Thursday, December 3, 2009

Business ideas in bulk

Just some notes on some business ideas I had and the research I did about it…

1. The realistic one

My girlfriend is a pianist. Everyday she carries a heavy bag of scores. Chopin, Mozart, Schubert… All magnificent musicians, but they are breaking her back! For a geek like me the solution seems easy: just use electronic scores and a kindle-like device for reading them everywhere! If you know a musician, you know that reading score is not enough, this device should also let the musician write annotations on the score.

On top of the huge advantage of being lighter, some features could be added:
  • Real Time analysis of the music played and page turned automatically (did you noticed that a pianist often need someone to turn his pages?)
  • Learning functions like showing the notes names, hiding a part of the score to train learning by heart…
  • Playing the score with midi to give and example or to play the orchestra part…
  • Transferring annotations (e.g. between teacher and student)

On the business side, the system could be coupled with an itunes-like system for selling scores. The simplest paper score cost 10 to 40 euros. To my mind it would not be difficult to sell them really cheaper over the internet (I am not naive, they are not expensive because of paper cost! However the usual take less margin, sell more could work).

When I first thought about this, I was really convinced it was a great idea! Then I thought about what I learnt at It Transfert barcamp: if you do not have competitors, this is because there is no market for that. So I checked a little bit what could be the competitors for my idea. I found two of them:

Music Reader, http://www.musicreader.net

This is a software that allows displaying electronic scores. It can run on desktop, laptop and tablet pc. The advantage is that it is really cheap (less than 100$) if you already have the hardware. However I do no know that many musician having a tablet pc, and laptop or desktop does not seems convenient. It implements all the features I talked about previously and add a special pedal to turn pages, half-page turn (to have the end of the current page and the beginning of the next one), metronome… Actually these are some good ideas to get inspired by.

In the “about us”, we learn that the company has been founded in 2008, and that the software has been started in 2002. It has been written by a student during his master. Wanted to check the turnover but did not find relevant information.

MuseBook, http://www.musebook.com

This software is built by a Korean company. It is designed to be installed on a tablet pc however the cost is 900$. They intelligently provide an academic license which is 600$ for 5 licenses. An interesting function is that if you are playing to piano, it can listen what you are playing and turn the page automatically. The website has not been updated since 2004…

Ok this seems really great! Why isn’t everyone using it?

I think this business cannot be profitable, or at least not yet. Musicians, like a lot of readers, like to have the “score” object in hand and write on it. Someone willing to make money with this idea should be really careful about this and take it into account from the start of product design and marketing planning.

On top of that, if I think about my wife, she is playing piano 4 to 8 hours a day, and already sometimes suffering from headaches… What if she would have to look at a screen all day long? It would be awful. I think a big competitive advantage would be to implement the thing on e-ink device (which can be difficult because it must have the annotation features)…


next ideas later ...

1 comment:

  1. Reading this post made me think of Jordan Rudess live performances in dream theater (for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4iuibP4g4I): He is using a tablet PC to show its score, wonder what soft he's using.

    another link on this subject : http://www.irisa.fr/imadoc/equipe/Sebastien_Mace/

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