For decades, emerging artists have relied on hustle and street teams to blanket utility poles with event flyers to get their name out in pretty much any way possible.
These days, the staple gun is proving less effective than the smartphone. So the street team game has largely moved to social media, which often means paying increasing amounts to boost ads. Now, a newly hatched Austin startup is hoping to use the founding team's experience in the music industry to better connect creators with their fans and incentivize those fans to spread the word about upcoming concerts or releases.
Crowdmouth, which just launched out of beta July 13, has developed an iOS and Android app that allows creators to offer unique shoutouts, memorabilia and other goodies to fans who rack up points earned by promoting unique links to an artist's concerts, videos or other activations.
The startup was co-founded by CEO Aston Teague, founder of Higher Sound Music Group, which manages artists including Austin's Bob Schneider; Jonathan Clay, one half of Austin-based band Jamestown Revival; and Donnie Gerault, the former CEO of strategic cloud integration firm Cloud49 and current VP of public sector and defense at Atos, a large digital transformation company.
The Crowdmouth founders have also brought on Beatport CEO Robb McDaniels as chairman of the board of directors.
Teague and Clay toured together as singer-songwriters around 2005. Teague stopped touring in 2008 and moved to Houston to start his family and work on entrepreneurial ventures. He moved back to Dripping Springs in 2018 to develop a music management business.
In 2019, Schneider hired Teague as his manager, and that's where Crowdmouth started to emerge. As Teague managed Schneider's digital marketing campaigns, he was sharing promotions on social media, and fans would share links and help spread the word, like a digital street team.
"That's cool that there's 50 people that do it every time I share something because they love Bob's music or they want to support Bob," Teague said. "I thought, 'Well how do I get the 50,000 people that follow him on Facebook to want to do the same thing?' And that's ultimately how the beginning spark of inspiration came."
As he worked on a prototype last year, Clay was on a national tour with Jamestown Revival, which got canceled due to Covid-19 just as the band was about to play a sold-out show at the The Fillmore in San Francisco. Soon, he was focused on Crowdmouth.
Clay said social media giants like Facebook appeared to be the ultimate fan-creator connection platform. But, he said, it's been disappointing.
"To me, it's been a little bit of a bait and switch as a creator. Our organic views and how many people are seeing our posts is going down," he said. "It's getting harder and harder to reach people organically without paying to boost posts or paying to run simultaneous ads along with your post. And so how do you cut through the noise? That was really why we built Crowdmouth, to really be a street team for the modern age. And to put creators and their fans back in direct connection again."
The Crowdmouth app has two versions: one for fans, one for creators. It's heavy on analytics to help artists see their most active fans and help fans see how well their personal promotion of the artist is going.
For example, Clay recently put out a new Jamestown Revival music video on YouTube. He created a Crowdmouth campaign, and he shares that link through email, social posts and texts. Meanwhile, fans can get handwritten lyrics, signed vinyl or a personal thank you video from Clay. The video got more than 2,500 clicks.
"If we were to run an ad campaign on Facebook, that's over $4,000 in advertising, which is a pretty astonishing number," he said.
The app is currently free, but the founders say they will likely develop a tiered subscription model for artists based on their reach. The team is currently working on partnerships with music labels and other promoters.
Crowdmouth raised about $740,000 in an angel funding round that closed in April. Investors included Werx Group, Rob McDaniels and Matt Pelling, CEO of Loopmasters. The founders plan to raise a new round of equity funding soon.
Crowdmouth has a small team, including a few local advisors, such as Austin City Limits General Manager Tom Gimbel.
While Clay and Teague are known in music circles, they said Crowdmouth is for anyone promoting their work.
"We always use Taylor Swift as our example of what we're really not trying to go for," Teague said. "Could you use Crowdmouth? Absolutely. Would it be impactful? Absolutely. But that's not who we built the platform for. We built the platform for independent artists creators of all kinds, YouTubers, Twitch gamers, TikTokers, all the way to Etsy store owners and brick and mortar ... for us it really doesn't matter. We believe that the technology will serve any type of content creator in the same fashion as long as you kind of follow the mechanics and the best practices of the app."
