Fairplay: 2023 in Retrospect 📀
Where we are after this amazing but challenging year that we've had and where we're headed.
It’s the end of the year and I sit here in front of my laptop to summarise the excruciating but amazing year that we’ve had and I’m just thinking to myself that people need to know about this. Now I’m not one to talk too much about myself or what we’re up to but I always prefer to sit down and write my thoughts when it comes to business. Without further ado, using the values that we follow at Fairplay, let me take you through the journey that we’ve been on in our first full year of operations. For folks who want a summary of the entire post, I have included that here with the detailed post below:
Year in Review: Fairplay 2023 Highlights 📝
1. Early Success Post AAM 2022 🚀
Surprising demand post-soft launch.
Balancing growth with a lean team and a customer-centric approach.
2. Q1 and Q2 Momentum 🔥
Defined goals for demand and supply.
Discovered new problem-solving capabilities.
Embraced the values of "Future" and "Fairness."
3. Recognition at the Global Stage 🙌🏽
Finalist for Young Entrepreneur of the Year by Universal Music Group & Music Ally.
Represented Fairplay on a global platform.
4. Navigating Chaos 📉📈
Toughest but most rewarding phase.
Embraced chaos for creativity and growth.
Strengthened team and emerged stronger.
5. Catalogue Growth 📀
Started with 200-300 tracks, expanded to 2000+ tracks from 320+ artists.
AP Dhillon, DIVINE, Anuv Jain, Kamakshi Khanna, Raja Kumari to name a few.
Quality over quantity philosophy.
Diversity of tracks featuring many regional languages.
6. Looking Ahead to 2024 🤔
Focus on customer relations and the demand side.
Expand the catalogue with intent.
Introduction of two new offerings in development.
Sustaining growth with a passion-driven approach.
7. 2024 - The Year of Meaningful Work 🙏🏽
Learning from successes and mistakes.
Slow and steady growth strategy.
Commitment to a win-win-win scenario for stakeholders.
What 2023 has been about and where are we right now? 🚀
EARLY JANUARY ✨
The early months following our soft launch at AAM 2022 turned out to be quite unexpected. I was surprised at the number of people and agencies reaching out to us for help with regard to their music needs despite the fact whether these requests fell into the music sync licensing space or not. This was an amazing opportunity for us to push our limits but also recognise that we are a completely bootstrapped, lean business and we wanted to ensure that every customer receives the best service along with keeping the turnaround time to a minimum. This gave us the perfect opportunity to practice our first value, BALANCE.
Q1 AND Q2 🔥
In the following months, we set defined goals for both the demand and supply sides of our platform. Recognising that the success of our platform hinges on the activation of both sides, we focused our efforts accordingly. This strategic focus led us to uncover two additional problems, which we began addressing through the platform. I will delve into these topics further in the coming months. This serves as a testament to our commitment to looking towards the future and integrating more problem-solving capabilities into the platform, aligning seamlessly with our second core value, FUTURE.
This particular value is very important to me as it reminds me that Fairplay is not something that we are building for the short term but rather something that we want to build for the long haul with proper pace, patience, relevant features, transparency and most importantly, with the right principles of fairness in place. This ties in with another one of our core values that we have been proud to uphold, FAIRNESS.
YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR FINALIST 🙌🏽
Now the next phase is a very interesting one where Fairplay got the chance to showcase itself in front of a global audience. Most of you might not know this but I was nominated as one of the finalists of the Young Entrepreneur of the Year award by Universal Music Group and Music Ally. It was such a fun experience and it was a pleasure to represent Fairplay and the Indian music tech scene on a global stage which was a huge win for the segment as a whole.
The key takeaway from this experience was the opportunity to interact with amazing founders, engage in the entire process of this wonderful program, and find motivation to keep our heads down and build. It also provided us a moment of gratitude for what we are constructing, and the entire process seamlessly aligns with our third value, EGO.
EXCRUCIATING BUT WONDERFUL 😮💨
Now this particular phase of Fairplay, these 4 months (May to August) were one of the toughest, most stressful and brutal times that I have personally faced in life but also one of the best as I think I learned more in this time than my entire working life in the music industry. I also moved cities in the middle of all of this so that just added fuel to the fire. This particular period defined one of our values that we look towards, CHAOS.
The way we tackled things and how it all tied up wonderfully by the end, I am still very impressed with our entire team that worked relentlessly during those months. I know I’m sounding too negative about this phase but I think it was the most positive thing that could’ve happened considering we came out to the other side much stronger, with clearer mindsets and newfound purpose.
CATALOGUE GALORE 📀
When we had our soft launch at AAM in September 2022, our catalogue consisted of around 200 to 300 tracks from 30 artists or so. One of my key areas of focus for 2023 was to intentionally introduce more tracks to our catalogue. We were not focused on quantity but on quality work that fit the briefs and conversations that we were having. I am very thankful to all the artists, agencies, catalogue managers, publishers and labels that have agreed to put their works on Fairplay, I will always be highly indebted to them for giving us this wonderful opportunity and also believing in our vision, which is slowly but surely giving results.
It’s a pleasure to share that we now have around 2000 tracks on the platform from 320+ artists ranging from AP Dhillon, DIVINE, Anuv Jain, Raja Kumari, Kamakshi Khanna, and many more. 500+ of these tracks are from regional languages such as Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, Odia and Chattisgarhi to name a few which, will be available by the end of this month. You can take a peek at our Sampler Playlist here.
My intention has always been to scout for quality over quantity which further enables discoverability and efficiency in the best way possible. This ties in beautifully with another one of our core values, DISCOVERY.
This brings me to the other side of the equation, the customer side. After moving to Mumbai, I had the opportunity to interact with numerous production houses, ad executives and brands for the platform offering that we have built. We are still in the early phases of the industry understanding our core offering, which sometimes requires us to make the offering a bit more palatable. We have done extensive work on this in the past few months which I’m sure will reflect in a major chunk of what lies ahead for 2024. I’m super excited for what’s in store for the coming year and I’m sure what we’ve learnt over our first year of operations is going to help us bring it all to life.
My core focus area would always be defining the line between providing the best opportunities to the artists on our platform and providing the best service to our customers regardless of whichever field they are a part of. A testament to this is our impressive turnaround time which we aim to maintain and improve going in the next year as well. This ties into another one of our core values and the one which is the most important to me personally, SERVICE.
What does the future look like? 🤔
I define 2023, for Fairplay and me, as the ‘Year of Perseverance’. We will ensure that we learn from all the positives that we’ve had over the year, the mistakes that we’ve made, what went right, and what went wrong and use all of that to steadily grow. I believe businesses, especially the ones that operate within a niche of a niche like ours, need proper attention, patience and pace to succeed rather than throwing tons of money and workforce at a problem. This is a marathon and not a sprint. (Sorry, I know this is a cliche but it is what it is! 😅)
Over the next few months of 2024, we aim to do the following. I believe this is what is key to sustaining us in the second year of our operations:
Develop relations with more customers on the demand side.
Increase the size of the catalogue with intent.
Introduce two new offerings that we have been working on.
Keep our heads down, put on horse blinders and do meaningful work.
Create a win-win-win scenario for all our stakeholders.
I remain passionate about taking Fairplay to the next level but I do recognise that the approach needs to be very different from the traditional tech firms that you come across in the Fintech, Edtech, Healthtech etc. space. This brings me to the final value that we at Fairplay diligently follow, PASSION.
In my life, I have never worked on something that I’m not passionate about. Whether it be running finance at an NGO during college, working at one of the Big 4s, founding what is India’s largest pet festival now, selling merch from the top musicians/artists from around the world and now building a full music ecosystem with Fairplay.