Website for Musicians to Distribute their Own Music

My name is Derek Dearden and I have been running my own business, developing software and designing computer systems for over twenty five years.

I would have claimed to be entirely content with my life – after all, I could generate a comfortable income doing work that I enjoyed and arranging the structure of my day to suit myself. But the reality was that most of the projects I was spending my time on did not really satisfy me.

When I was listening to a friend of my son playing a piece of music that he had composed, I suddenly thought “This is much better than a lot of the music you hear on the radio or can buy in the shops, but what chance does he have of breaking into that world? And how poor a deal would he get if he did?” I realised that with today’s technology, it would be possible for people like him to put their music in front of a Global audience. I created the idea of a website where musicians could just put up their music and it would be available to all the world. I saw that it would be possible to offer this without creating an artificial scarcity for the sake of the publishers’ inflated profits, and that there could be a simple and fair scheme for channeling the income back to the musicians. What would have been predictable before I joined this Program was that this would have remained merely a nice idea that I was sure I would do “someday”. With the training, the coaching and the support that it provides, I got my website – beatbiz.net – up and running within three months of joining and I’ve now got about a hundred musicians from all over the world contributing to it and hundreds of visitors every day; and this is only the beginning!