually make money and continue to lead the way in this new wave? All of these questions are clearly on the minds of the Indaba team and it will be interesting to see how the company addresses them. In any case, Indaba is definitely one of the leading edge companies in the Alley and it is worth keeping a close eye on it.