Byta’s Focus On How We Listen Continues Invaluable Conversation About The Barriers To Music Promotion And The Need For Change

In June of this year, Byta, a private music service, raised $1.4 million dollars in seed funding from the Canadian Media Fund.  The service enables artists, labels, and approved third parties to access and securely exchange pre-released music files for the purpose of collaboration and promotion. Byta was founded in London, UK in 2015 by Marc Brown and Jen Pomphrey who then moved the company to Calgary, Canada in 2017.

This simple task of sending, receiving, and listening to music files efficiently and securely on desktop is a massive pain point within the music industry.  At best, shortcuts and insecure transfer of audio files  can result in lost time in getting a release to market and promoted. At worst, the breach of secure audio file transference can cause  music to be leaked prior to its release date, with significant financial implications. The impact of this inefficiency is felt at all levels of the industry. 

Byta co-founder and CEO, Marc Brown, noted that radio station executives have repeatedly said that “Going back to CDs would almost be an improvement.” I sat down with Chris Price, the head of BBC Radio 1 and Radio 1XTRA, to ask how this problem affected his process of music discovery. 

Chris recounted an anecdotal story about Marc Brown, back in the days when the co-founder of Byta used to plug new bands to Chris. It was a Tuesday night, and Marc was telling Chris about an exciting new band he had discovered, called The Darkness. The pair decided to see the band that evening at the Metro, a popular venue, now, sadly closed. Chris left with one of the band’s CDs and the next day gave the CD to radio host Jo Wiley. Jo played the song on the radio that very day. As Chris exclaims, “It is hard to imagine an exchange of music based on passion being as seamless as it was that day.”

Additionally, policies like ‘On Air On Sale’ now blocks radio stations from playing or promoting songs before they are released to the public. The aim of the policy is to combat copyright infringement. However, in some ways, it makes for missed promotional opportunities driven by momentary inspiration.

From Marc Brown’s vantage point, music discovery has two layers. The first and most obvious is the discovery of music by music fans. The second is the discovery of music by music industry professionals for the purpose of promoting new releases. 

As Spotify’s founder, Daniel Ek, noted, over 40,000 new songs are uploaded to Spotify daily, so artists rely on promotion to break through the noise. As of September 2020, music promotion is the last standing component of the business that is fundamentally gated.  Playlist payola or simply paying for placement is common on popular platforms like Tik Tok. Enforceable and effective FCC legislation surrounding payola currently only applies to radio airwaves.  So protection is limited, making the market unfair, sometimes determined by the amount of cash in your pocket rather than by organic attention and traction.

With this in mind, Byta launched an educational platform available through Byta.com called, #HowWeListen. A free offering that educates artists through interview series, events and storytelling. Their site, #HowWeListen aims to help artists better understand how music industry insiders holding the keys to promotional opportunities discover and listen to music.

This year, Byta is making moves, having recently announced a partnership with the Sled Island Music Festival to present Tête-à-Têtes, a series of intimate conversations between emerging artists, established musicians, and industry leaders. Upcoming for Byta is the launch of a Beta program, which is now open for registration. 

Music promotion is inevitably going to evolve tremendously over the next decade. Music consumption is freely accessible, but access to promotion is gated. This is a problem ripe for evolution and Byta is right there to start the conversion.