Hey First name / producer,
Back in 2015, I was operating one of the largest fully-remote music production agencies (at the time) with my partner Christian.
We were starting to explore ways to deploy our profits and build assets to generate some passive income.
Also around that time, we were making the transition from “service-producers” primarily getting gigs through SoundBetter, Google search, etc. to more “brand-driven producers”… People hiring us because they specifically wanted us, not because we were the first one they found on search.
We experimented with many different ventures that year, but two of them would become the catalyst for what is now Make Pop Music…
1). Purchasing a sample pack company called Woodshed Audio (with about 9-10 products)
2.) Launching a YouTube channel and packing it with pop content (wasn't called Make Pop Music yet).
In 2015, there weren't many options when it came to pop production content on YouTube. When you searched for ‘pop production tutorials’ it was either old sounding stuff or more EDM based stuff.
We saw that there was a blue ocean here and were able to get our channel to around 5k subscribers pretty quickly and start selling sample packs.
PS - The pop market is still a blue ocean on YouTube so you pop producers should jump on it lol.
Also around that time we purchased the domain name Make Pop Music, and Christian and I started a Facebook group with that same name.
However, that was not the Facebook group that ended up being the main Make Pop Music Community (if you know what I'm referring to here). Yes… there is technically another MPM group but no one was ever added to it, lol.
Here's why…
As 2016 rolled in, my production partner Christian was starting to fly way from the nest and was onto bigger and better things as a music producer – and is still crushing it to this day!
In 2015, I had met a college student from Florida named Austin Hull. He had started this really cool community on Facebook called “Pop Producers & Songwriters”. It had around 1000 people in it (wasn't called MPM yet).
I saw that he was starting to release a few sample packs of his own and I eventually reached out to offer him some advice from what I had learned running Woodshed Audio.
As time went on, we bonded and I was sending Austin the bulk of the production work from our remote agency. He was knocking it out of the park and it gave us a chance to work more intimately together.
Then one day I brought up the idea…
“Dude, so I have this domain name called Make Pop Music. We haven't done anything with it yet. You've got an awesome community and a few products. We've got a YouTube channel that is primed for pop content, 9+ products, and a mailing list. Wanna team up on this?”
Austin said yes and Make Pop Music was born. We re-branded the group, mailing list, products, and YouTube channel. Austin became the main face of everything and for a few years we ran it as partners. This was an incredible season in my career. It was super fun and I learned a ton.
We did have some failures a long the way... In 2018 we tried launching a subscription service called “Full Time Music Industry” that would include all of our products, business training, production tutorials, pop beats, etc.
Ultimately, it was a flop. Subscription models are tough to pull off and in hindsight we probably shouldn't have tried to make something with a different name from MPM… It confused people. We ended up refunding everyone who purchased.
On the flip side though, we had a lot of products that did super well and the Facebook group led to a bunch of personal opportunities for both of us.
In January 2019, we made the mutual decision to go our own ways (just with Make Pop Music).
I was visiting Nashville for a business summit and remember having that phone call in a Starbucks. We both had mutual feelings about the future of the project…
Austin and his lovely wife Miranda wanted to go ‘all in’ on MPM, but I was pretty deep into running Dark Label Music at that point and wasn't going to be able to meet them halfway anymore on the project.
Later than month, the YouTube channel blew up and that was really all him. Since then it's become a behemoth!
Lesson: Instead of trying to ‘hang on’ and potentially cause a big resentment which would have most likely ruined the friendship… I bowed out.
Make Pop Music gave me an incredible launch pad and track record to create Dark Label, and I made a great return on my investment during the years we were partners on the MPM project.
I'm not around the community much anymore, but I highly encourage people to check that out on Facebook.
I hope that you enjoyed the story and got some take-a-ways from it.
And if you made it this far, we just released a new YouTube video yesterday which you can watch here:
Produce prosperously,
Dan
