The Protection of Upsee's Intellectual Property

The name Upsee is derived from the term "up and coming", which refers to musical artists on the rise; more details are in an earlier blog post. But this isn't the point I am writing about. The point of this post is to describe how I will protect that name and anything else that belongs to Upsee.

This name and definitely an in-progress logo will be the first set of intellectual property I would start protecting, and I will do that by making them our trademarks. However I feel like that is something all businesses do anyway; kind of like a default, standard thing to do. Since Upsee is computer software, the actual code that makes up the website will be copyrighted...

... and that's it! We do not make inventions or anything, so patents are not needed. Also, I have not thought of any trade secrets that we might have, since everything is just code which is already has copyrights. Upsee is user driven, so literally all of the content on there will belong to and be created by those users. I am not entirely sure if we are supposed to be involved with their content in regards to intellectual property protection; I was thinking they would do that themselves, or perhaps we would have a built-in system that automatically protects them. 

I am slightly familiar with the idea of protecting intellectual property; I am definitely not an expert. But this is roughly how I would go about protecting my stuff.

Upsee's Mission and Vision

There are already so many music streaming services out there like Spotify, SoundCloud, and even YouTube, and Twitch is the prominent streaming website of today. A handful of Twitch streamers are indeed musicians, but, other than the already popular artists like deadmau5, I do not know of anyone who became popular because of streaming. Twitch is much more known for being the streaming hub for the gaming community, and the scale of its popularity and support is much bigger compared to the music streamers' side. I think it would be so awesome if music can reach that level. I mentioned that I have not heard of a popular music streamer from Twitch, so I want to give people the ability to become a popular "Upsee streamer"; like "YouTubers" or "SoundCloud rappers". I want to build the stage for music to be the main attraction for streaming and online community creation...

Our vision for Upsee is the thriving of online communities centered around the music of the world's artists, both the aspiring and the experienced.

Our mission to realize that vision is to enable all people to experience the world of music together through live streaming and media sharing in a digital environment.

We also want to support artists by providing a way for them to make money for themselves, which will in turn maintain a prosperous state for the communities that they have built. The artists and their viewers will always be getting something out of their mutual love for music.

Pricing the Product

After quite a while since the three business ideas post, I began to question whether or not any of my three initial business ideas were viable as an actual business. The questioning alone made me scrap all of it, so I came up with something more realistic in my realm; a website (and app). It is an online service for music that allows any user to upload, share, and live stream their musical works. Think of this as Twitch, YouTube, and SoundCloud (or anything else similar to these for that matter) all combined solely for the purpose of helping small time artists put themselves out there, or providing already relatively successful artists a way to make more money as a musical artist. I'll call it Upsee.

I basically want to use Twitch's model for the streamers, and really any other website's membership-upgrade model. For the upgrade price, I was thinking of putting it at $7.99 a month. Before I explain why, let me elaborate on what I envision:

Upgrade the membership to...
1. Remove ads (like every other website).
2. Gain the ability to download tracks to your offline account (like Spotify Premium).
3. Upload tracks faster (like SoundCloud Pro).
4. Use a free subscription to any one artist of your choice who is "partnered" with Upsee.*

*This goes back to the Twitch model. If a popular streamer applies for something called a partnership with Twitch and gets approved, they will be able to set and sell their own private subscriptions where stream viewers can pay these monthly subscriptions to the streamer and gain access to more of their content. Twitch takes a percentage of each single subscription, while the rest goes to the streamer.

Now back to Upsee. I priced it at around 8 dollars a month because 10 dollars is what I've found to be a common upgrade price among various websites like YouTube Red or Spotify Premium, and I want it to be cheaper than those guys. SoundCloud Pro is 7 dollars, but it does not include as much benefits as Upsee's upgrade, so I made it slightly higher than that.

As for the whole partnering thing, I was thinking of taking 50% of each subscription from partnered artists. Since they name their own price, that 50% will vary. Twitch does exactly this and is seemingly successful.

If you're wondering why I called it Upsee: I took the term "up and coming" as it pertains to musical artists, removed the "and", and abbreviated the "coming" to get UpC, which would look better as (and would be pronounced as) UP - see.

Brian has come Forth

Honestly, I took ass notes on the day Brian Forth came to speak; I usually can figure out what I mean to note when I write down a single word related to the subject, but this time around, I have no clue. But here is what I do remember:

Brian Forth is the founder and president of SiteCrafting, which is really described in its own name. They provide digital support to businesses or anyone else through building and designing websites. He started out as a 5th grade teacher. One day during his teaching time, the kids, with the help of teachers, were tasked with creating websites for whom I can't remember, and I believe I remember that seeing this moment was Brian's eye-opener for doing just that, but as a potential business. Seems to me that the business is quite successful.

The thing that stood out the most from what I took from the talk was the idea to never dismiss anyone. I find this advice to be something I should always keep in mind if I ever want to start my own thing. This can apply to both within the workplace or company, or outside the workplace like potential business partners and customers. Another thing I clearly remember was the WordPress template that he and SiteCrafting are working on, code named "Groot". Then Andrew Fry stepped in and talked about how common it is to use code names for projects, which was something I did not know until then

If I had to do the celebrity look-alike again, I'd say Brian reminds me of Varys from Game of Thrones. This is really mainly due to his current hairstyle.