Interview: Tim Weber (Good Music All Day)

GoodMusicAllDay.com is a taste-making website that provides the best legally free music in a variety of genres for young adults ages 16 to 24. Unlike other music websites, GoodMusicAllDay is not defined by one genre of music and does not cost money. The website uses these two unique qualities to establish itself as the leading taste-maker for college-aged consumers: influencing what they listen to, the clothes they wear, and the issues they talk about.

We interviewed their Founder and CEO, Tim Weber, to find out how he uses social media to grow his young and innovative business.

1. What was your purpose for starting this site? Is it any different now?

During high school, music got me through some down times. I loved music, and I began to feel the power a song could have on not only my mood, but also my outlook on life. When I headed off to college at Notre Dame, I didn’t exactly attend every class and thus had more free time than ever before. Having just discovered the concept of legally free music and blogs, I spent nearly all of my time searching the internet for new music. Once I discovered that there were thousands of music sites to download from, I wanted to be a part of it. So I joined two websites, blazed1.com and 5starhiphop.com, and started blogging for them (only for a matter of weeks). Around the end of October, I decided to start a website called tweb90.wordpress.com with one intention: to keep a group of close high school friends in the loop on what I was listening to and vice-versa. To be honest, I always felt like my friends and I had a good taste in music, so the site acted as a way for us to continually share with each other the music we enjoyed.

For the first two months, the site was pretty low key. Only my friends and those at my high school and college knew about it, which is what I wanted. I didn’t think of it as a blog, website, company, or anything of that nature. It was  just a website for me to review songs that I liked. In January, we hit 1k views in a week for the first time, and at that point I actually thought about shutting down the site because I thought it was getting too big and not personal anymore.

Obviously since then, my purpose of the site has changed completely. I began to look at the site as a way to learn about the music business, and now approach it just like a business (we’ve recently become: GoodMusicAllDay LLC).

2. Which blogs/websites influence you and your staff? Everyone. Simply put, there is too much music out there to pick just one website. For myself, I have always loved Pigeons and Planes just because of their diversity and honesty in their reviews. Shout out to Confusion.
3. How/do you market to the high school demographic? We actually consider our target market College campuses and College aged students 18-22; however, we realize that music goes beyond an age, and that we get a lot of traffic from high school students as well. We don’t go out of our way to market to high school students simply because we are still growing and have to focus on the markets that we target.
4. What do you think about Facebook’s  development over the years? Do you think its sustainable? Facebook’s development has been nothing less than remarkable. Their ability to combine listening to their users feedback with using their own ideas to stay one step ahead is admirable. I think Facebook is beyond sustainable just due to the principle that people of all generations have a desire to stay connected with friends, and they have established themselves as the best at doing that (and saying the best is an understatement).
5. How have the prominent social media tools (Blogging, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) allowed you to market your site and spread awareness? Social media is the easiest way to market a new company or website. Facebook and Twitter have been two resources that allow us to get the word out about our company without spending a single dollar. I can not over emphasize how important it is to get people to follow your company on Twitter and Facebook, and keep them engaged. As long as you have the content and quality to back your brand up, the hardest part is getting people to hear about your company. Social media has allowed almost any company to have the chance to go viral overnight (if the idea is good enough).
6. Do you plan on continuing this site post-graduation? I actually attended Notre Dame, NYU, and Belmont before taking a break from school to focus on my company. The more I learned about the music industry and those whom have succeeded in it, the more I realized how important it is to work as hard as you can, be confident in your work, and network constantly. Over the past year, I decided that a college education wasn’t needed to do those things just yet. Obviously, not getting a full college education means I have to work that much harder and teach myself many basic business skills, but in my mind it was more efficient than taking out loans to get a degree I wasn’t passionate about. That said, it is never too late to go back to school, and I realize that. I just didn’t want to live with any regrets.
7. How have you leveraged your experience with the site when applying for jobs/internships? While I consider the website my full-time job (about 70 hours a week), I use my experience to network with other people in the music business and learn from them and collaborate with them.

To find out more about Good Music All Day, visit their website at www.goodmusicallday.com