We’re pleased to announce that our KISS Remixer app is now live on iOS. We completely rebuilt the app from the ground up, and partnered with KISS to create a highly engaging and social music creation experience for consumers and a new model for commercial radio and the music industry.
Here’s why we think it’s a big deal….
For years brands have been looking to engage consumers through music. It’s a major passion point for consumers and a key way that brands try to engage their target audience. Yet most of the experiences they provide are reactive and passive. Giving away free track downloads and sponsoring music festivals - sure it uses music to reach consumers, but it doesn’t truly engage them.
Roll in smartphones, they offer content creation experiences in everyone’s pockets. The new holy grail for brands is getting their audience creating content empowered by the brand. Easy for photo sharing (Instagram) or video sharing (Viddy), but tricky for music - how do you get a mass audience of non-musicians creating music around a brand??
That’s why we built the remixer and partnered with KISS to reach their listeners - fanatical about music, and exactly the right demographic of the content creation generation who love to create and share everything they do - and now they can do it around the music they love.
What does it mean for the Music Industry?
Hello music industry naysayers, here’s a completely new way of monetizing an existing digital asset (the multi-track recordings or stems) without cannibalizing your traditional revenue streams. These assets were mostly sitting on hard drives in A&R departments and we’ve worked out a way to monetize them in a repeatable and scalable way. By partnering with commercial radio groups, we intend to bring substantial distribution for a premium price interactive product.
We’ve had great support from labels, managers, artists, publishers and PROs who have been patient with us throughout the process whilst we’ve iterated and tweaked the model. To all those who have supported us - thank you.
What we’ve realised in the process is there’s a great consumer desire to interact with music and so we’re pretty focused on developing a stream of interactive music products that fit the same parameters as the remixer… Accessible, Evergreen, Interactive and Social.
What does it mean for radio?
Commercial radio is looking for new ways to engage and monetize audiences. Radio still reaches 69.7% of adult Americans every day and 89% of the UK audience every week – it’s the #1 music discovery mechanism for consumers. People who think radio is dying are mad. App developers need audiences. Radio stations have massive audiences and a willingness to try things to engage and monetize them.
Working with commercial groups enables creation of a new revenue stream (participation on paid track downloads), helps monetize unsold ad inventory, creates new sponsorship and programming/editorial opportunities and also gets listeners creating and sharing around the brand.
What’s next for Soniqplay?
Working with radio partners means we can reach massive audiences and scale quickly. We plan to quickly roll-out in the UK and have started to sign similar deals internationally. Australia and US - you’re up next.
Working with some of the worlds most established media brands gives us an altruistic dynamic of leveraging and monetizing large audiences, and creating a new engagement for content creation on a mass consumer level.
We’re hard at work putting similar deals in place around the world, and at the same time creating a whole new generation of interactive music creation white label apps for media and consumer brands. Watch this space…
