8th Stage Launches In Beta To Offer A LinkedIn For Musicians With Built-In Talent Development

Chicago-based startup 8th Stage is launching in beta form today, offering independent music artists a way to push forward and track their career online. The idea is to give artists more tools to help them deal with the changing nature of the music industry, which no longer takes big risks on unproven acts with expensive record contracts the way it has in the past.

What’s changed about the music industry? According to 8th Stage co-founder Paul Jorgensen, a lot. For one, record labels don’t have the big budgets to spend on discovering and developing talent based on the old methods of demo tapes and one-off auditions, and for another, it doesn’t really make good financial sense to use those methods when everyone has YouTube accounts, Twitter and Facebook and many often try to build followings on those channels independently.

What those channels lack, and what 8th Stage wants to provide, is some transparency and guidance around how you get from playing music on your own to becoming a musician professionally, or just to advancing your hobby to the next level.

“I realized the industry had changed so much, when I tried myself to make it as an artist and I literally had people at labels saying ‘Five or ten years ago we could take this demo and give you like a million or two and you and could just go and record,’” Jorgensen said, explaining what’s changed to make 8th Stage necessary. “But because they weren’t really generating the money anymore that they used to with record sales, they’d become these giant risk averse corporations.”