Digital Music, Remix Culture, and Internet Collaboration

Building Beats teaches music and multimedia production skills to disadvantaged youth who lack career opportunities in arts and creative industries. By teaching with mobile and cloud-based production tools, we aim to lower the entry barriers to using technology for creative expression and entrepreneurship.

Our mobile/cloud-based and culturally-responsive music curriculum is geared towards helping youth who lack access to technology and/or digital media training to learn about 21st century entrepreneurial skills like internet collaboration, design thinking, and social media marketing. While many youth engage with digital content, few have the support needed to become influential creators and voices in the digital media sphere. Those who do have adequate support are disproportionately from mid- and high-income backgrounds. Meanwhile, the technology which facilitates the creative culture of the internet is accessible to most youth now in the form of low-cost smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

Drawing from personal experience, many employers are now looking to hire young people not for their college degrees or academic credentials, but for their fluency in social media, digital content creation, and the associated nuances in the field of marketing and advertising. However, many young people take their media fluency for granted, and do not know how to present these self-taught skills to employers in a compelling fashion. Our solution encourages young people to take their digital lives seriously, and to view their consumption and creation of digital content as having a palpable effect on the world around them.

Our solution will help youth who lack career opportunities and mentorship in the fields of digital media/arts to pursue training and development in these areas. Although the primary delivery of our solution is through the facilitation of music production workshops, we will also build out sustainable mentorship and internship opportunities for our students to further their work after the conclusion of their classes with us. We also aim to function as a record label and incubator to directly help with the promotional and entrepreneurial aspects of our student work.

Track partnerships with NYC schools. - Have a presence in all NYC schools by 2020.

Create Building Beats umbrella accounts on Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp, and track student releases through each of these accounts. - Release and promote 1,000 student tracks on streaming platforms in 2018.

Track number of mentorship/internships through our partnerships with NYC cultural and educational institutions. - Connect 50 students with digital media mentorship and/or internship opportunities in 2018.

Our solution is innovative in its low-cost and scalability, with the only prerequisite for successful workshops being a skilled instructor, working internet connection and approximately 1 laptop, tablet, or mobile device for every few students. As opposed to music programs that focus on skill-building on costly instruments, we focus on training our students to navigate free cloud-based production software, setting their own goals for collaborating with others on the cloud or remixing royalty-free or creative commons material. Our cloud-based platform also allows students to work on music independently outside of class.

We help our students participate in internet communities that focus on open-source collaboration and democratic access to instructional materials -- human-centric practices which are lacking in traditional arts and music pedagogy. For instance, it is difficult for a violinist to tweak their instrument for a better sound, but if a student is unable to produce a sound s/he wants on a software instrument, it is possible to “hack” the instrument itself, redesign its parameters, and upload it so other users can improve it remotely. This is the kind of creative and collaborative design-thinking we want to foster in our students.

Our solution will be scaled out using cloud-based music education software such as Soundtrap and Audiotool, where we have direct correspondence with the software development and educational teams. These platforms are free, and we have partnerships with them to secure premium and educational features which will boost their effectiveness in the classroom. We will seek out and train workshop leaders who have experience in youth development and/or music technology to lead our workshops. Because of the near-universal accessibility of internet connection and internet-compatible devices, our solution will be accessible by any site which has these prerequisites.

We are currently building out a legacy donor program, as well as a full-time grants and development team to sustain the steps we’ve already taken towards independent fundraising. We will continue to apply our earned income model by charging a per-workshop fee to cover the workshop leader pay and our overhead fees. We will pitch and sell our highly adaptable curricula to school districts who have shown interest in adopting our workshop model on a large scale, and provide training to these school districts as a paid service. We will also use our newly acquired office space to develop more out-of-school workshops for excelling students, corporations, or interested individuals. This will allow us to diversify our revenue stream and sustain our process of scaling out.

Our main revenue is through earned income from selling our afterschool workshops to different sites. We are overly reliant on this revenue stream, and would benefit from diversification. We work with a variety of sites with varying technological resources, and the implementation of our curriculum can suffer from inconsistencies as a result. We have a small core administrative team (2 full-time, 3 part-time), relative to our team of 15 workshop leaders. In order to scale out, we need to define administrative roles more clearly to support a team of hundreds or thousands of workshop leaders spread across different locations.

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Our curriculum is very focused on NYC right now, which is a relatively large supporter of afterschool programs and arts education. The challenge we face is scaling out to more locations while maintaining our high quality of instruction offered by our workshop leaders, who are all music industry professionals and entrepreneurs. We will need technology consultation for scaling out our cloud-based curriculum and implementation and designing an HR model that taps into local communities of talented facilitators and creative entrepreneurs. We also need assistance expanding our programming to more media arts besides music production, and diversifying our revenue stream.

New York City Department of Youth and Community Development

New York City Department of Probation

Horizon Juvenile Detention Center

Hive Digital Media Learning Network

Carnegie Hall

Urban Arts Partnership/B.E.A.T. NYC/DreamYard/Found Sound Nation/Sonic Arts for All