Is Ryan Leslie’s DMM The New Model For The Music Industry?
He’s been at this for a while now. Not just producing, writing, recording and performing. Since early 2014, musician and entrepreneur Ryan Leslie has been pushing his Disruptive Multimedia (DMM) artist-to-fan platform. Or as he refers to it: the first direct-to-consumer record label. He’s literally selling his music and merchandise directly to consumers and retaining all the customer and transaction data.
So when a fan texts him – and the platform supports this – he can see exactly how much (or how little) that person has spent with him and he can interact correspondingly, cutting out two of the layers artists have previously been constrained by: labels and retailers.
The reason why consumers appreciate a solution like DMM is that it gives them what they want more than anything: access. Getting closer to the artist is an absolute win for fans, and if the volume is there, it’s clearly a win for artists too. Three other rappers – 50 Cent, Nipsey Hussle and Talib Kweli – are already using DMM to engage directly with their fans, suggesting this may be a platform every artist could ultimately use.
Backstage at World of Dance with the homies @lestwinsoff & @lestwinson showing them the future after we shut down the stage with more than 200 dancers from around the globe. // Over 17K whatsapp messages and counting. // Thank you all for the support. // #MZRT // I read every message. // #NoPrisoners // 📷 @myvision100
A photo posted by Ryan Leslie (@ryanleslie) on Apr 5, 2015 at 5:48pm PDT
How did Ryan Leslie come up with this and how did he have the audacity to just do it?
As he explained at Idealab! 2013, it’s about applying best practices from one industry to another industry that’s underserved, something the music industry has not done particularly well in the Internet era. First technology takes retail and now artists create solutions for direct-to-consumer distribution? And it gets pretty serious when someone like Ben Horowitz invests.
Now, a platform like DMM doesn’t change the fact that music must still be marketed. But even that is something artists now do more and more of themselves, obviously largely through social media. If you’re discovered on SoundCloud or YouTube, marketed through their Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and have your music and merch sold via DMM, that can get you pretty far.
Is Ryan Leslie’s DMM The New Model For The Music Industry? was originally published on Reasonable Blueprint