The RootNote team (from left to right): Jeremy Burchard, Brian Huefner and Jason Burchard.
Founded by brothers Jason and Jeremy Burchard, RootNote is a music and technology start-up based in Nashville, Tennessee.
RootNote is developing a new tool for musicians and other creatives to take control of their careers. With an eye on financial literacy, smart analytics, and new capital solutions for creatives, RootNote aims to help usher in a new era of growth and independence for entertainers.
We spoke with Jason, Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Master's in Management graduate, to find out more.
Tell us about RootNote and what made you decide to set up your own company.
At RootNote, we’re building analytic tools to help creators make more informed business decisions and providing access to capital to help them grow their creative careers. Creators operate in one of the most complex and outdated industries in the world and we believe that it’s time for a change.
My brother (Jeremy) and I launched RootNote over three years ago with a standardised model for investing into artists as business founders. We saw a huge need for this then (and still do), and through years of working with our portfolio companies, we realised that there are some larger problems that need to be addressed. In 2020, we are excited to be growing into the space that we call entertainment fintech.
As for our origins, RootNote was actually spun up out of ideas that formed during my time at the LSE. I was interning with an incredible company called Mustard Seed that specialised in social impact venture capital and I had an opportunity to meet a lot of amazing founders. Simultaneously, Jeremy was working on his career as a musician and music journalist, and I recognised a lot of parallels in the challenges faced between the social impact entrepreneurs I was meeting and artists like Jeremy. This inspired me to take a deeper look at the music industry in my dissertation and the rest is history. After graduating, my brother and I both relocated to Nashville, Tennessee and we haven’t turned back.
What is CODa and how will it benefit artists?
CODa is the first of its kind software as a service (SaaS) platform built specifically for creators that aggregates, organises, and simplifies critical financial, streaming, and social media data – all in one place.
Currently, as a creator or someone who works with creators, it’s very time-consuming and challenging to locate and keep track of all your key information. Whether you’re a music creator, YouTuber, gamer, podcaster, or anybody else who produces content for a living, it’s likely that you make money from a lot of different income sources and your data lives on potentially hundreds of different platforms.
From creators who are just starting to grow their brands to global superstars, the task of keeping track of all the different income sources is overwhelming. CODa is automating this process and providing key insights to help creators optimise their businesses for success.
What inspired you to create CODa?
Don’t get me wrong, we love spreadsheets as much as the next person out there, but we realised that there had to be a better way than spending hours every week manually tracking all this information. After talking with numerous industry colleagues, we learned that there just isn’t. So, we did what most entrepreneurs do when they have a problem that no one else is fixing – we started building a solution!
How is the music industry changing and how will CODa play into this?
There are three key trends that I believe will continue to become more apparent as the industry continues to evolve:
1) The distribution of wealth will continue to shift and a greater number of creators will be earning substantial income from their creative businesses.
2) Creators are going to continue to find more ways to make money through exploiting their brands and content on emerging digital platforms.
3) The services aspect of industry is going to become increasingly competitive and creators are going to continue to have more options for service providers.
What this means for RootNote is that there will be more people making more money in more ways, and they are going to have a lot of choices about who they can work with while they do it. As a standardised solution to this whole data mess, CODa is being designed to grow with the user and to be valuable whether someone is just getting started in their bedroom studio or working with a team of hundreds and operating a global brand.
You recently spoke at the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM). Tell us about your time there.
NAMM was great – it’s special to be in a place where people are constantly pushing the bar forward and evolving the music space, because as we know, the business side of the industry is not nearly as quick to innovate. Everybody at NAMM is competing to be the most innovative, which is welcomed in the music space.
We were invited to speak on a panel about the future of technology for indie artists and presented our CODa prototype demo. Overall, the event was a huge success and we were able to generate a good bit of buzz around our forthcoming product and get interest from some potential early users.
Jason studied on the two-year MiM which is now the Global Master's in Management (GMiM).
Watch Jason's alumni profile video:
LSE Management Alumni Profile - Jason Burchard
Tuesday 28 January 2020