UK’s Amazing Media To Bring Indie Background Music To U.S.

Amazing Media is coming to the States. The Newcastle upon Tyne-based company began in digital music sales then developed a web radio station, Amazing Radio, that broadcast the music they carried for sale.  This base allowed them to take advantage of the opportunity to provide indie background music to UK retailers and restaurants.  Now they're bringing this mix to the U.S.

Amazing Music is a combination of two web services, Amazing Tunes (ecommerce) and Amazing Radio (web radio). These paired services are the base on which Amazing Media developed their background music service.

Paul Campbell developed Amazing Media by first launching the Amazing Tunes ecommerce platform and then building Amazing Radio on top of it. Most of the now 65,000 musicians selling music on Amazing Tunes agreed to allow streaming on Amazing Radio.

The station began by featuring top sellers from Amazing Tunes then adding DJs to host shows. The station helps market the music but the true revenue generator is Amazing Instore, a background music service:

"Amazing customizes the music for each client, so what you hear in a clothing store will be different than what you hear in a restaurant. In some case, clients want ads — maybe to promote sales going on — and Amazing creates those as well and builds them into the sound track."

Campbell says musicians make much more on the licensing deals than they would on Spotify. It's also done well for Amazing Media:

"This leads to three revenue streams: a license for the technology, the music, and the ads. Only the music fees get shared with the artist, and the terms vary. This new business helped the startup enough that Campbell changed the terms of Amazingtunes.com, so that the musicians get 100 percent of the price."

Amazing Media has "deals with more than 1,000 retailers and restaurant chains across the U.K." and is now working on the States.

Amazing's development is interesting. Starting a music store and marketing it with a web radio station gave them critical mass that they could then leverage to create an indie background music store. That may not have been their initial intent but it's potentially a much more powerful way to monetize digital music than ecommerce and web radio.

Amazing's biggest danger may be in trying to do too many different things:

"Amazing is working with festivals across the U.K, and it's starting to put on concerts that it records and broadcasts. It plans to edge into more traditional revenue streams such as publishing, merchandise, and ticketing and will likely add its own label, even releasing albums."

This ambitious company bears watching.

Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith blogs about business at Flux Research: Business Changes and about dance at All World Dance: News. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.