Musiversal Founder Andre Miranda on Disrupting Music Production

Musiversal is the world’s first fully remote recording studio, aiming to put the world’s best musicians and orchestras in the hands of every music creator. The music startup is disrupting the cost of professional music recordings by providing session musicians with stable jobs.

The company’s core differentiator is on the business model. It selects the top 1% of session artists and puts them on a salary, offering music creators the ability to book them on-demand and have pro recording sessions with a one-hour turnaround, all over livestream. It’s like having direct access to an offline studio that’s decked out with elite musicians/gear, just without the travel and high price tag.

The salary-based model means music creators can pay around $40 for a professional recording session, which is around 10 times cheaper than booking the same kind of musician in a studio somewhere like Nashville.

Musiversal believes that there’s no better way of producing music than with the touch of a pro musician or producer, and it aims to be the go-to platform for music creators in the next few years.

I love music and I think passionately about how to make the world a better place. However, I don’t mean it in a politically correct way. I thought that the quality of life of musicians and music creators (and the economic productivity of the music industry) was not optimized. In fact it has many flaws — which are fundamentally inefficient, old, and honestly revolting at times.

I’m a firm advocate of the power of industry, technology, and capitalism to make our world a better, more livable place. So I wanted to use the technologies available today to increase the amount and quality of work that both musicians and music creators can make and at the same time decrease their costs and increase their income.

The way I found was first through shared orchestral sessions, making them accessible remotely and much cheaper. This allowed us to attract thousands of people who were not willing and able to spend money on orchestra recording sessions. A new and untapped revenue stream for musicians. A new possibility for music creators.

Then we decided to do the same at a much larger scale with single musicians. We called that Musiversal Studio, which is the platform you see today.

I’m proud to say that we’ve paid well over $1 million to musicians so far and facilitated the creation of more than 30,000 music tracks. Not only have we created many jobs, but there are also now many new tracks of music that you might even have already heard without knowing it!

This is what motivated me to start Musiversal and it’s what makes me feel that I’m making a contribution to the world. There is potential for much more.

I have to give a special shoutout to everyone in the company because everyone works their butts off to drive our business forward. More specifically, my co-founder Xavier Jameson, our CTO Javier Mey, our product manager Vinicius Castro, our head of customer success Diogo Carvalho, our orchestra queen Rita Tulha, and our head of music João Soeiro. 

We came together under one shared vision of how we can improve the current music industry and secure an exciting future for musicians and music creators. Every decision is taken through the filter of “does it make the music industry a better place or not?”

That focus helps us work together as a team, although many times we will discuss what is the best way of answering that question. Whenever we answer that question and act on it, we are at our best as a team. We ask that question from the perspective of the music creator and from the perspective of the musician.

Generally, the landscape looks like this:

• Produce music yourself with samples/virtual instruments (low cost, low quality)
• Produce music offline with real musicians/studios (very expensive, time consuming, hard to find network if you don’t have it)
• Produce music with real musicians by finding them online (hit-and-miss, pay-per-gig means expensive session rates around $150-plus for an instrument recording).

We differentiate ourselves by providing an end-to-end solution for music creators of any level to take a musical idea to fully produced reality, without requiring any background musical knowledge or any software. In addition, we provide both higher quality and a lower cost and time simultaneously.

We’re the only solution offering a full-service music production platform where you can get both the human capital (musicians/producers/engineers) and the ability to record music over livestream.

The alternatives are first gen marketplaces (serve the purpose of connecting you with a huge choice of musicians) or remote recording software solutions where you have to find the talent yourself. We do both.

It’s like Uber’s model for the taxi industry and how it created disruption. Usually you find one or the other: musician/freelance marketplaces (music made over message/email/offline) or streaming platforms for customer-to-customer collaboration.

We’re the only solution offering the ability to book musicians on a specific date/time. Usually, because all other solutions are offline, you just get your files whenever the musician has time to deliver them. Can be days or weeks. Perhaps payments for express delivery can be made. But it’s undetermined and unreliable.

We’re far cheaper than any alternative. The cheapest alternative solution is Fiverr, which is still more expensive and is very hit-and-miss and has lots of poor quality musicians on there.

We have curated musicians. Meaning we’re selective and accept less than 1% who apply. Music marketplace solutions have zero barriers to entry. You could set up a profile to become a drummer right now if you wanted to.

We are providing stable jobs for musicians. This is on the supply side, but it’s different from any other company today, perhaps ever. It simply doesn’t happen.

The business model is also different. Usually other solutions are pay-as-you-go. That also typically means a lose-lose for users and musicians — high fees, high disintermediation, etc. We’ve historically had a subscription model. Most users love it because it keeps them creating, motivated, inspired, committed to creating music, which they love (because everyone would love to just make music all the time but for those who don’t make money from music, their work life competes, so having a subscription keeps pushing them to make the time and get their value for money). 

Musiversal investors can expect three different exit scenarios. It is possible that a larger company will be interested in acquiring Musiversal (namely large music streaming companies) in order to boost their artist communities’ ability to produce better and more music. An IPO is also a possibility, especially if Musiversal continues to see demand for crowdfunding investments over time as it has seen so far. Finally, it’s also a possibility that Musiversal will be interested in buying back shares from its early investors in the future when the company has enough free cash flow to do so and if the terms of such a buyback are favorable for the company.

We want to reach 1,000 subscribers. Which means 100 musicians working for the company with stable jobs.

Financially, this means:

• $3.6 million annual run rate
• Around 3,000 sessions and around 1,000 songs produced every month
• Overall profitability as a company.

We then want to raise a Series A (within 24 months).