Company
OKListen
OKListen, as described on the show by Vijay Basrur.
Episodes (1)
Vijay Basrur, founder of OKListen, explains how he bootstrapped an independent Indian music platform for over a decade before its acquisition by AWAL.
Questions these episodes answer
How did Vijay Basrur come up with the idea for OKListen?
He wanted to buy music from an independent band he discovered called Them Clones and realized there was no digital way to buy Indian independent music. After the CD he ordered by post missed a home delivery, he researched the market, found nobody was selling independent Indian music digitally, and decided to build the platform himself.
From: Building a Music Tech Company Before the Market Was Ready
Why did investors decline to fund OKListen in its early years?
Venture capitalists told Basrur and his co-founder that independent music was too niche a market to reach real scale, and suggested they pivot toward Bollywood or broader commercial music instead. Basrur and his co-founder were not excited by that advice and chose to stay away from it, so the company went unfunded.
From: Building a Music Tech Company Before the Market Was Ready
How did Vijay Basrur keep OKListen alive while working full-time corporate jobs?
After failing to raise capital, artists urged him to keep the platform alive, so from 2014 to 2019 he held a day job while his co-founder returned to a family business, and he hired a junior employee to keep OKListen running day to day as the business slowly kept growing.
From: Building a Music Tech Company Before the Market Was Ready
How did competition from TuneCore and CD Baby affect OKListen during its acquisition talks with Sony?
While Sony's deliberations dragged on for roughly a year and a half, TuneCore and CD Baby both expanded into India and started taking business from OKListen. Basrur says he could not invest to compete because the company was in the middle of sensitive acquisition talks, so he told Sony's team about the slipping numbers and they agreed not to walk away over it.
From: Building a Music Tech Company Before the Market Was Ready
What role did Vijay Basrur take on after AWAL acquired OKListen?
He committed to stay on for about a year but ended up staying roughly eighteen months, becoming head of India and South Asia. Much of that time went into merging OKListen's finances into AWAL's systems and deciding which independent artists on OKListen's long roster should migrate onto AWAL.
From: Building a Music Tech Company Before the Market Was Ready