The early implementation of Zoom into their long-term business plan has allowed music education startup Bold Music to thrive throughout the pandemic.
The idea behind Bold Music, founded in 2013 by George Ramsay and Dean Williams, is two fold: To provide a high-level, quality music experience in the comfort of a student's own home, and to be a broker for music teachers by connecting them with students.
Ramsay said they've on-boarded about 40 teachers from the Charlotte and Raleigh regions who specialize in voice lessons, guitar, piano, drums and a host of other instruments. Students range in age from three to 75, he said.
"We hire music teachers from all over the city, and our job is to get those teachers private students," he said. "Someone interested in lessons finds us and reaches out, and we're the match-makers who figure out what the student wants to get out of the lessons. That helps us figure out who is the best fit."
Though Bold Music was founded based on a face-to-face model, Ramsay said they implemented Zoom capabilities in February to give students and teachers more options for making up missed or canceled lessons. That, he said, is what allowed Bold Music to adapt quickly and stay on track when Covid-19 hit just one month later.
"Switching over was very easy for us because we were lucky in that we'd already developed a solution," he said. "So when it actually came around to mid-March, when the pandemic hit, we pretty much made the call overnight that we were going to go virtual."
Though Bold Music's transition from in-person to virtual learning was seamless, Ramsay said he knew the team needed to work on ways to keep teachers and students from eventually experiencing "Zoom fatigue."
"What we quickly realized needed to happen was figuring out ways to be engaged and connected as a community while everyone was at home," he said. "We embarked on an all-hands-on-deck approach to take our service to the next level."
What they came up with was a collaborative music project called "Collaborations from Home" that gives students the opportunity to record different parts of a song with their instructor. The individual parts are complied into a full video, something Ramsay said, the students can feel like they did together.
"We knew that in order to keep families around, they needed to feel like they were part of a community," he said.
Ramsay said they currently have about 350 students, about 30% of whom have resumed in-person instruction. The virtual platform is something he said Bold Music will stick with long past Covid, however, because it helps the startup extend its reach past Charlotte and Raleigh.
"We now have students in England, Florida and Ohio and instructors who live in Chicago and Seattle," he said. "It offers a lot more flexibility. We're looking at continuing to build our online presence and engagement through more interesting programming."
Though 2020 has been challenging, Ramsay said they've learned so much about how to better the business and make it more appealing for all music lovers. One of the team's biggest takeaways was the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement over the summer.
"That led to some really interesting conversations with our staff and some of our teachers," he said. "We have a very diverse roster of teachers, but we don't have a diverse student base, and that's something we want to change."
To jumpstart that initiative, Bold Music recently partnered with Charlotte's Freedom School to provide summer camp scholarship funding for older students, as well as general fundraising and support for music programming within the school.
"We want to lend our expertise and services to students who might not otherwise have the resources," he said.
