Believe me, you’re surely not wanting to pass on this interview with Jonas Brander from Restorm, the platform for licensing music online I reviewed last month on MusicKO. I praised the service quite extensively back then, and the conversation I was fortunate enough to have with Jonas simply exemplifies the way of thinking of those with the vision and the skill to create revolutionary digital services.
You can read Part 1 of the interview below. Part 2 (“Music & You”) is right here.
Full Name: Jonas Brander
Age: 25
Startup: restorm.com
Position: media & communication
PART I
THE STARTUP
Tell us a little about your startup. How was it conceived? What are its most distinctive features in your opinion?
We built an artist-based music platform that offers solutions for the challenges of the music industry. There should be one place for everyone who loves music, one meeting point where artists, labels, promoters, media representatives and music lovers can connect to share their music, offer gigs and tickets or talk about music.
At the moment we focus to build professional and completely free tools to help artists to earn more money and create more attention while saving time. For example restorm.com allows bands and labels to sell music directly to their fans. It only takes a few minutes to set up a personal download shop, which can be embedded on their homepage or on Facebook. 90% of all sales go directly to the artists. Another feature is the connect tool that allows you to synchronize Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Soundcloud, Youtube and large Eventdatabases with each other at once. With the so-called Minipage you can embed the entire restorm.com profile anywhere on the web. Just to mention a few of our tools.
What was the original launch date?
restorm.com was launched in 2007, but it had another focus back then. Our CEO Philippe Perreaux became the main shareholder of the company in 2008 and in the course of this change we had a big personal and conceptual shift towards the vision we represent now. So the real starting point was at the end of 2008. The following two years were mainly programming to get a unique profile and stand out from other music platforms.
What has been the response so far? In which countries has it been more successful?
Since we have a clear profile, the feedback has been really good. For example, just recently there was a huge survey from a university and the biggest German independent music association. They analyzed 13 music platforms in eight categories and restorm.com won far in front of well-known services such as Bandcamp, Spotifiy or Soundcloud.
As we started in Switzerland its consequence was that we first had the most members in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. But since we are available in five languages and have a global approach, we daily get more and more bands form all over the world. So this discrepancy should be history soon. Continue reading →
