Ryan Born started his career in the Atlanta office of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ (PwC) Assurance and Business Advisory Services Practice where he gained experience in an array of industries. He later transferred to New York City to broaden his experience in the firm’s Tax and Legal Services division. After PwC, he served as VP of Finance and Financial Controller at WireImage.com during which time the Company was acquired by Getty Images for $208 million. After WireImage, Ryan angel invested and served as CFO to NewCondosOnline.com, the largest one-stop resource for finding and comparing new condo developments. Most recently, he relocated to Los Angeles and founded AudioMicro.com, a micro stock music licensing destination. The company secured a round of Series A financing from VC firm DFJ Frontier and has amassed a UGC library of over 200,000 stock music and sound effects tracks which are licensed into YouTube videos, iPhone apps, short films, television, animations, and other new media projects.

Ryan graduated Beta Gamma Sigma with an undergraduate degree in Accounting/Marketing & Art history and a Studio Art minor from Emory University. In addition, he possesses a Masters of Accounting Science degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and holds an active CPA license with the State Board of Accountancy of his home state, Tennessee.

What are you working on right now?

I am spending most of my time on AudioMicro these days. We continue to grow. We’ve got the best content, the largest library and we’re putting music into thousands of videos, iPhone Apps, Facebook games, movies and even television. We’re taking on large chunks of good music (which can be anyone from individuals to labels) and then on the distribution front, we’re partnering up with other websites and partners who can white label our content from us. While we’re getting a lot of traffic to our site, when it comes to distribution my belief is the more the merrier so we try and spread the content around and cast as large a net as possible. Our clients range from big brands like AMD, Martha Stewart, and Wells Fargo that are using video for internal purposes, presentations, pitches or YouTube videos to millions of independent video bloggers who’re using it for their blogs, YouTube or projects. On the bigger side of those smaller web video clients would be someone like iJustine who has a very large following both via her blog, Twitter, and YouTube.

Also, I am working on another project which is currently in stealth mode which is in the voice to text category and ties in with Google Voice.

How did you get the idea for AudioMicro?

I was working for a company called WireImage, for which I worked in a financial capacity. As I was studying the photography category, I ran across a little company called iStockPhoto which was able to compete via crowd sourcing with companies much larger like Getty Images, Jupiter Images, and Corbis. In 2005, my mother called me one day because she needed a rose for her business card. She had found an image on the Internet and had called Getty Images who quoted her $200 for that image. I sent her to iStockphoto where she was able to get an image of a rose for $5. That really hit home with me. Once I realized that licensing content from a micro stock destination was so easy that my mother was doing it, I knew that micro stock was going to be absolutely huge.

That meant to me that the micro stock business model works. Crowd sourcing content and then selling it for an affordable price works. So, then I started thinking about what other categories I could apply this business model to – flash, video, vectors, fonts, etc. At some point I thought of the music industry and then just decided to do it. So, I bootstrapped the business with three zero interest credit cards, built a basic site and then began recruiting artists via MySpace, Facebook, and direct email. We gained some immediate momentum at which point I brought in some funding and really built out the platform. Now we’re able to attract content not just from individuals but also record labels and large high end production music libraries.

What does the music biz think about you?

At first they hated us. We were a threat to the way they were doing business. Now, we don’t get those gripes anymore. While the huge bands and wildly popular artists will never use our services, AudioMicro is addressing the needs the growing number of small content producers who otherwise would have had a hard time being matched up with clients in need. Artists are making extra money because of us. We frequently send larger payouts to artists than they receive on iTunes, so I think they are happy to say the least. Some artists make more than others, and it has a lot to do with the quality and scope of your submissions. Word has gotten out that some of our artists are receiving nice monthly checks, which again brings more contributors to the site. Now, we’re respected within the industry and helping more and more musicians and producers make money with their work.

How do you bring ideas to life?

Just do it. I think it’s Mark Suster who says JFDI. I’m sure you can figure out the “F”. If you have an idea burning inside of you, do what it takes to bring it to life. No idea is great, or even good, if you don’t do anything with it. Start by trying to get a beta version live without going through too much capital. Then as and if you gain momentum, raise funds or do whatever it takes to bring your idea to the next level. Whatever you do, don’t be afraid to tell everyone and anyone about your idea. No one will copy you. Ideas are worthless, it’s all about execution so you have to get out there and get something to market asap and find out if it has legs or not.

Three trends that you’re excited about

People bringing stuff to life

It’s amazing how many different people are bringing ideas to life. You can build a business with a idea, an Internet connection, some hard work, and just a little cash. It has never been as easy to do this as it is today. Using cloud based storage and servers systems and intelligent, young programmers, you can get an idea to market quickly and affordably and see if it sticks. The risks are so low for so many projects. We are seeing more ideas being brought to life than ever before, and this really excites me.

New advertising models

Technologies are continuing to revolutionize the way people get paid for content. Traditional media and publishing is on the decline. Now the next phase of advertising and monetization models are starting to form. Companies like GumGum / Bedrock are doing some really cool stuff in that space. They’re able to offer compelling content to consumers, a monetization model for publishers and producers as well as engaged eyeballs for advertisers. .

The death of voice mail

I recently got rid of my voicemail using Ribbit. It a service that, for free, hijacks your voice mail and transcribes every message left for you and emails / texts it to you. Voice mail is a waste of time and companies like Ribbit, PhoneTag, and YouMail are helping to rid the world of it. This is a trend I’m really passionate about. It’s all about productivity and reducing time wasting activities like checking voice mail.

Here is one trend that I am not excited about.

Content factories

This is one trend that I am not excited about are content factories – businesses that are producing content that really isn’t that original but solely relies on getting spidered by search engines. There are two very large Los Angeles based companies that do this, but I’ll refrain from naming them. This is really not interesting to me at all, but sadly those kinds of businesses seem to be on the rise as well because they make positive cash flow by producing content cheaply and monetizing it through ads, which don’t pay much, but they pay just a little more than the content costs to create.

What’s important to you?

To spend time with family and friends.

Family and friends…they will always be by your side, no matter what. Business goes up and down but you need to take care of the people around you. Also, while my business and customers are super important to me, I am not running a hospital. What I mean is that nobody is going to live or die because of stock music and sound effects. This has been an important lesson for me to recognize. I don’t have to get super stressed out about every single fire drill. Actually most times it’s good to take a step back, relax, and then take care of whatever the issue at hand is.

Connect

Twitter: @bornryan
Blog: Ryanborn.net

Clark Benson is the founder of Ranker, a consumer web startup that is a platform for ranking . . . anything.  Ranker is Benson’s 5th startup; all prior startups were successes – real businesses, real profitability.  He sold prior internet startup eCrush to Hearst in 2006.  Benson is also the founder of Almighty Music Marketing, which has provided various marketing services to the music industry since 1995.  Benson has always rolled some of his earnings into his other businesses, and self-financed the initial seed $1million for Ranker. Clark started his career in business affairs at Virgin Records America and co-wrote the book College: Your Guide To The Best Five Years of Your Life.

If you’d like to learn more about eCrush’s sale to Hearst media, here is an interesting case study titled Why timing the M&A market is tricky.

What are you working on right now?

Ranker, 24-7.  It is a very ambitious platform and is starting to take off quickly, so it’s pretty much the main focus of my energies.  My other business, Almighty Music Marketing, is a 15 year old company that provides various marketing services to record labels, and I have an amazing business partner, Joel Oberstein, who pretty much runs every aspect of that, allowing me to devote almost all my time to Ranker.

Trends that excite you?

The move on the web towards structured data is the trend that most excites me, and my goal is for Ranker to play a big part of that.  We are striving to produce a Wikipedia of opinions – taking large datasets of topics that people feel passionate about and giving them a fun, easy, and social tool to rank them.  And the rapid growth of open-source datasets, through sites like Freebase , who we have partnered with, has given us the ability to scale far faster than I’d imagined 5 years ago when I first started kicking around the concept.

How do you bring ideas to life?

I get lots of ideas (for businesses and other things), but I have what may actually be a disease in that when an idea gets in my head in a certain way and I can’t get it out I just plunge into it full steam ahead.  I probably don’t do enough planning in advance, it’s human nature to massively underestimate the time it will take to do something.  I had the luxury of quick success with my first business, and so as soon as I had saved some capital, I dumped a big pile of it into my second business, and have done that ever since, though the businesses have gotten a lot more scaleable.  This enables me to move fast, but it certainly doesn’t ease the stress level, ha. Almost every time I start a business, I find myself 6 months in, when I’m working 80-90 hour weeks, going “why didn’t I really plan out the details through some more before going all-in”.  Whenever I commit to an idea I want to get it out as fast as possible to beat any potential competition etc.  But once you have a staff and overhead you have a lot of other things on your plate that can suck the time away from planning, so you end up working nights and weekends so you can really hone ideas without all the distractions.  So far it has always worked out in the end, but it certainly makes the process quite a ride.

What gave you the idea to start Ranker?

I’ve been making lists all my life, I love to rank things.  I also strongly believe in the “wisdom of crowds”.  Lists are all over the web, but they don’t connect to anything, so I decided I’d build a platform that would allow, for example, anyone’s “Best Movies of Alltime” list to connect to other people’s versions of the same list.  Then, of course, we can aggregate them and generate that “wisdom of crowds” ranking, which is really powerful.  And quite cool as well.

What are your hobbies and interests?

I have a bunch of hobbies and interests, but above all I’m a total music freak.  Most of my other startups have been in the music industry, and getting into the business side of the music industry was the main reason I moved to Los Angeles.  I can barely think straight without music playing in the background.  I have seen 1000s of concerts and own about 10,000 albums.  A lot of my ideas for Ranker came out of how they would apply to music, but I didn’t want to just do a music startup, I wanted to create a broad platform for anyone’s hobbies.  We already have all kinds of crazy datasets beyond just the obvious stuff like albums, movies, books.  People can make a list of alltime favorite sports cars, mountains they hope to climb, basketball players, comic book characters – whatever your hobbies/passions/interests are, we have a platform to express your opinions in a very granular way.  Americans love lists and rankings – just look at Digg’s homepage or any major blog.  But most of the lists I will be personally be making are things like The Best Rock Bands.

Connect

Twitter: @clarkbenson

Ranker Profile

LinkedIn

Born three weeks overdue and weighing in at nearly 10lbs at birth, Ryan made a big impact early on, giving his poor mother nearly 24 hours of intense labor. Since then, Ryan has worked hard to maintain that kind of intensity in most all that he does.

Residing in Portland, Oregon, with his beautiful wife, Jeana, and their two cats: Billie & Ella – Ryan has an affinity for Stumptown coffee, Northwest brewed IPA, live music, backpacking in the wilderness, travel, and most of all, spending time with friends.

In the business arena, Ryan has toiled away as a marketing pro in various capacities for several years, until realizing that online/digital marketing strategy and public relations are where his powers truly manifest. This often involves offering his talent to the wild world of entertainment and music, although he has been known to freelance from time to time, executing some dynamite PR campaigns for a wide range of clients. Ryan’s campaigns have landed in publications such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Oregonian, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, SPIN Magazine, Advertising Age, Magnet Magazine, Under the Radar, OPB, MTV.com, CNN.com, Forbes.com, Largeheartedboy.com, Pampelmoose.com, and many more.

Currently, Ryan is working for The Dandy Warhols as the Label Manager for their Portland, Oregon-based indie label, Beat The World Records. Oh, and he’s got his own little boutique PR and Digital Strategy agency too…and a his own little record label too. The man never sleeps.

What are you working on right now?

Right now seems like the most dynamic, fluid, and opportunistic time of my life. I live in Portland, Oregon, which honestly has more creative, artistic and cultural juices flowing than nearly anywhere else in the world. It’s truly a special time to live in such a unique and thriving city. It’s something akin to living in Florence during the renaissance period…especially for the DIY, independent music community.

I’m most excited about pouring my heart and soul into the Northwest music scene. From working with The Dandy Warhols and their label, Beat The World Records, to launching my own little record label (Timber Carnival Records), and in helping independent artists and musicians make sense of the ever changing world of online marketing and digital strategy. I only wish there were more hours in the day to devote to this stuff, so I could help more artists and make a bigger impact on things.

In a nutshell, the music industry is upside down right now and no one knows what’s going on. It’s as if the crazies are running the hospital and the only rule is that there aren’t any rules. Old, seasoned industry veterans are having the hardest time adapting, because the entire economy that they built their lives and careers on is bankrupt. If you want to survive, you literally must question everything and regularly take risks and try things that nobody has ever tried before.  I sort of feel like Lewis and Clark…boldly heading off into the unknown, seeking something better. (I just hope I don’t run out of food like they did and end up eating a horse.)

3 Trends that excite you?

Nachos really excite me. But I imagine you’re looking for a better answer than that, aren’t you?

Social media is exciting to me because it is really connecting people and communities in ways that has never been possible before in the history of humankind. The power to share ideas and thoughts, express feelings, make choices, and participate in community are aspects that are especially exciting to me. We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg today. My crystal ball tells me that as mobile technology improves, we’ll get to a point where everyone is literally two degrees from everyone else in the world. And I don’t mean that only in theory…but literally.

Of course, music excites me too. Unfortunately, too many people are hung up on the challenges currently presented in monetizing things (ie: making money from selling records and CDs). Instead, I believe the focus should be on the fact that more people are listening to more music than ever before in the history of the world. This proves to me that demand is there. People WANT music. We (the industry) have simply lacked the creativity and innovation to turn that demand into a better, tangible reward. But there is hope… I mean, people used to believe the world to be flat, right? The music industry is very similar. Changing old perceptions and reimagining the future will be the biggest catalyst to success.

How do you bring ideas to life?

I often bring ideas to life by first exploring them with real, person-to-person dialog and participation with others. Talking through and working through ideas with other people who have similar (or even opposing) interests or interesting perspectives on things is really helpful to me. It allows me to explore new avenues and take a few tangents that I may not have otherwise had visibility or awareness too.

Too many people live on islands and are resigned to believing what they believe because it’s what they were told or it’s all that they’ve ever known. I enjoy being a heretic. Challenging the status quo and asking “why” is something that can be extremely fruitful, when applied in an appropriate and productive manner. However, it can also be counter-productive too. It’s very much a two sided sword in that way. Many things in life are.

I’m also a big fan of the “continual improvement” model. I prefer to approach ideas and projects, no matter how tried and true they may be, as if they’re always a prototype or a beta test of some kind, with plenty of opportunity for growth, learning and improvement. Once you get too comfortable or rely too heavily on a perceived success or a perceived truth, you begin to lose a sense of creativity and objectivity. Unless you are dealing with real absolutes like math and many aspects of science, keeping an open mind and questioning perceived truths can really spawn creativity, innovation and ingenuity. Keeping things fresh and maintaining an open mind really helps bring ideas to life. Google seems to have done quite well with this approach.

What does the future of the music industry look like?

No one really knows what the future of the music industry looks like. But I can tell you with a high degree of certainty that it looks nothing like what we have today and will soon make everything we’ve had up until now look like the stone age.

From a music consumption standpoint, I believe the Spotify model will eventually trump what iTunes is currently doing. Physically owning music, in terms of possessing a physical, digitally tangible object will soon be obsolete. Subscription services are the future…and they key to their success lies in how well it develops and integrates with mobile technology. It’s quite simple, really. It will be very much like paying monthly for your cellular phone service or your cable television service or your gym membership – only it’s music. Once someone effectively ties this into mobile technology, where you can pay $x to have all of the music you want with you and available, on demand, all of the time – the game will be over. Over meaning that that I believe that whomever is the first to master that technology will win the game. iTunes current model is more or less a stop-gap solution during this in between time. It will be interesting to see how well iTunes evolves and develops their platform to compete in the future. I certainly wouldn’t bet against Apple… unless maybe Google was in the game.

How are smaller, up-and-coming independent artists going to economically succeed in the music industry of the future?

First of all, independent artists need to learn to adapt better and faster than their peers. Too many artists are resigned to the old philosophy that they “just want to make music” and aren’t interested in or don’t have time to keep up with technology, social media, online marketing, etc. It’s almost as if artists still believe that simply making really good music is enough, all by itself, to succeed.

Musicians, as much as anyone in any business, trade or industry, need to stay up on the latest technologies and innovations that are taking place today. If you simply stay in your basement or a recording studio all of the time and expect to make a record that is so good that everyone will automatically buy it – because it’s so good – you would be better served to give up now, before you waste your time and money.

Unless you make music purely for the artistic experience and artistic merit of it, than you must get your head in the game and learn how to market and evangelize your music in today’s economy of Web 2.0, social media and digital strategy.

Honestly, I believe independent artists should plan to allocate half of their time to things like planning, strategy, social media, fan/tribe development, connecting with and participating with fans and community, online marketing, etc. And if you do the math, that leaves approximately half of your time to make music and perform. However, in today’s world there’s just no other way to succeed. And while many artists will bury their heads in the sand and cling to the old way of doing things, fearing the unknown or dreading the learning curve involved with unknown buzz words like “Twitter” and “Facebook” and “Digital Content”, “Blogging”, etc…the few brave and hard working artists that embrace this approach will be positioned best to succeed. There a lot of brilliant ideas and resources available right now – especially on the web. Some that quickly come to mind are Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame, Dave Allen of Pampelmoose.com, Ian Rogers and Topspin Media, Kevin Breuner at CD Baby, and companies like Spotify, Bandcamp, CD Baby, TuneCore, Topspin Media. There’s a wealth of information available out there. And like G.I. Joe used to say… “Knowing is half the battle.”

Connect

email: ryan at petmarmoset.com

http://www.petmarmoset.com

http://www.beattheworld.com

http://www.timbercarnival.com

http://www.twitter.com/petmarmoset

http://www.facebook.com/ryanwines

http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanwines