Colossal Expands the Music Economy for Artists and Producers
Bringing top producers and artists together in an engaging app, Colossal is creating a new category of experience for music collaboration—and pushing monetization to the next level.
What’s the biggest problem for producers and artists? No business model in music right now serves their creative and monetary interests.
Colossal (colossal.fm) is here to change this by flipping the script for artists, producers, and beatmakers. Colossal have created a new paradigm in music discovery, collaboration, and monetization, via a streamlined combination of machine learning-powered discovery and commerce infrastructure to support the next generation of music creation.
It’s so compelling, producers who rarely offer beats online are coming to Colossal, including legendary hip hop producer Lex Luger, as well as hip hop and electronic beatmakers Moniquewinning (NLE Choppa), ProdbyRFP, Oshi, and Omito beats.
A quick trip through the app proves why. Colossal’s search and discovery experience connects artists with beats via a TikTok-like experience, pairing producer-created beats and supplementary videos with proprietary machine learning to return personalized recommendations. Artists looking for a beat can jump to the beat’s hook or chorus as they seek the best bed for their future track. As they do, Colossal learns what they love. Producers just have to make compelling beats; gone is the need to hustle to draw creators to their online store via third-party platforms like YouTube. Meanwhile, artists can buy beats they love in a single click, unlocking a license that’s the simplest, most transparent, and most up-to-date in the industry.
Sign up for early access to Colossal now at www.Colossal.fm.
Colossal’s unique design and functionality flows from a bigger vision, one grounded in insights from fintech. Colossal founder and CEO Paul Anthony believes music should be far more valuable and economically dynamic than it is, based on the explosion of the larger creator economy. “Some creator economy companies have grown quickly to billions in valuation,” explains Anthony. “I wondered why no company had done something similar in music tech. This lackluster growth means there are increasingly fewer monetization opportunities or ways for producers and artists to create supplemental income.”
Anthony, who built a wildly successful infrastructure company for online payments, saw the problem was the kind that fintech companies knew how to solve. There was critical infrastructure missing that would let producers make more money more easily and let artists at all points in their careers make more music. The key issue: to make money as a producer, you need to be a great entrepreneur and marketer. “The old script is, ‘Here’s a bunch of fragmented and mediocre tools, beatmaker, good luck,’” Anthony says. “We see things radically differently.”
Anthony cares deeply about music, and his fascination with music and music making began in childhood. A fan of rap and hip hop, he was also interested in tech. Anthony’s skills came into play when he became the first employee and developer at a groundbreaking London fintech startup in 2009 that grew to be one of the world’s first online payment methods, long before the likes of PayPal Credit and Klarna. As it did, Paul became CTO. Then Anthony moved to PayPal and worked as the main technical contact for some of the world’s biggest merchants.
But he saw something was missing in payments, key infrastructure to facilitate global online commerce, which, like music, was extremely fragmented. Those around him were skeptical. They changed their minds after Paul and a co-founder started Primer, which built an innovative payment processing solution. Within 18 months, Primer was valued at $425m.
Anthony also began to explore music production, to understand how music was made. This piqued his interest in the business of music, and he considered investing in the space. As he dug in, he expected to find dynamics similar to other industries.
Instead, he found a landscape riddled with platforms that required creators to rebuild their business again and again, with licensing complexities that stymied growth. He was shocked how difficult it was to find beats on these platforms, for example, and to complete sales. Beatmakers could set up a storefront, sure, but they had to find their own customers, akin to what online retailers face with a Shopify store—and hope they made it all the way through checkout. To make matters even worse, licensing was profoundly complex even on platforms aimed at indie creators.
“Most beat discovery happens via YouTube right now,” says Anthony, “which is not where artists can purchase these beats. You can’t find customers where you sell beats. You can’t find beats easily where you might be able to buy them. And you can’t understand exactly what your license lets you do. We’ve heard too many stories of artists discovering their license doesn’t cover their track after it reaches a certain level of success or once it’s performed live. Artists need transparency.”
That’s why Colossal focused on the artist problem first, which in essence is a discovery problem. Instead of forcing producers to become entrepreneurs, Colossal brings beat-seekers to them via an interface designed to make the experience easy and fun for old hands and non-experts alike. “Much the same way TikTok serves videos to people and learns what they enjoy, we’re surfacing beats to users, based on a wide range of data points and the very latest in machine-learning technology,” Anthony notes. Just open Colossal, start listening/watching, and find what you love.
Then, once beat-seekers have found the perfect beat, they can agree to the simplest license that exists in the industry. This integration of engaging discovery and frictionless commerce sets Colossal apart, and its goal is to create new forms of monetization for all music creators and eventually for other music products and services.
“We’re trying to create a new economy so that music creators can make more money. We’re creating a new pool of money for creators, not siphoning it away from an existing pool,” reflects Anthony. “Our goal is to expand the total market, to bring more creators into the creator economy.”
About Colossal
Colossal is changing how artists find and license beats, offering a user-friendly app experience, similar to Tik-Tok. Their AI-powered discovery feed lets you make more music, faster. Colossal's unified licensing structure, which provides 100% royalties to artists, is the simplest in the music industry.