World Rythm: When Innovation meets AD & PR Lab
On the 6th semester of our studies at Panteion University in the department of Communication, Media & Culture, in the frame of AD & PR Lab we attended “Startup Lab”. Through this semester, we had the opportunity to take lessons from two professionals from the industries of Real Estate and Radio. As a final task for this course, we had to choose one of these two industries and fulfill a project for this. Our team’s love for music led us in choosing the Radio Industry and so, our final task was to create a new start-up company that would be included in the category of audio, music or radio.
Our team, Social Butterflies, wanted to create something that would have an impact on users’ life and would actually solve a problem. The idea came to us when one member of our team confessed that a few months ago was bewitched with Russian Rap but was unable to discover such music and songs through YouTube. She complained that it was really challenging for her to discover the kind of music she wanted to listen among the chaotic number of radio stations around the world, whilst it was almost impossible to do so when she searched for radio stations coming from abroad. That was the moment when our idea was created.
World Rythm was then born. World Rythm would be a platform where each user could find all digital radio stations categorized based on country and the kind of music they provided. Imagine opening a website and the first thing you would see, would be the map of the world. On top of each country, a musical note would be placed; the user may choose the country of their liking and search for the genre they prefer. Small tabs with music categories would appear (rap, rock, RnB etc), and by clicking on a kind of music, multiple radio stations that play this specific genre on that country would appear.
In order to see whether a website like this would appeal to the Greek audience, we created two focus groups with the audiences that could be our potential users; the first one consisted of 7 people aged from 16 to 24, the second one consisting of 5 people, aged from 35 to 50. Almost all participants answered that despite listening to music from other countries, they fail to discover music from abroad especially through radio. Moreover, 1/3 of the participants mentioned that they have difficulty in discovering the genre of music they want to listen through radio and most of the time, they can only name one radio station for each genre.
We believed in World Rythm and so we started creating our business strategy. In order to acquaint our start-up, we thought that we could create advertising banners that would be displayed on social media and on websites with a great amount of interaction with our target group. We also decided to create informative and promotional articles that would be provided in websites with great appeal to our older target group. We would emphasize on our uniqueness, as no other of our competitors provides all the radio stations around the world based on country & kind of music.
Next step in our Business Model, and maybe the most crucial one, was the indication of the best possible sources of revenue. Our team proposed two different sources. The first one was through advertisements, either by collaborating with Google, in which we could sell our advertising space through Google Adsense, or by selling this space directly to brands. Our second idea was the creation of a digital radio party called, World Rythm Party, which would be a part of our website. In these parties, DJs from all around the globe, would be invited to play live streaming music in our platform. This event would be a collaboration with a digital radio station with whom we would split the expenses. Each user that would like to attend in this party shall purchase first a ticket in order to get a code number. The user would use this code to sign in on our platform and “attend” the concert. We also thought that we could have some sponsors in each party, the display & promotion of which would vary based on the amount of their sponsorship. With these incomes, we could cover the conservation of our equipment, the utilization of a workforce with great experience in UX and radio industry, and also our expenses for advertising our brand.
World Rythm stands for the idea that music is a means of connecting people no matter their geographical or cultural differences, and this is a value we tried to establish in every aspect of our business model.
Konstantina Angelidou, Grasiela Varkari, Myrto Galanopoulou, Katerina Somi, Margarita Kammenou
Betty Tsakarestou, Domnika Skreta
