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You're spot on. Unfortunately, our approach was a double edged sword. No company who licenses a big catalog of music first ever survives to tell the tale. But building a two sided marketplace meant splitting half of our already thin resources in half, switching back and forth between pleasing listeners and pleasing bands, and we just weren't able to build the consumer experience necessary. In retrospect, had we focused on mobile first, built mostly listener features until that product was great, then focus on the artists, we may have had a better shot. The problem with that is, had we not built enough stuff to wow the bands and labels, we would have never gotten the kind of artists we did. We had to prove two different concepts on 1/100th the budget of our competitors, who only serve one side of the market.



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