Rormix Offers Indie Musicians A Mobile Platform For Promoting Music Videos [Updated]
Rormix is a nicely done curated app for discovering indie music videos. Taking a mobile first approach, they launched what founder Amman Ahmed described as a "very buggy" mobile app in late 2013 and then engaged their community of music fans for direction. Using established discovery tools, from choosing a specific musician as a starting point to offering a feed of trending videos, the site and mobile app are simple, clean and designed for finding and sharing new music. Unsigned artist with a music video? You should definitely submit it to Rormix.
Rormix Inspired By Unsigned Artists On YouTube
Rormix founder Amman Ahmed writes that, as he worked with YouTube via a previous music tech venture, he was inspired by all the "unsigned/emerging music videos" he was finding:
"Artists were creating great videos but these were then getting lost in an ocean of diverse content. Artists are great at making music but maybe marketing seemed to be their pitfall. As an average user, finding great content was difficult on YouTube. This got me thinking… 'Would it not be easier to have one platform for this type of specific content which fed me content suited to my taste?'"
Ahmed states in his post that his team started with a particular strength in marketing. So creating an app that can be viewed as a marketing app for music videos (which are themselves marketing tools) and then marketing the app through the growing community of users enjoying the videos may sound a bit convoluted but is one example of how such startups are making big things happen with limited budgets.
From what I'm seeing the video are all or mostly from YouTube. This makes Rormix a good way to extend what you're doing on YouTube rather than fragmenting your efforts.
However if they include hosting in the future (I'm checking on this and will update) But Rormix also has the potential to grow into an alternative destination as well as an extension of YouTube.
Update: Amman Ahmed responded to say that:
"In two weeks we will move away from YouTube and host all the videos on our own servers. This will allow us to offer offline mode. The ability to exit the app and still listen to the music which you cannot do on the YouTube IOS app. It will also allow us to launch our 'quick discovery' feature aka 'Tinder for Music videos'."
Rormix Reports Success To Date
Ahmed recently wrote me to share a number of milestones achieved along the way. In addition to growing a curated mix of 4000 music videos from unsigned artists they've achieved 100k app downloads with users in 170 countries.
Rormix also has a presence in major UK gyms providing a curated stream to gym screens resulting in 2 million monthly views of indie videos. That's an especially cool accomplishment and opens up interesting potential for finding new fans.
Rormix also received a £250k seed round from The North West Fund and an angel investor.
Unsigned artist with a great music video? Submit it here.
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch) also blogs at DanceLand. Send news about music tech startups and services, DIY music biz and music marketing to: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
