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.