Interview with GrooveZoo CEO Jeremy Korn

By: Rick Landers

GrooveZoo CEO, Jeremy Korn, has a vision that aligns with the old adage; “Think Globally, Act Locally” with his new site’s mission to optimize collaboration on the web by songwriters, musicians and producers. The site has established forums based on key categories of interest to those who write music, record, produce and market music to pull together the typically disparate pieces of the music business puzzle into one spot.

The forums are titled: Songwriters, Producers, Mixology, Mastering, Promotions, and Gearheads. A songwriter’s creative journey will move to all of these areas from the incubation of a song idea to and through recording and production, marketing and sales, along with a technical spot for music makers to dig down into the details of gear. GrooveZoo is a “connector” and a communication zone where those interested in the cross-pollination of ideas, music-related education and creativity will find fertile soil.

Jeremy Korn

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Rick Landers: Looking at the GrooveZoo website before its official launch, I see that it’s core function seems to be a place for guitarists and others in the music business to reach out to one another to learn from one another, as well as be a platform for forming alliances or collaborations. How would you describe the GrooveZoo mission or purpose?

Jeremy Korn: Our guiding light at GrooveZoo is a short, but very powerful missions statement, “To increase the ease of creativity for songwriters, musicians and producers.” From my experience when people have to think about the tools or the process, their creative juice drops exponentially. Some of this is learning your tools so well that it becomes second nature.

But, who has time to learn all instruments, mix and master this well? So the real key is to work with others, which is more fun and yields a much better end product anyways. As a semi-professional guitar player I can play bass and keyboards at a fairly high level. However, it’s not my specialty and takes a great deal of thought to switch gears and do it right. I’ve found my best work comes when I, and the people I’m working with, are on the same page and truly focus on what we each do well.

When this happens everyone is in the moment and flows through the creative process, then everything instantly goes to a higher level. I’ve seen this happen in the recording studio and the computer lab. It’s universal and is the foundation of our society’s progress.

GrooveZoo Screen Shot

Rick: Before embarking on a challenging endeavor, it’s important to check out the direct and indirect competition to your business goals and objectives. What did you find available that was similar, but didn’t fill the need of musicians that GrooveZoo intends to cover?

Jeremy: I found several sites that had the right idea but had the wrong implementation. It was blatantly obvious that the people who create these sites don’t have the personal perspective of a songwriter, musician and producer. Their workflow is awkward, ability to match members is inaccurate, and they all seem to encourage free use of files with Creative Commons.

I live and breathe every aspect of music and have my pulse on what the music community needs and desires. It mostly revolves around three facts: first is that the rug has been pulled out from under our feet with file sharing. Creative Commons is not helping the matter. What incentive do people have to create great tracks if the tracks aren’t protected digitally much less legally?

Second is that we’ve been given all the tools to do it ourselves but have not been connected so that we can do it for each other. The Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is one of the greatest inventions ever made, but it has so many aspects that require specialization, from the performance, to the mix, the master, and last but not least a producer who is the ringleader with the vision and quality control.

In fact, the DAW is more of a weapon than a tool when used incorrectly, and the carnage comes in the form of mediocre or just plain bad tracks that flood the market and hinder potential buyers from finding the good stuff. It’s no wonder that nobody wants to pay for music when it’s been devalued with an onslaught of garbage.

Third is that most musicians aren’t business people and don’t want to spend the time, effort, or money to create contracts and market themselves. This is completely understandable, but again you’ve given the community at large the tool but not the process that can lead them to success.

All musicians want to get better at what they do and need to know that they’re making progress. Progress comes in the form of truly impressing their friends with a genuine “Wow, that’s great!” to actually monetizing their efforts. We addressed all of these issues in our online GrooveZoo application.

GrooveZoo Screen Shot

Rick: Does GrooveZoo offer opportunities for musicians to collaborate musically or is it limited to passing information and, maybe, lessons learned between them?

Jeremy: Musicians learn by working with other musicians that are comfortably better than they are. Our AutoMatch feature matches people within an optimized window of their skill level so they can pull each other up. It will be fun to see the community at-large improve. This combined with everyone leveraging each other to create higher-quality music and production is the path to a truly next-generation label that is created for the people, by the people.

Rick: What kinds of technical challenges have you had to overcome in order allow the site to match your vision?

Jeremy: This is just the first revision of the site, and my vision is constantly evolving. We are bursting with ideas and have the feature list stacked up for monthly releases through mid 2012. To accommodate the fast implementation of new ideas we created a Window Servicing Manager using an AJAX framework.

This allows us to quickly and easily bolt on new features in the form of modules that we call Page Elements. While this took a significant investment in architecture, time, and effort we know it will pay huge dividends to our users. This not only allows us to offer new modules quickly, but also allows the user to create custom pages using a drag and drop UI.

They can add, delete, change, move, and resize page elements and then save it as their custom pages. This allows them to maintain a clean streamlined user interface and allows us to offer a large selection of modules without cluttering up the tool.

Jeremy Korn

Rick: What’s your background with respect to music, working with web-based technologies and collaborative situations or events?

Jeremy: I’ve been playing music for over 30 years and have been recording and producing for over 12 years. I’m a degreed Electrical Engineer and have worked for Dolby Laboratories and Apple Computer.

I owned and operated a professional recording studio, Akorn Studios, for five years, as well as a web development company, Mindshare Productions, for eight years. Throughout the years I migrated from core engineering to business development. Almost everyone I know agrees that the GrooveZoo venture leverages the perfect mesh of my experience.

Rick: GrooveZoo kicked off its “Go Wild” competition a short while ago. How did that come about and tell us about the Rock the Block NYE Vegas event.

Jeremy: From the start GrooveZoo planned to run monthly promotions that help musicians move their career forward, because that’s why GrooveZoo exists. While planning the first few promotions for 2011, my Promotions Manager, Ian McQueen [ISM Entertainment] contacted me with the idea. I loved it right away. It was great way to make a big splash and kick off our launch. It also shows people that we are serious and here to stay.

Rick: Are you expecting your site’s visitors to experience a new tool that will raise their “game” to another level?

Jeremy: Absolutely. I think people will try it out based on curiosity, but after a few sessions they will experience and then truly understand the value. Part of this will happen immediately where they will have better songs and production; the other is where they improve by working with people who are comfortably better than they are.

One of the most exciting parts is that we can track the trend of each member’s improvement. While this information is held private, it is useful to show trends using absolute values and in anonymous form to encourage others to join and experience improvement as well.

Rick: Does GrooveZoo have an extended reach internationally for those musicians that don’t speak a common language? For example, if a songwriter from Mali would like to collaborate with other musicians from England, Russia, Japan and the U.S., and there are language barriers, does your site take that into account and make such collaborations possible?

Jeremy: The site is open to people worldwide and supports people from all countries working together. It will be interesting to see what kinds of mash-up style people create reaching not only across borders, but also around the world. As far as language we support English right now, but may eventually include auto translation.

Rick: Growing a business on the web can take phenomenal leaps and, basically, explode in popularity, but more often the business growth takes time. Where are you with your expectations with respect to projected growth, coupled with tenacity to make the site successful and of high value to its visitors?

Jeremy: We are well funded and have a fairly conservative revenue model planned that will keep us going for quite a while. With that said, from a technology standpoint we are planning for fast growth. Our database took five months to design and optimize for speed and easy expandability. We are committed to a great user experience, which means loading UI elements and audio files in the shortest time possible.

The database is ready to handle whatever the world wants to throw its way. Furthermore, we have a cluster of servers at launch that can support well over 300,000 users and can increase this to accommodate over 2,000,0000 users in a matter of days, and over 10,000,000 in a matter of weeks. We are ready for the world and are pretty darn sure the world is ready for us.

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GrooveZoo Screen Shot