Why this music discovery site thinks email is the best path to listeners’ hearts

Music “discovery” has been hot since the earliest days of the internet. Now, going on 20 years later, a team with one foot in Durham, N.C., and another in Greenpoint, believes the music industry is still enough in flux that there’s room for a startup to blow up and stand out.
BoomboxFM is sending users links to downloadable tracks from independent musicians that its team thinks people will dig.
“Although we are a consumer product, our real value is on the artist/label side,” cofounder Dave Marcello told us in an email. “We’re building a direct-to-fan distribution model for the independents that doesn’t quite exist right now the way it should.”

Email isn't very sexy, but it's kind of the holy grail of the marketing and business world, and the amount of time our target demo (21-35) is on email every day remains substantial.

One of the very biggest stories during the original dot-com bubble was that of Napster. It was the original mega music startup. Here’s a quick breakdown of how that site worked: it was a massive database that connected computers to each other. If you wanted a track, you could search for it on Napster. If someone who had a copy of that track had their computer on and connected to the internet (and odds are, someone did), you could copy that track from their computer.
It was the original music discovery service. It was huge. It was controversial and it came crashing down.
Since then, there have been loads of music discovery startups. There’s no shortage of companies that want to show you fresh tracks, but in the opinion of Greenpoint’s Marcello and his indie musician cofounder, Mike Hoy, the deck is stacked against small acts when it comes to the big online music sites.
BoomboxFM (formerly MusicBox) sends its members “boxes” with downloadable music based on their preferences. It promises a whole album’s worth of free tracks ever day, direct to your inbox.
“Email isn’t very sexy, but it’s kind of the holy grail of the marketing and business world, and the amount of time our target demo (21-35) is on email every day remains substantial,” Marcello told us. Another music discovery venture curating tracks through email is Song-A-Day.
“We look at the Spotifys of the world and we see a very crowded room dominated by Big Label Marketing Dollars & Influence,” Marcello wrote. “Independent artists are being told to go in there and yell louder than a bunch of people holding megaphones? Sure, some indie artists will peek through every now and then, but not as often as we’d like it to happen (and our 12,000+ listeners have echoed this sentiment time and time again).”
The company emerged from a project originally started by Hoy, called IndieBundles. When it didn’t catch on as strongly as he liked, he reached out to Marcello to see if he thought there was a potential pivot, or if he should shut it down. Together, they come up with a new idea.
“We brainstormed flipping the model on its head by giving the music away free as an alternative way for indie artists to reach new fans,” Marcello wrote. “In January 2014, we came up with a name (MusicBox). We had about 300 listeners in the first two months when Lifehacker wrote an unexpected piece about us.”
Right now, the team is working together at a three-month Durham, N.C., accelerator called The Startup Factory, which gave them $55,000 in funding in exchange for a 7.5 percent stake. It may also provide additional funding in the form of a convertible note after their demo day at the end of May.
After the demo day, Marcello will return to Brooklyn to continue making connections in the music scene here, he told us. The team is two people right now, but he says they’ll likely be looking to hire over the summer.