Dec 3, 2008

"Internet Retailer" Features I School Master's Project

From Internet Retailer
December 2008

The Internet Retailer Hot 100 Retail Web Sites
By Don Davis

Popcuts.com is what you get when three brainy grad students at the University of California, Berkeley, figure out what’s wrong with the music industry—and decide to fix it on the Internet.

"This was our master’s thesis project," says co-founder Kevin Lim. "We started out brainstorming about why the sky was falling in the music business, and we identified the basic problem as a lack of incentive between the people who use music and those who make it."

Lim and co-founders Hannes Hesse and Yiming Liu realized that much of the passion in choosing and sharing music comes in getting recognized by peers as a music trendsetter. "It’s often about who heard of great new music first, or which friends showed off great new bands," Lim says.

The secret sauce behind Popcuts is software that crunches the numbers on sales of downloaded 99-cent songs and ranks the buyers as trendsetters. The more a song sells, the higher a buyer is ranked as a trend setter and the more she can earn in credits toward additional song purchases. Trendsetting rank and credits are highest for initial buyers, so it pays to be the first to discover and buy good music. "We give music fans a reason to care about how their songs sell," Lim says.

Popcuts provides a fixed cut for music artists, who are free to share more of their revenue with buyers to stimulate more sales.

"I really like the concept—it’s definitely modern in that it tries to build community both around the music makers and the music consumers," says Nikki Baird, managing director of research and consulting firm Retail Systems Research LLC.

Baird notes that Popcuts also has room for improvement, such as by leveraging music content already in other social sites like MySpace and by providing better ways to sample music online.

But Popcuts is just beginning, Lim says, and will continue improving the site’s usability and developing social networking opportunities. "We’re not shy about our ambition to fix the gaping hole in how music is sold," he says.

Read more...

Quotes

"I really like the concept—it’s definitely modern in that it tries to build community both around the music makers and the music consumers."
—Nikki Baird, Retail Systems Research LLC
popcuts.jpg
Hot100Seal_0.gif

Last updated:

October 4, 2016