Many entrepreneurs get their start from solving an everyday problem that can benefit vast numbers of people. Anthony Volodkin is one of those entrepreneurs. The idea of Hype Machine originated in Volodkin’s desire for a better way of finding cool new music.
Volodkin was really solving his own problem with the music industry. He would constantly travel to Philadelphia or Boston attempting to find new music. There wasn’t a reliable print source available due to marketing bias, and it just meet his standards. Hype Machine was born in this distress. In between classes at college, Volodkin started building a website that showed recent posts from a selection of music blogs. He would sample songs and let people know what was popular and what was good. The result was a way to find new music by crowd-sourcing. In its most basic form, Hype Machine shows music to users that they might like but may not have ever found.
Hype Machine took off after getting attention from industry leaders, but Volodkin learned from the mistakes of Napster. He made sure that his site was not competing with artists by linking to iTunes or other sites to purchase the songs. This well thought out business plan is what made Hype Machine well known in the internet community and its start up story can inspire young entrepreneurs today. Anthony Volodkin’s entrepreneurial journey shows us that it is never too early to start making our ideas reality.
Volodkin has himself a nice niche market here running from the wake of itunes and spotify. I think one of the largest competitors here might be the company Noisetrade, which allows customers to download free itunes of artists who put their music up for free to get more recognition.