

How Two Teenagers Broke In To Silicon Valley - And The Music Industry - alaskamiller
http://forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2011/10/19/how-two-teenagers-broke-in-to-silicon-valley-and-the-music-industry/

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Lukeas14
If you're good at what you do and have the results to prove it, eventually,
people will recognize that and present opportunities. This is Silicon Valley,
not Hollywood, no need to "Break In".

~~~
Cushman
The rest of the world can't conceive of a culture where real talent is
rewarded appropriately and nepotism, politics and seniority take a back seat
to getting shit done.

Maybe we're better off that way.

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schlichtm
I'm Matt Schlicht, one of the guys in the story. We would love to chat with
any music/entertainment focused companies OR digital managers + any start up
founders. Email matt@tracksby.com to get in touch.

To everyone else - thanks for the support! (love the Madmen reference)

~~~
Cushman
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you social networking 100: When people are
talking about you, go say hi.

Hi Matt :)

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ChuckMcM
tl;dr version: 21st century version of Madmen. People with a talent for
exploiting social networks to achieve brand recognition in a particular
demographic.

It certainly illustrates clearly the difference between what one might
consider 'traditional' promotion to 'modern' promotion. In the sixties they
guys would have founded a PR agency.

~~~
rastafark
Mad respect Chuck but I feel like you're being a little reductionist. Couldn't
I weave a story that these guys would have been hackers in the 70s, exploiting
telephone networks for fun and profit?

Rather than do that, I'll just say some things are just what they are, and
don't need to be explained by being 'like' something else. Especially when it
comes to Madmen, its just too easy to make anything mythological by conflating
it with that show.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I've got huge respect for them, and if I came off dismissive then that was
certainly not my intent. I _do_ find it mythological when folks are just
natural born connectors like these two.

These guys took Lil Twist from 4K to 2M facebook fans. That is impressive.
With the phreakers in the 70's and the folks at the MIT AI lab, it was not
about brand so much as it was about the nascent power of technological change.
I see that as a different groove.

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kaizenfury7
By hack, they mean that two teens who know how to use Facebook, Twitter, and
other social media, help musicians use Facebook, Twitter, and other social
media.

~~~
nedwin
By "hack" I think they mean they know how to hustle the shit out of SV tech
companies and some of the top musicians in the world. Not an easy hack at all.

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joshu
Well, "hacked" is now an overused word.

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brackin
Props to these guys, i'm currently going through this as a 17 year old
founder. This is more about the tech community and how it seems to be
perceived by Forbes at least.

From what i've seen startups don't discriminate by age (young at least). I
know lots of 18 year olds (some younger) involved and working for startups,
lots starting their own and raising money. I just perceived the piece as if
they believe the valley is like wall street. When it's such an open ecosystem,
if you're building cool stuff and are around you already have a lot of
leverage.

It's also much easier to achieve a lot of meaningful connecting from out of
the valley, i'm from London and am out here for a week and have had lots of
great meetings and catch ups. I've been able to meet all these people I know
from twitter, hacker news (to an extent), events in other places and MLGen
(<http://mlgen.com>).

Not saying any of this is easy but many of these publications don't understand
how it works.

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abbasmehdi
Following the wave of college dropout billionaires, we are going to be seeing
high school dropout billionaires... ;)

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knewjax
These guys truly get the whole "Social" thing.

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unohoo
matt & mazy - congrats on the launch and good luck. Hope you're able to
recognize who I am.

~~~
schlichtm
Holy shit - what's up. Go friend me on Facebook <http://facebook.com/Mattfs>

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wisty
One clever hack - they want to give free tunes to people in return for
"likes". I guess it's better than a free virtual cow.

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nicklovescode
They "hacked themselves"... Really?

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marcamillion
This is exactly the type of journalism that gives people the wrong impression
about entrepreneurship.

This makes it sounds so easy.

~~~
muhfuhkuh
It's so easy, high school kids could get music's hottest stars to promote
their service to garner millions of social network fans and raise the brow of
every musician, record company exec and venture capitalist with a penchant for
newsworthy investments.

It's so easy, a guy built a shoddy little dating/hookup site that looked and
ran like absolute nightmare, and the only distinguishing twist was that it's
free; now he's a millionaire I'm not sure how many times over.

It's so easy, one teenage girl created, bought, and licensed a bunch of shiny
gifs and site templates for MySpace users years ago and was making at one
point $2 Million a year and she hadn't even graduated or taken one cent of
funding.

Be in the right niche at the right time and exploit the hell out of it. Oh,
and hard work, dedication bordering on the pathological, and almost zero
aversion to both risk and knowing your "place".

It's really easy after that.

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bomatson
C'mon. You guys don't understand the budgets they had to grow these bases.
It's not hard to throw $ in a FB advertising campaign w/ a few grand a month
and get to these #'s. Props to these guys for being hustlers and tech-savvy
but the praise ends there. Tracks.by hasn't proven anything yet

~~~
schlichtm
$0/ever

~~~
bomatson
Right on guys.

But, even for Lil' Wayne? It's hard to believe, usually ad budgets get
allocated for Universal artists

~~~
schlichtm
$0

Its all about finding all possible ways to distribute their content +
maximizing the interactions with the content once you send the traffic
(optimizing it to be viral, social, and a great experience where both the fan
and artist are happy).

~~~
mitjak
> maximizing the interactions...optimizing it to be viral..

You lost me.

