Creative Technology: Building For A Culture

With the power to affect our emotions, connect us with ourselves and with others, there are few influences in this world more powerful than music. For many, music is central to their culture, their identity. It defines who they are, the people they interact with, who they love, where they travel, even their political ideology.

Further, every person on the planet has an innate desire for human connection and belonging. Drawn to those who have shared interests and seek the same experiences, we belong to tribes.

To extend Seth’s definition above, we believe that tribe’s must also be able to transact – dividing work among participants to create focus and support each other to achieve a better outcome. Music creates fertile ground for tribes to form, however no one has yet enabled all participants to connect, communicate, transact and engage digitally with the culture they are part of through a purpose built platform.

Globally, electronic music attracts some 1.5 billion yearly listeners, ranging from Top 40 hits like David Guetta’s “When Love Takes Over”, through to obscure psychedelic trance produced on a beach in Goa.

Consider those two alternatives as ends of a continuum. When we say ‘Underground’, we are simply referencing the latter third, or half a billion people that would rather listen to obscure psychedelic trance than Guetta’s Top 40 cash cow (sorry David).

This group often represents the more mature dance music consumer. Slightly older, with a more refined taste in the culture. By default this makes them higher income earning with a more refined taste in culture. They have established what genres they like, what ones they don’t.

Existing media and social platforms have failed at meeting the needs of today’s tribes, who increasingly disengage from the mainstream, homogenised digital landscape.

We aspire to not only fix this problem, but also engage with some of the most complex challenges of our times including, climate change through matching local buyers and sellers, wealth inequality by redistributing over priced advertising budgets and unemployment by increasing participation in the arts and staff in our vendors. 

Half Wild is an evolution of ecommerce, social, digital media and experiential marketing (events, brand activations, sponsorships).

We’re building an economic framework for our tribe to exist in the digital economy, connecting the producers of electronic music related media, products and services directly with the participants in the culture.

We allow our vendors to do more of what they are good at, producing creative, inspiring and different art and merchandise, while simultaneously decreasing their costs and increasing their sales.

We help artist’s focus more on their music by not having to buy into an expensive marketing and PR machines. By helping promoters sell more tickets we ensure they can pay the hardworking artist’s the fair compensation they deserve.

Finally, our tribe. We give them a dedicated platform driven by content about the culture they love. We give them a say in our development, what features to build, what vendors to onboard.

Our platform was born in the culture for the culture.

Digital media companies such as Buzzfeed and Huffington Post emerged as darlings of the post newspaper era, driving a new hope for publishing and journalism.

This early enthusiasm caused a boom in share price, yet the unit economics of buying and selling clicks leaves little margin, something that has ultimately burst the bubble of many of these first movers.

Other digital merchants aren’t much better off. The cost to acquire customers through platforms like Facebook and Google has skyrocketed in recent years as more businesses move online and digital ad supply constricts – and there’s no sign of slowing down.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving your ranking on Google or other search providers. It’s driven by a myriad of factors of which two are critical.

First you must produce high quality content, and second, others must link to you, signalling your brand has authority.

This is a complex discipline that needs significant resources to achieve results, yet it is the backbone of all digital businesses.

Through a media first user acquisition strategy we achieve significantly reduced marketing costs because we inherently need to create good content to attract readers, plus readers that link to our articles grow our SEO rankings on autopilot.

Meanwhile, we see huge international growth in ecommerce as more consumers become comfortable shopping online, including the fashion and beauty categories with a 17% YoY increase. 

In this category we see increased demand for local, ethical and environmentally friendly products that aren’t typically stocked by major retailers. How will an industry experiencing such high growth meet demand for products that are high quality, harder to produce and often unique?

Ecommerce has proven to be more environmentally friendly than bricks and mortar retail. Yet, on Singles Day 2018 in China, retail giant Alibaba processes over $30bn USD in retail transactions during a 24 hour sale.

Greenpeace estimated that 2017 sales generated 160,000 tonnes of packaging waste, notably this doesn’t even include emissions from delivery. Solutions to further reduce both of these harmful environmental impacts are surely welcome.

Next we take a looking the globally booming dance music and festival industry…

Electronic music continues to thrive as barriers to entry for either the production or performance of the music tumble –  consider, you can now start making music on your iPhone or download tracks to DJ within minutes.

Music produced by technology is arguably the future of music itself. Synthesisers are the new guitars, midi controllers – our drums, digital software tools – our bass. As we evolve into our digital futures, naturally so does our music. Electronic music is here to stay and we’ve only seen a mere fraction of it’s growth.

Given electronic music only achieved mainstream success in the last few decades, the global culture is now maturing. Across ticketing, music, technology and artist fees the international electronic music industry is forecast to reach $8.9bn by 2021/22. This brings our total approachable market size including alternative and festival clothing to $12.9bn p/a.

Despite unjust, and often unfounded political opposition, our festival dance floors have grown and flourished. Every year, young, cashed up, white collar workers flood the market looking to spend their temporary, debt fuelled wealth.

Let us tell you from experience, as well as hopefully your own, no authority will get in the way of a Generation Y middle management executive from having a good time.

No partner, no house, no business – hedonism is at its peak and you live for the weekends and shared experiences with your mates, not the draining 9-5 you’ve all of a sudden realised is the rest of your life.

Once obscure festivals like Boom Festival in Portugal, are now selling out to global audiences of over 33,000 within minutes. It’s common to find that festivals of only a few hundred friends are now attracting new customers by the thousand.

Just look at Burning Man. Over 30 years they’re grown to become Nevada’s third largest city behind Las Vegas and Reno.

Our business is remarkable because it has been founded by a group of extremely intelligent, creative and passionate people who have both grown up with, and fallen in love with the beauty of underground electronic music culture in parallel to their professional successes in backgrounds crossing finance, marketing and technology.

Our platform has been built from first-hand experience, participating and working in the music, entertainment and festival industry. Every single person on our team has promoted and put on their own events, and over half our team and board, are DJs. We are Half Wild.

From a customer’s perspective, we enrich their lives with a sense of purpose and belonging by allowing them to connect with likeminded tribe members who share their same passion and world view.

We support in-culture vendors and promoters by more efficiently connecting them with their target market, a market hungry for a new experience that is outside the mainstream.

Our supply chain strength comes from a well-organised, fully automated, and dispersed distribution system that reduces inventory costs. Armed with product feeds of their high quality, unique and creative fashion pieces, we open sales channels into new regions and other marketplaces.

We have no single source of failure, and global delivery partners including DHL ensure we have a consistent reliable service of 2-3 days no matter if we are shipping from Rio to Melbourne or LA to Lisbon.

Although the starting point of our marketplace, alternative and festival fashion are by no means the limit.

Market size for DJ and music equipment is on track for $1.0bn p/a, festival and club tickets $4.8bn p/a. Both are growing strongly and provide lucrative opportunity for both partnerships and profit.