Please introduce yourself
My name is Vibhor Goel, founder of ‘Deliver My Tune’. I was born and brought up in Delhi. I did my school from Delhi, from St. Mark’s Sr. Sec. Public School and I think I was lucky enough to study in that school since I got a lot of opportunities to explore myself, nurture my talents, and bring the best in me. My teachers were extremely supportive and always encouraged me to push my limits and create something big. In my school days only I developed the interest for extra curricular activities and started enrolling in management and organization work.
I got the opportunity to work for few of the international organizations and represent India at many platforms. I was the member of the organizing committee and student council as well. All the learning that I garnered in the school, gave me enough confidence to be able to start a company at such a young age. Right now I’m in the final year of my B.Tech in Aerospace Engineering from Amity University Noida.
When and how did you think about Deliver My Tune?
About 3 years ago, I was learning guitar and my guitar teacher decided to put up an album, and I was managing it. Like I mentioned, with all my experience in the school and with a strong knack towards management from childhood, I extended my hand for managing the whole process, starting from the launch, physical and & digital distribution and everything else associated with it. My teacher was excited for his entire burden was being taken care of by me and at the same time I was also excited because this was my first music venture. While working on this small project, I
realized that the physical distribution was very easy, We got it done in less than a week, but the digital distribution was a pain. It took us a long time to find our way and get through.
It was then; I decided that there should be a platform, which is dedicated to ease out things for all the artists as far as digital distribution is concerned. I realized that the artist’s job is to sing, not to get into the hassle of going through the tedious process of distribution, because singing and procuring all that is needed to record a song in itself is a tough task and it is carried out entirely by the artist alone. Once the song is recorded, the next step is distribution and my entire focus was to take away this burden from artist.
From whom you got inspiration to start DeliverMyTune and who is your mentor ?
I would say that Steve Jobs, co-founder & ex- CEO of Apple, is the inspiration of my life, and has been from a very long time. The way he carried out things in his professional life, was a big source of motivation for. The one thing that changed my life in his words is ” when you grow up you are tend to get told that the world is the way it is and try not to bash in to much, have a small family and live your life in it but that is very limited life. The day you realize that the world was made by people that were no smarter than you, you can change things and you can make things that other
people can use and that is limitless.”
I feel that there are certain things, which once your hear pluck the deepest string of your heart. I related to this particular statement to an extent that from the moment I heart this I resolved to change things, put a dent in the universe. There is no reason, not to follow your heart. Dream Big became my mantra ever since. If we talk about a mentor then I would say that the world is my mentor. I try to learn from everyone. Everyone out there teaches you something new, something which you do not know, and something which can be altered and used for your own good. I
strongly believe that till the day you have the will to learn, you can do anything.
Introduce your Co-Founder/Founders and Team.
Deliver My Tune doesn’t have any co-founder. I Vibhor Goel am the sole founder but we are blessed with a very passionate and hard working team. We were able to pull this kind of work only because of the passion and commitment of the team.
Lakshay Singh is the head developer. I have known Lakshay since my school days and one of the things I have known about him is that he never quits, come what may. He is one of the most hardworking part of the team and knows how to accomplish his responsibilities and give maximum outputs.
Aryaman Gupta leads digital Marketing and social media division. He is a great web content developer and a very good campaign designer. He was the reason we were able to pull off more than 3 thousands like on Facebook before the launch. He is a good critical thinker and is great in crises.
Nidhi Pathak is our head analyst and the youngest member of the team. At such a young age she understands the importance of the research data in a company. I would say her work is the support for all of us because without the database, we are direction-less.
There are few more people who helped us in and out in many ways, I believe, every bit of contribution brick by brick has played a significant role in making the company what it is today.
Explain more about Deliver My Tune, what makes you special and how is it different from others?
DMT is India’s first aggregator website. Most of us don’t know what exactly an aggregator is. Let me try and explain it with an example. You must be using online music application like gaana, saavn, and the most popular one iTunes to listen to music. These applications are easy to use, have millions of songs with them, which you can buy easily (some of them are free also). One thing you cant do is that as a musician, it’s not possible for you to sell your song on these platforms. It’s not that this can’t be done, but it will take a lot of time and consume a lot of energy for someone to do that. You will have to deal with each store differently, call them, speak to them, meet their needs, formatting issues etc. If at all the store will refuse, it will be very disheartening for the artist. From the store’s side, it is difficult to deal with a single artist, so they refuse providing the services.
Now through us, there is an easier solution to all the chaos that the artist was previously Going through. We’ll complete all the technical and financial requirements for all the stores and we’ll provide a single platform for all the artists. The artist can come to us and give the audio file and artwork and we’ll take care of the rest. We’ll encode it, decode it and fulfill all the technical & financial requirements for all the stores at once. So basically it’s a win-win situation for all the people. The artist, us and the music store.
This is just the starting. Once the music is live on all the stores, the music is sold. It is listened and Downloaded by many people. Based upon that, royalties are generated. The sales report is generated. So instead of the stores sending the sales report and the royalty to every artist individually, they send it to us. We process it, bifurcate it and send it individually to all the artists. So it’s a two way process. We are a mediator for the artist.
Digital distribution market
The sad part is that Indian musicians are not aware of digital distribution market, so right now we don’t have a competitor. The best competitor we can think of is a music label. What Deliver My Tune offers is a lot different from what label does. First thing, the label offers the services but charges a bigger proportion of royalty than what Deliver my tune does.
We take 10% royalty and give back 90% to the artist which is highest in the country. This way, through us the artist, in the most simple words, is able to make more money. If we discuss how we are better than a label, to that, I would say that apart from the Royalty aspect mentioned above firstly, we don’t ask for a contract, i.e. we don’t propagate the music of the artist binding him in a contract, or taking away his control over the song rather we give 100% right and 100% control to the artist, lastly whenever you distribute music through a label you’ll always see the label’s name around all the stores beside the artist’s name.
This is simply because the label has strict terms and conditions for music distribution according to which sometimes the artist has to surrender all the rights and control to the label itself moreover one thing which cannot be denied is that it is almost impossible for a young singer or a beginner to reach big, renowned and famous music labels. On the contrary, if you distribute music through us, The only name we propagate is the name of the artist.
These are a bunch of benefits which a person will get when he comes to DMT rather than going with a label. Even Outside India I don’t think we have any competitors because the market is so big that we all can easily share it. Moreover there are not more than 15-20 aggregators in the world, which are fully functional. So it’s not the competition that bothers us, it’s just the quest to provide quick, time bound and good quality service. This is our primary concern. Oh and not forgetting one more thing, making more and more people aware about the market of digital music distribution
and the strength in the online music stores.
What challenges did you face while setting up DeliverMyTune? How did you overcome?
Difficulties were countless. Like I said, DMT has come a long way…. To begin with, we were unable to establish our website; firstly, owing to financial setbacks, and secondly, because our website was a little more complex compared to others. We had to change 12 developers until we found the one who finally designed our website. Once our website was operational, the next challenge was to obtain permission from the Indian music industry to begin work. After eight months of struggle, DMT’s enthusiasm was finally recognized, and the secretary of the Indian music industry
granted us permission to begin operations. That was not it though, The next problem we faced was, getting permission from all the stores. The national stores were easier to deal with but, the international stores were difficult to reach, let along dealing with them. Moreover almost all the Indian stores were not familiar with the business model because there hasn’t been a single music aggregator throughout the country till now. Access to the international stores and awareness in the Indian music industry about what DMT does are both very important things when you want to form business associations.
Apart from these, in order to get through a contract, how you market yourself is key, so that was another hurdle. Keeping these major difficulties aside, the other issues faced by us dealt with building a strong and able team, and training our people right from scratch. In a startup, DMT included, it is challenging to retain the employees, since there is relatively less to offer them. In the end, however, there is only one strategy that I believe in applying, and that is, to keep working your way through it all. One day it will all be fine; one day, all our problems will go.
What’s the Current Path, Deliver My Tune Funding Status and Future plans?
Currently Deliver My Tune is looking for seed funding. We have successfully distributed 152 songs till date and those includes songs for artist like Brodha V feat Benny Dayal, Shibani Khyshab and many more. We have more than 5000 likes over our Facebook page and few thousand followers over linkedIn, we will be launching our Deliver My Tune blog by mid of august and expect it to reach half a million visitors per month by the first quarter.
If you would like, you can share a few words about VID.
VID is a good initiative and especially for the upcoming Entrepreneurs, who can take motivation and learning from the existing Entrepreneurs. We wish you all the very best for future.
all the best bro, proud to be part of amity family