MyMajorCompany

» see mymajorcompany.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Seventy thousand euros, ten at a time. That was the whole proposition. A record label costs money mainly because recording and promoting an unknown singer is a bet, and MyMajorCompany's answer was to break the bet into seven thousand pieces and sell them to the audience. Hit the number and the artist goes into a studio. Miss it and nothing happens.

The company was created on 8 june 2007 by Michael Goldman, Sevan Barsikian, Anthony Marciano and Simon Istolainen, and the site opened in Paris that december. The timing was not an accident. The French record industry had spent five years watching its revenue fall and was signing almost nobody, so there was a supply of good unsigned people and a public that had opinions about them.

Then the first project paid out on a scale that platforms usually spend a decade failing to reach. Grégoire went up shortly after launch and reached seventy thousand euros on 15 february 2008, in under two months. The album Toi + Moi came out on 22 september and sold more than 1.2 million copies. The people who had put ten euros in got back somewhere near twenty times their money, and the story went around every newspaper in France as proof that the crowd could pick better than an A and R department.

None of this arrived in Turkey. Toi + Moi is a French chanson and it stayed inside the francophone market, so the whole affair reached me the way most French internet history does, years later and in translation. There is a structural distance too. This model needs a national music market big enough to make a hundred thousand sales meaningful and small enough that one song can saturate it, and the Turkish version of that was still run entirely through television and record companies in 2008.

~ the record ~

~ the seventy thousand ~

The number was chosen to be what an album actually costs, not what a platform thought was a good marketing figure. Studio time and a producer, plus enough promotion to get the record heard. It was high enough that a project needed real momentum to close and low enough that a few thousand people could do it between them.

What made it work in 2008 was that paying ten euros was not really an investment decision. It was a way of taking a side. The people who backed Grégoire spent the next four months telling everyone they knew about him, because they now owned a piece of whether he succeeded, and that unpaid promotion is the part no traditional label could buy. The platform's early success was a marketing machine dressed as a finance product.

~ what the backers got ~

The split was written down and unusually generous: forty percent of revenue to the backers and forty to the artist, with twenty left for MyMajorCompany. Compared to a standard recording contract of the period, where the artist saw a single digit percentage after recoupment, this was a different universe.

The catch is the one every crowdfunding platform eventually meets. Forty percent of nothing is nothing, and almost all of these projects returned nothing, because almost all records lose money. In its first year the site raised a million euros for artists, and the returns from that million were concentrated in essentially one person. Everybody could see the winner and nobody was counting the rest, which is a fine way to run a lottery and a hard way to run an investment.

~ everything except music ~

The expansion started early. MyMajorCompany Books launched with the publisher XO Éditions, a comics arm followed with Media Participations, and on 21 october 2010 the company opened in Britain. MMC UK closed in 2012, as did the books operation. In may 2012 the platform reopened as a general crowdfunding site that would take any project at all, from video games to small businesses.

That was the moment it stopped being the thing it was famous for. A participatory record label is a specific promise with a specific number attached to it. A general crowdfunding site is a marketplace, and France already had two of those doing it better. Ulule and KissKissBankBank had built for that shape from the start, and MyMajorCompany arrived in their category as a music brand asking people to fund a card game.

~ the last projects ~

Between 2007 and 2012 the company says it raised thirteen million euros across its projects. In the two years before the end it collected around five million, which for a platform of that age and that name is a decline rather than a business. In february 2016 it announced that no new projects would be financed, and the projects on the site wound down that march.

The founders did not leave the general problem alone, they changed its shape. Tipeee, which came out of the same building, dropped the album and the target entirely and asked people to send a creator a small amount every month for as long as they felt like it. No seventy thousand euro threshold, and no share of a hit that was probably never coming. It turns out that what the crowd was reliably willing to do was not invest. It was tip.

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