· By Matej Harangozo
Serial Tech Entrepreneur Using COVID-19’s Lessons to Disrupt the Music Industry, and Help Get Money into Musicians’ Hands
Our Founder, Matej Harangozo was recently featured in an article by startup.info discussing the COVID-19 pandemic and how it has affected business & the music industry.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
We talked to Matej Harangozo of Digital Science Media on how the firm is disrupting the music industry during COVID-19.
First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?
Matej Harangozo: We are doing well. I am fortunate that all my family is doing well — no one has caught the virus. In fact, my father lives in China, and my mother lives in Europe. Because of this, I get real insight from two different continents to see how things are. I don’t have to rely on the media to get a sense of how things really are in other parts of the world.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Digital Science Media.
Matej Harangozo: In 2012, I had my first townhouse, and this was right around the time when I moved out of my mom’s house. This was during the early days of our startup, greeNEWit. As greeNEWit scaled and enabled me to have more free time and more money, I spent a lot of money on my hobby, which is music production. That led to a lot of expensive studio equipment, so I decided to turn it into a company and came up with the name “Open Source Entertainment”. To this day, I remain a big fan of the open-source mentality when it comes to software development. At the time, I was also a part of the national building performance institute (BPI) home performance technical committee that worked to define how to collect energy efficiency data and process information between all stakeholders (i.e., power utilities, home lenders, building contractors, appliance companies, etc.). There was always the battle between using the open-source methodology or something private. The BPI homeperformance.org committee decided to go with a standard that was a quazi (open-source/third-party tech) solution due to the lobbying and pressure from some of the big companies involved.
Given my experience with the open-source concept, I thought it made sense for my new venture to use this methodology. Many of the big-name record labels did not practice solid and genuine business practices and created a similar pressure against the independent or DIY artist business model. They did not educate artists on how to maintain a brand that operates as a business, and therefore many artists were getting raked when it came to contracts. So, I figured there had to be a better way of running companies and to show artists how to truly benefit more from their art and actually create generational wealth from it on their own. So, I had this idea of an artist incubator/accelerator that would use open source methods to teach artists and their teams on how to be successful in the space… sort of my version of a modern ethical record label.