Recreate My Night: Building an Effective Social Platform for Music Promotion

MIDTOWN, MANHATTAN: There’s more than one way to socialize, but as the Web continues to expand, determined entrepreneurs must dig deeper to create new group experiences.

David Guetta was on board for a promotional push via RecreateMyNight.

Its hard work for these thought leaders, but when they make a discovery, everyone else – especially those of us in the music sector — benefits with new ways to connect to audiences. At the NYC-based online startup RecreateMyNight (RMN), the aim has been to build a business with their own twist on the social media platform.

Created by President/Founder Tejpaul Bhatia and a roster of social media experts culled from ESPN and MTV, RMN allows its users to gather their photos, videos, and posts from a specific experience and stream them online to a central gathering place. Record companies are already seeing the potential: EMI’s Astralwerks label recently tapped it to promote David Guetta’s song “Memories” featuring Kid Cudi, adding up to a montage of fan-sourced media that play out along with the song (see the result at http://guetta.recreatemynight.com).

A free-to-use site, RMN provides the same opportunity to everyone from indie bands to ballgames to the bar mitzvah set. It’s a good enough idea, but there’s more than enough good ideas out there, competing like mad for the attention of individuals and investors. Will the market bite and turn RMN into a real breadwinner? Tejpaul and his team are betting – with every ounce of their blood, sweat and tears – that the answer is yes.

How do you define RecreateMyNight – is it a social platform?
One thing that we’re not is a social network. The big difference between us and sites in the social networking space is that we’re not a system of record – you don’t have to setup a username and password with us and you don’t have to upload any files to us. Users don’t have to change their behavior at all. They can upload to Twitter, Facebook, and RMN goes to all those social sites/platforms, and brings all those points in time into one place – in a comprehensive and meaningful way.

So if I’m using RMN, how do I share my images?
Say you upload images to Facebook from your phone. Then, you’ll connect RMN with Facebook, and RMN will automatically pull in anything tagged with that timeframe. It works amazingly well with FB’s mobile application. So you take a picture at a concert and upload it from your phone, boom – it’s in. Or if you just take it with a digital camera, you upload it to FB later and tag it with that time, RMN will then get them into that event.

Alternatively, five friends will pull in all the media they generated around it. Take that to the next level, with 30,000 people at a concert pulling in all their media. It gets extremely complex and interesting.

What niche would you say RMN is filling with what you offer?
What a lot of other solutions are providing is answering the question, “What’s happening right now?” Everything about Twitter and Facebook is right now – with phones and broadband you can upload it and it’s immediately broadcast to everyone.

We do a different take, asking the question, “What happened? How do you look at an event in a time-synched way?” With RMN, you can take all the images from an event that you didn’t know existed, and show what people were thinking in a way that was tied together with photos and videos. So we’re different in the way that we take media, and present them back to the user, but also because we don’t change people’s behavior in the ecosystem – we just take what they’re doing and make it exponentially more valuable.

Why is that particularly useful in the music arena?
When we launched the product, we knew there were a couple of verticals that were a slam dunk, with music/concerts being one, and weddings being another.

When we launched, we were approached by EMI Records – they said, “We have a new band, The Constellations, and we want to see if you can help promote them.” So we recreated every concert of their summer tour, and EMI said, “This is cool, can we do it with a larger artist?” David Guetta is a natural: He’s got a ton of followers, he’s very active in the social space, and the song is “Memories”. Labels are great because they have resources, and we can customize campaigns for them, but what matters is how to get this to the local artist.

Tejpaul Bhatia is targeting the music sector to grow RMN.

For an artist that sells a couple thousand tickets, there was an in-between need that we thought needed to be met. At CMJ, for example, some bands used RMN to showcase the events. When you go to our site, you’ll see there’s a band called The Wellington Papers that used RMN. People were taking photos and videos, and these guys did a recreation for each of three shows in a week. You can see all the posts and Tweets, some photos look pro while others are raw, and all this took this upstart band and made them look even better.

There was so much fan participation, but it wasn’t a hurdle. We didn’t ask them to do anything – they did it on their own. Then other fans see it and say, “I was there!” and their media gets pulled in. So even though the concert was one night, three or four weeks later it’s still living. It’s a local band using the site to promote themselves, and it worked really well.

Recreate My Night is free for users — what’s the revenue model?

Currently, RecreateMyNight earns revenue through licensing agreements with other companies. Our customers brand, white label or embed our platform inside theirs. Looking forward, we see revenue generating opportunities in the area of consumer goods like photo prints, customized/personalize merchandise and music downloads. We also see a lot of opportunities in the area of contextual advertising once we figure out a seamless way to integrate it into our products.

You’re based in NYC. What’s good and bad about being an online startup here?
Let’s start with the good: NYC is a microcosm of the world. With 8 million people here, whatever your product is, there’s an audience in NYC for it. Music and media is an obvious play – there’s a lot of people, companies and energy around. In NYC, I can have as many meetings in a day as I can possibly fit in. We could always be busy selling with business development people, if I had enough of them. And on the user side, to recruit local bands I don’t have to do major outreach to test something new: I can just call a couple of friends and get quick feedback.

From a challenge sense, NYC is a tough place. With so much competition, getting the word out isn’t easy. And for startups, NYC is particularly tough. We don’t have much capital. We’re putting our lives into this, making a big investment not necessarily with cash, but with our time and the hope that this will pay us back at some point. NYC is evolving to be more supportive of that type of dream, but if you look at a startup breeder like Silicon Valley, it’s not like that.

However, if you look at this as a place for starting up and succeeding, NYC has a lot of history like that. The city is doing a ton of stuff to support entrepreneurs, and the mayor and his different departments have played a huge role in our ability to stay alive right now. A couple of programs include The Levin Institute and the NYC Economic Development Corporation, they both do a ton of programs for startups.

There’s a scene, a support structure, and people just have to believe — that the positives of NYC can outweigh the difficulties, and make it a truly great place to get started.

— David Weiss

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