Sales Marketing

vivoh.com:

a social marketplace for music fans

Sales of music CDs have plummeted 20% in the past year and the music industry finds itself in a crisis. Big ticket artists, like Madonna, have struck deals with companies like Live Nation to monetize the live concert experience, but this option is not accessible to independent musicians who cannot afford the high costs of video production. Musicians are using new social tools like MySpace and Facebook to connect with their fans, but there are significant costs to participate in each new social network, and no clear and direct renumeration for musicians that do participate.

Vivoh will sell live event videos to fans both at the show and around the world through a vibrant fan network called .

Artists, venues, labels and fans all win from the combination of our simple video capture devices, automated distribution system and zero-effort social contribution tools.

will pay musicians, labels and venues hundreds to thousands of dollars a month for doing what they want to do: perform in front of their fans.

will provide fans with VIP access to their favorite musicians, and provides equitable compensation and control to musicians and their labels.

Fans share the live experience with other fans in the club or around the world using text messaging, images and videos from camera phones and online chat rooms to become participants alongside their favorite musicians in the live experience.

will be a vibrant marketplace where musicians will be paid directly for their creative output and where fans get direct access to their favorite musicians.

The Experience

A new band "Alberta Highlife" has been making waves on the Internet. They are in the middle of their tour across American and receiving great press from local newspapers and blogs.

Vivoh is helping Alberta Highlife connect with fans before the show, during the show, and after the show, and paying the band to participate.

On Tuesday the band arrives into Portland, OR. The lead singer Jackson McFrey has been cell phone blogging through Vivoh.com. The day of their show in Portland Jackson receives a text message on his phone reminding him to call in with an update; he dials the number from the text message, and talks for five minutes about what he did the previous night after the show in Seattle, talks about his favorite breakfast food, and then hangs up. After a short delay (so his agent can verify the recording), the recording goes out to thousands of fans who have subscribed to his audio blog in iTunes. Fans can also listen to the audio blog through Facebook, MySpace, or on Vivoh.com.

That day the bass guitarist Cindy Williams is walking down the street and is recognized by one of her fans. The fan asks to take a picture with her cell phone and Cindy is happy to oblige. She suggests that the fan submits the picture to Vivoh.com so the image will appear in Cindy's Facebook profile. The fan sends the image from her cell phone to abqik1@r.postjobfree.com with the tag " alberta highlife " and the image automatically appears in Cindy's Facebook and MySpace feed. Cindy suggests to the fan that she can listen to the cell phone blog through Vivoh.com and purchase music from the band, and the fan becomes a new customer on Vivoh.com.

That night Alberta Highlife plays their live show at the Holocene nightclub. Fans at the show send videos and images from their cell phones which show up in their Facebook and MySpace pages automatically. Fans around the US and around the world have subscribed to these feeds and immediately see the new images from the live show on Facebook. On Vivoh.com fans can chat and discuss the band as they see these videos appear.

The day after the show, Alberta Highlife sends a message to their fan email list indicating that the live show from the Holocene is available for sale for $10 through Vivoh.com. 50 fans purchase the show the first day, and Alberta Highlife gets $300 for this. The nightclub Holocene automatically displays a five minute clip of the video on their website, and 10 fans visiting the calendar page see the Alberta Highlife video clip and decide to purchase it. Fans of Alberta Highlife write blogs and place the five minute clip inside their blogs, and another 90 people reading these blogs see the clip and purchase the video. After two days, Alberta Highlife has made $900 by doing nothing more than performing for their fans as they love to do.

Project Stages

User Acquisition and Data Gathering: Vivoh will spend the first three months building free services (cell phone audio blogging and cell phone photo sharing) to provide clear value to musicians by connecting them to their fans. Vivoh will do a test run with 10 capture devices (provided by founder Chris Dawson's company Box Populi http://www.boxpopuli.com) in Portland, OR to evaluate the quality and viability. As development of the services component is progressing we will build a cross-referenced database of musicians and venues. After we have completed beta on these services we will announce the services to musicians and build a user base of 100,000 users via Facebook and MySpace. We will refine expectations through our interaction with musicians, venues and fans during this period. This period will take 3 months from April 2008 until June 2008. No funding is required during this phase.Venue Acquisition: Vivoh will add staff for development, venue relationship management and marketing. Vivoh will add three developers to finish the artist tools and social networking features. Vivoh will add two relationship management specialists to manage venue needs and expectations. Vivoh will also hire a VP of Marketing to create a comprehensive marketing plan. We will build out a datacenter to support high capacity storage and delivery of video.Monetization Expansion: Vivoh will look to offer other opportunities for musicians to sell music and merchandise in the second and third year. Vivoh will seek a $5 million dollar Series A investment to fulfill on this goal.Company Sale: Vivoh will position itself for acquisition in the fifth year of operation to a major entertainment company.

Investment Opportunity

Vivoh is looking for investment of $1,500,000 to fund phase 2 for the first year.

Strategic Objective

Vivoh will launch vivoh.com as a marketplace for artists to sell and directly benefit from connections to their fans. We will provide tools that make it simple for artists to sell to fans and offer control over the price and availability of their creative works. We will make Vivoh a compelling and exciting destination for fans of performance art where they can not only purchase but interact with the artists directly in an exclusive environment, and interact freely with other fans to discuss and share music, culture and art and their experiences around that art.

Organizational Chart

Marketing

Venue marketing: venues should be provided with information and fliers that promote the service. The marketing should offer information that notes that artists receive the lion-share of the revenues, and that the venues themselves benefit financially. This message will resonate with young people who are uncomfortable with the response by the RIAA to filesharing. Fliers should promote the mobile opportunities ( Register now by texting to abqik1@r.postjobfree.com or Send your videos from the show to abqik1@r.postjobfree.com ). They should also indicate that by purchasing now!, beyond just getting a physical good and the download, that purchasing gets them opportunities to do live chats with the musician, connect with other fans in the chat rooms, upload their pictures and videos, and more.

Label Marketing: We can contact labels and indicate that the accounting for the purchases can be sent to them instead of the artist directly. We want to make sure that labels are able to control the purchase accounting if this is a requirement to them.

Buzz marketing: As much as possible we should leverage the open source and open culture movements who will likely respond to the open source platform. Sites like BoingBoing.net, Techcrunch and others are very aware of the problems with the record industry and will be sympathetic to new business models which directly pay artists. Communicating to these sites that we are paying the majority of the revenues to the artists and the venues will give us great PR. We can also point out a comparison of other royalty sharing models, like textbook sales (12%) or record labels (5%, and only if you go gold ).

Artists as salespeople: In the same way that music venues and nightclubs create scarcity around the experience of being at a club through the velvet rope, VIP sections and backstage access, vivoh.com will create a feeling of exclusivity that creates buzz and interest. Initially access to the site will be only by invitation. We will ask artists to invite people on their personal mailing lists, and only people with invitations from the first wave of participating artists will people be able to gain access. When we communicate the high value to artists of participation through sales to their fans and the network of other fans, they will do sales work for us.

Competitions: One opportunity is to offer sponsorship of Dorkbot events to promote platform awareness and build interesting capture stations and kiosks. The Dorkbot community could be enlisted to build interesting camera control applications, or hack new features onto the open source platform we have built. A contest which offers a prize to the best community voted new systems might generate significant interest around the idea.

Office of Economic Development: Any medium to large city will have a city funded office to promote cultural events. These agencies can be used to help promote the benefit to artists and venues. Contact the Music Liaison to create relationships with venues and musicians by communicating the value to the musicians and the value to tourism and national recognition.

Pro Forma Revenue

Financial Requirements for First Year

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