Thanks

1) The vision is constantly changing because the competitive landscape, and in music, the legal landscape is constantly changing. We have to stay on top of that. Both have pushed and pulled on our decision making. In the beginning, we had a grand vision that we wanted to open free legal streaming to the masses and do so with a nearly unlimited catalog. The reality of music licensing is that there are several players who take varying stances on how they aim to protect their IP. For example, 2 years ago most major labels used to look the other way and release a huge number of promo tracks to their labels who were given autonomy to distribute them. Only recently have they pulled them back to a corporate level.

We’ve had to adapt to that.

We’ve also had to adapt to changes in frothiness over social networks. Users were driven by the press who drove a mania 2 years ago to social networks when ours launched. Now there’s an element of fatigue that every destination is fighting against. By becoming a distributed platform we’re counteracting some of that.

2) At times in our business we’ve done all of coding, design and PR with consultants. We’ve also done it in-house. We learned a lot from making mistakes with outsourced talent… The most important being to make sure communications are absolutely pristine. When a consultant doesn’t have the luxury of sitting in meetings and learning about hte company and its history, you have to rope in the creativity a bit and make sure to closely manage the process or it can quickly get out of control. We now make sure to always have several steps of sign-off, even if this is not procedure for the consultant. This is not because we don’t trust that person, but because if we don’t hear from him or her for 2 weeks and when we finally do the product is garbage, we’ve just wasted two weeks of time…and money in a situation we could’ve avoided.

Hope my answers help. If you have any further questions post them here, and I’ll be happy to answer.

-Jordan

And since Darren opened the gates to questions from the peanut gallery, here are two:
1) How much did your vision change from the first day code was written to where you are now? There are lots of examples of companies that shift strategy and product somewhat after development begins…. curious if you also had to change tack, and if so, to what extent?
2) You mentioned the split of doing some advertising in-house and some through partnerships. When it comes to other aspects of your business – coding, design, PR — what functions have you done -in-house and which have you outsourced? What lessons have you learned from the process regarding which functions can or cannot be outsourced? If you have outsourced, what lessons have you learned regarding how to manage the process better?