Own project
Musibiz
Independent artists are judged on streams and followers. I asked a different question: what does an artist actually need to build a career?
The situation
- Independent artists are surrounded by individual measures of apparent success — streams, followers, playlists, chart positions, exposure. None of those numbers on its own means an artist is building a sustainable career. My background in music and artist development led to a broader question: what does an independent artist actually need to build?
What I saw
- Career development needed to be looked at as a whole, not as a set of popularity metrics. It came down to four connected areas: Foundation, Audience, Communication and Support. An artist needs foundations, needs to develop an audience, needs to communicate consistently and show activity, and needs genuine support around what they do. And it should start in Ireland — build the backyard first — with an international path later.
The solution
- Musibiz was built as an Irish career-development and discovery platform rather than another music directory. Each part serves the model: profiles and progress give artists their foundation; updates, followers and support build and sustain an audience; county and genre directories, and the Irish Indie Chart, make discovery permanent rather than weekly; membership levels match the stage an artist is at; and there is a route out into the wider World Indie Chart.
What it improved
- Artists. Structure, a sense of progress and clearer priorities.
- Listeners and industry. Permanent discovery through directories, not only through a weekly ranking.
- Irish independent music. An organised home base built around development.
- Me. Years of music-industry experience turned into a working system.
How it was optimised
Search visibility influenced how Musibiz was structured; it was not added after the platform was built. The aim was never just to rank the homepage.
- Artist discovery designed into the structure from the beginning.
- Artists can be found through their own profiles, by county and by genre — not only through the homepage or the weekly chart.
- Artists stay permanently discoverable even when they aren't currently ranking.
- Genre pages only become visible in search once there are enough artists to justify them.
- Many useful ways in from search, without creating large numbers of weak pages.
- Incomplete profiles kept from weakening the public experience, and private account areas kept apart from public discovery.
The website came after the model. The first job was understanding the problem and deciding what the platform needed to encourage artists to do — moving the question from “How popular do I look?” to “Am I building the foundations of a career?”