‘We pride ourselves on human curation’: Vocana is an indie music service determined to challenge Spotify’s payment system — I spoke with the platform’s President about the company’s inception, and how it’s planning to fix music streaming
The competition between the best music streaming services has become increasingly tough over the years, and new entrants to the sector have their work cut out when it comes to competing with the big players.
One such startup is Vocana, the independent-only streaming platform that’s challenging Spotify’s payment system at a time when music fans are criticizing music platforms for the unfairness of the pro-rata system.
Vocana’s journey began in 2021 when Dale Chorba and Dave Petruziello joined forces to build a platform designed to “fix what’s broken in streaming”. Its President is Neil Sheehan, who joined the team shortly after it was founded, bringing his experience in live music promotion and indie label management to the table.
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Vocana entered public beta three months ago, and Sheehan is driving plans to expand the platforms offering by enlisting more artists, onboarding more users, and launching live subscriptions to take the indie-centric platform to new heights — all while keeping the brand’s ethos at the forefront of everything it does.
No major labels allowed
Since 2021, the team has been working hard to break into the mainstream, but it had to start somewhere: “It’s the brainchild of these two businessmen that were live music aficionados,” Sheehan starts. “They would go to live shows and see tip jars on a stage, and they were like ‘why are these artists, if they have Spotify and they’re playing shows, need a tip jar?’, assuming all artists that are on a stage or have streaming numbers are making money. What they kept hearing from artists was that they don’t get paid well from streaming services. So they thought ‘why can’t this be rectified?’”.
Payment was one of the trio;s top priorities. “Spotify and most of the other Digital Service Providers (DSP) pay in a pro rata model, so your $10 subscription goes into this big pot. It doesn’t matter who you listen to, Drake, MGK, and Taylor Swift are going to take the majority because they are listened to mostly by everybody. So we wanted to do a true user-centric system,” says Sheehan.
Equally, Sheehan wanted to eliminate the unfairness of the competition — but how do you do that? You exclude major labels, that’s how. “When you’re on these DSPs, nine times out of ten the algorithm or the playlist, whether it’s editorialized or not, is going to prop up some major label artists or the ones that are getting listened to the most,” Sheehan observes.
“So we said let’s be independent-only, meaning we’re just going to license content from true independent distributors where almost every time you get a song, it’s pure discovery. There are millions of these artists out there, but they’re not being propped up. So you’re not going to get major label content. Everything that’s going to come to you is most likely going to be discoverable that you’ve never heard before,” he adds. That said, it doesn’t mean that Vocana is shutting out the big artists that you love listening to altogether. Sheehan tells me that, despite his popularity, Snoop Doog qualifies for a Vocana artist page as he’s technically signed independently.
Though Sheehan has had a long four-year run at Vocana so far, this is just the beginning: “It’s been quite a journey for myself,” he tells me. “There are a lot of artists now who are getting their masters back, and then going to an independent distributor. They own their own masters, they own their own publishing, so they can do whatever they want with it. I think you’ll see a lot of these artists that are leaving the major label world on our platform”.
Human curation goes a long way
As it stands, Vocana is still in public beta and is awaiting a wider rollout, but it already has 40 million tracks and 2 million artists, as well as all the music features you can imagine.
“We took the basic idea of streaming and kept it so that you can queue songs, you can have your playlists, and you can have your catalog selection,” Sheehan tells me. This is where Vocana spins the social features on its head. “The features that we prop up are community-focused like the old Myspace, but we also have shortform videos like TikTok”.
There’s one thing that Vocana does differently to other music streaming giants, and that’s reinforcing the idea that music is supposed to be discussed. “We also have what we call ‘Hubs’,” says Sheehan
“These are private groups that you can join, so they could either be by city, or you can create one like ‘emo guys in Liverpool’ for example. Whatever you want to make, you could make that hub and then people could talk privately in those groups,” he adds. At the same time, these Hubs aim to offer listeners music discovery on a level that’s not just algorithmic. “Hopefully people now are talking and not just relying on something pushing them somewhere,” Sheehan says.
As far as algorithms go, Vocana’s structure doesn’t rely on AI models to do it all for you like Spotify does. If anything, it’s a simple model that does what it needs to do, and that’s use your listening habits as one of the bases for your new music recommendations. But the Hubs tool is Vocana’s true catalyst for driving discovery: “We pride ourselves on human curation,” Sheehan tells me, and it’s music to my ears.
“What I mean by that is, I brought up Myspace in the past where we are leaning into allowing fans to discover music, and then share that music with other people. I’m a firm believer that people move in tribes. If you are in an emo tribe, you follow those people and that’s how you’d discover new music, because those people are now talking about it,” he continues. “So we are encouraging people to share as much music as possible within their hubs, on our system. We don’t have an algorithm that’s going to spit out music to you”.
Looking beyond the US market
Vocana has pretty much laid the groundwork for all future expansions. It has a solid brand image and a structured app interface with the features to go with it. So how is the company planning to climb the ladder of success from here? The short answer is; marketing.
“We have another 90 days in public beta, and we’re about to allocate a large marketing budget,” he says. “We did some small marketing during the public beta. We started a ‘Pay the Artists’ concert series in New York, and we’re about to start it in Nashville and Dallas as well, but you will see a fairly robust online digital marketing campaign as well”.
That’s just one of the components to Vocana’s long-term plan — it wants even more users to join the family. “Our goal is to onboard 50,000 users in the next 90 days and get a lot more artists to come claim their page. So that’s kind of the 90 day roadmap, and then the subscriptions will be turned on and we’ll see what happens after that,” he adds. Then there’s the matter of international expansion, which Sheehan admits will be an even longer journey.
“The reason we started with the United States is because we’re based here,” he puts it simply. “Publishing was a little easier here, but we’ve looked at several different areas to expand fairly quickly, at least in Mexico, Japan, UK, to all our big connoisseurs of music, especially independent music,” he shares, so going internationally isn’t off the cards for Vocana.
“It’s been something we’ve talked about numerous times every week for the last three months,” Sheehan reveals, adding “because we have so many people overseas asking to either be on the platform or they’ve tried to log in and they can’t” (I’m one of those people). Before we bade farewell, Sheehan left me with a glimpse of what to expect in the coming months; “You’ll probably see in the next 12 months hit half a dozen markets outside of the United States”.
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