This essay from Marmoset and Track Club CEO & Founder Ryan Wines explores why Track Club is proud to launch with a small-batch catalog, and why, in a world of enormous music licensing catalogs, Track Club is choosing quality over quantity.
In a marketplace where music licensing companies boast an unfathomable number of tracks, it may seem crazy to launch a new alternative, based on the belief that less is more. But that’s exactly what we’re doing with Track Club, powered by Marmoset.
Apparently APM Music has nearly 1 million tracks. Other companies, Audio Network and Megatrax, both boast more than 200,000 tracks. Newer entries to the marketplace seem to have somewhere around 40k to 50k tracks, right out of the gate. By the way, who names these places anyways?
Using basic math, if you divide 50k tracks by the average size of a traditional studio album (10-12 songs), that’s the equivalent of having around 5000 vinyl records. That’s almost double the physical records my friends, Michael and Maya Gersten of Speck’s Records & Tapes, have available in their record store on any given day. It’s a smaller-sized shop, but you get the idea. Bottom line, it’s a ton of music!
Michael and Maya could choose to run a giant-sized record store if they wanted. But they too believe less is more. And it’s working. Visit them sometime at 8216 N Denver Ave, Portland, Oregon to see for yourself. The magic is real at Speck’s Records & Tapes..
Why do most music companies seem to think bigger is better?
Talk with APM customers and you’ll hear the same thing over and over. They’ll tell you the catalog is full of very average, so-so quality production music. Hundreds of thousands of mostly uninspiring production tracks. You know the music I speak of. But if you listen closely, APM customers will also tell you that if you know where to dig, and if you dig long enough, you’ll find some real gems.
My question is this: who wants to spend hours of their precious time digging through thousands of losers, just to find one gem?
At both Marmoset, and our soon-to-launch subscription brand, Track Club, we spend significant internal time and resources twice a year doing something we call “The 10% Curation Event.” In this, we carefully evaluate the performance of every song in our catalog, removing the worst performing 10%. That’s right — we strategically reduce the size of our catalog twice a year, purely to make it a better experience for our clients. (It’s a lot of work too.)
Why? Because it’s the right thing to do.
With Track Club, we’ve designed the app to feature a better catalog of music, not the biggest one. In fact, we invite you to take the challenge yourself: strap on your headphones and spend 5 minutes on Track Club… and then go spend 5 minutes with the competition. It shouldn’t take too long.
If that isn’t good enough for you, know this: Track Club is the first ever music licensing app on the planet that features 100% customizable songs. If there’s a song you like, but perhaps the drums are a bit too loud, or the guitar is too distracting — you can edit the song yourself, all in the app. You can easily mute, solo, or adjust the volume of the instruments and vocals in the song, until it meets your exact vision for your project. Or if you prefer to do the editing with your own preferred software or app on your own computer or console, you can easily download all the stems too. The choice is yours.
Our thesis is this: a meticulously curated, perpetually refined, small-batch catalog of the highest quality, that you can easily customize (in the app) to meet the specific needs of your project, is always better than any “mega” catalog out there.
Better is always better than more.
-RW
