- Three Men in the Hub: Boston-based indie music site PureVolume.com is the work of recent alums Brett Woitunski ’03, Nate Hudson ’04, and Mitchell Pavao ’03.
The music industry isn’t just about the music. It’s also about making connections. Hosting parties is one way to schmooze with band members and finesse valuable relationships.
“Did we pay for this beer?” Mitchell Pavao ’03 asks co-workers Nate Hudson ’04 and Brett Woitunski ’03. Pavao is watching the deliveryman drop off cases for tomorrow night’s party at Unborn Media Inc.’s headquarters in Boston.
Are beer parties business as usual? Not quite. As any of the three 25-year-old self-made men will tell you, the hugely successful launch of PureVolume.com, a Web site dedicated to promoting independent, unsigned rock bands by allowing users to download free music, required the sacrifice of their personal lives. And although the party will be fun, it’s largely in the name of giving the Web site visibility.
“You sort of have to be obsessed to make a business successful,” explains Woitunski, business developer and creative director. “We work 18-hour days. We’ve slept here on occasion. In some ways it’s a 24-hour job. We’ll leave the office at eight, 10 p.m., or midnight, thinking about decisions we have to make the next day.”
The hard work is paying off—literally. Last year, PureVolume.com, which is the first media project by Unborn Media Inc., pulled in more than $1 million—three times what it grossed the year before.
The idea for the Web site came to Woitunski during his senior year. While he was toying with the idea of a social networking Web site exclusively for college students, a Web site that allowed users to listen to music in MP3 format was shut down by the Recording Industry Association of America for violating music copyrights. In the wake of the shutdown, 700 unsigned bands were homeless on the Internet. Seeing an opportunity, Woitunski junked the social networking idea and focused on making a music-networking site instead.
During that time, Woitunski took one of his computers to be fixed. The person who fixed it put him in touch with Pavao, now Unborn Media’s software engineer and database developer. Pavao knew Hudson, now technical director and network architect, from work.
“I think we were all bitten by the same bug, where we didn’t want a ‘job in a box’ when we got out of school,” says Hudson.
PureVolume.com started in a $350-a-month basement room they shared with another business in Amherst. Using $30 folding tables from Staples, old computers, and even older monitors, the men scraped together money by designing Web pages for The Daily Collegian, Amherst sandwich shop The Loose Goose, and for various local artists. PureVolume.com made its first dollar by selling “pro” memberships to bands.
“The first day we had someone sign up for a year, which is 70 bucks, and someone sign up for a month, which is eight bucks. It isn’t a lot of money, but it was good for the first day,” remembers Woitunski. As the site gained popularity, PureVolume.com started selling home-page placement and banner slots.
Today PureVolume.com is primarily operated out of Boston, with offices in Los Angeles and New York. The site uses 25 servers, hosts about 257,000 bands, and has 365,000 members, in addition to four million unique visitors a month. Indie music aficionados and executives at label giants such as Universal and Time Warner cruise the site searching for bands that might be worth an investment.
Bands can sign up for a professional membership, enabling them to update pages with concert information and new songs. This allows users almost direct contact with their favorite groups—the member’s personalized homepage features new postings from their selected bands. At the bottom of the page, a special section matches the zip code entered at sign-up with upcoming local shows of all kinds of bands. Other pages allow members to add favorite bands, favorite genres of music, photos, and friends. Bloggers have a home here, too: PureVolume.com has its own user-to-user messaging system.
Bands see their exposure increase because of PureVolume. Some recent winners include Fall Out Boy, a pop/punk/rock band from Chicago, and Taking Back Sunday, a rock band from Long Island, New York. Besides watching bands grow in popularity and get signed to labels, there are other reasons that make Pavao love his job. “One of the best parts is hearing new music before anyone else, getting on the guest list for shows, and getting CDs before they’re released,” he says.
PureVolume.com is just the beginning for Unborn Media. Plans are underway for a music magazine acquisition as well as for the launch of two other Web sites, Virb.com and BetweenClass.com, the social networking sites Woitunski originally envisioned.
