Music2 Text Helps Labels Establish a Direct to Fan SMS Relationship

Music2 Text is an easy to use – direct to consumer sms distribution service for record labels that recently took first place at Music Tech Pitch 4.5.

After demoing the service a few weeks ago, I was completely blown away. I was surprised on how user friendly the cms system was as I uploaded my mp3 and received a short code to text in less than 45 seconds! The service is currently only available in the UK now, but will be expanding to the U.S very soon. Here is an interview I had with Music2 Text’s CEO, Denver Thomas.

How long have you been around?
We launched in 2006. We are not rookies we have been around for a while.

Is your service focused more on marketing music for the labels or actually helping them to make more sales?
Our technology is designed to create a mobile distribution service triggered by sms. What we do is we give record labels the ability to sell music via sms directly to consumers.

Our business model is very simple. If you want to give away music, you can upload it to the system and use it for free. If you want to sell music, you pre-pay a small fee to activate the track and we give you a short code to give to your fans to text. We also capture the mobile number every time they use the short code and the record labels get to build a sms list as well. A sms fan is very important, because they chose to opt-in via their phone. We want to help record label establish a direct to consumer sms relationships

How were you able to create a technology like Music2 Text so many years ago?
That’s a good question, Kelland. To be honest it didn’t all happen at once, it happened in phases. I knew back in 2006, that sms was a technology in its on right and I also knew that the mobile web and social networks would eventually merge. What we actually developed is a distribution standard, because it wasn’t a mobile distribution standard worldwide.

We are very cutting edge and some people were saying we were 5-10 years ahead of the game. We already have html5 mobile solutions sorted out and it will be coming online very soon.

Is there a lot competition within your vertical?
No, because most of mobile competition so far has been focused on mobile apps. We focus on sms gateway. In my opinion, what we were doing was very risky and it could have went wrong, but it didn’t. As far as what we’re concerened we are not reaping the rewards of our labor yet, but it’s gonna happen this year.

How has the increased popularity with streaming music services affected what we do?
We are in a very unique area of music industry so we aren’t necessarily affected by streaming music services like Spotify and other factors. We work harmoniously we other distribution systems, so if you are a label and you are distributing a single through iTunes we aren’t interfering with that. By all means we are not a replacement service for Amazon or iTunes. We are just another way for consumers to purchase music online and the delivery format just happens to be sms.

How do consumers store their music wants its downloaded via shortcode?
A consumer can store their music on their mobile device, they can upload to iTunes, their window media player or any other mobile device.

Comments

[Joshua Barnes]

This is unbelievably awesome! The opportunities this presents indie artists are absolutely huge, especially if they are already touring. I think I'm going to do a vlog post on this!

[me]

crooks! dont ever use this service