Closing out this year feels surreal. 2023 was a big year for Symphony 💜 from dropping new features and building bridges with new partners, to helping thousands of creatives grow their fanbase and build their businesses - it’s hard to put it all into a review.

From the day we launched, our team has been building with two consistent values top-of-mind:

1. we wanted to build something that could help anyone make a living from their passion, bringing together everything our team learned in our past decade of experience as data-driven marketers, into one accessible & affordable form factor

2. we wanted to use our platform to educate the next generation of creatives on how to make it in today’s increasingly busy world

The community we’ve built together has been a driving force in our story and we’d like to extend BIG love & appreciation to each of you.

We’ve got a packed year ahead, but before we close this chapter… we wanted to close out 2023 by highlighting some of our favorite moments across product + the community this year. Let’s run it all back 🏃‍♀️.

January: Hitting the Scene 🚀

We’re a small team of creatives at Symphony - and we want to surround ourselves with other creatives and stay close to the ground. It felt right for us to start the year off in LA interviewing artists at “Everything is Punk”, where we had the opportunity to connect with some talented folks in our community.

A few weeks before 2023 started, we’d hit Fedex, printed some stickers, and slapped it onto a microphone we bought. Since then the Symphony mic has been allllll over 🎤

Peep the interview we did with Tommy Richman (who was recently featured on Brent Faiyaz’s album + just got off a world tour). Time moves quick ⬇️

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Feb + March: FOREVER SAVES 💌

The month that changed pre-saves forever – Forever Saves. Pre-saves were always an annoying part of the fan-artist experience: ask a fan to pre-save, and ask them to do it again. And again and again and again.

Forever Saves was our way of changing this experience for the better: fans gained the ability to effortlessly 'subscribe' to an artist’s future releases, ensuring automatic addition of new music to their libraries upon release, while giving artists a seamless way to collect fan data.

Recognizing that your fans are at the core of your career, we began focusing on more ways for you to better understand who they are and connect with them.

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Indie artists are really about to shake it up with this pre-save game changer 😭 #indieartisttips #musicmarketing #musicmarketingtips #musi... See more

We also had the opportunity to attend SXSW in March, where we met and connected with many of you at our first in-person event! Managed to snag an interview with some dope industry leaders, including 21 Savage's manager, Meezy (both 21 and Meezy would go onto becoming investors in Symphony 💜)

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April: Say hello to Maestro 🤖

We like to be deep in tech, and try to bring the cutting edge into the platform as it makes sense. Maestro was our first iteration of integrating GPT-4, the tech behind ChatGPT into Symphony.

The goal was to educate: with all of the playbooks at hand, and more folks joining Symphony everyday, we were hoping to find a way to help people understand how to maximize the platform for their specific goals.

The v1 of Maestro was marketing recommendations:

As we’ve built more marketing levers into the platform, we have a lot of ideas on where to take this tool.

Top of mind is automating the entire marketing workflow, from strategy to execution to analysis, and doing it on your behalf. This is a big push we’re making in Q1 and we’re particularly excited about it as a team. “AI Action Plans” are otw, here’s an early sneak peak ⬇️

May - July: We put the control in your hands 🎮

As we kept building into the summer, we realized we’d built a whole lot of tech to create marketing campaigns, and not as much tech to customize + control your campaigns after they’d started.

This was a big undertaking - IG ads, pre-saves, and YT ads all work differently under the cover, but we took on the challenge. It was a fun build for us though, because it gave us a chance to surface front-and-center, all of the data that we thought would be relevant to a growing career.

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A lot of ideas have come to our minds since this update, not only to make campaign setup + analysis easier, but also to add more customization options during the creation process. We’ve got a few things we’re planning to roll out in Jan + Feb that’ll make things even easier and more expressive.

August: Our very first Symphony U 🎓

August marked the debut of Symphony University, the first of many to come. As a tech team in the creative field, we draw inspiration from a lot of places:

• 🎽 From the fashion world: we’re deeply inspired by what Virgil Abloh did with “FREE-GAME”, a free online resource he put together years ago to share all his insights and resources on how to build a fashion brand.

• ⚙️ From the tech world: the open source movement, where powerful code is shared freely for anyone to build on top of, has led to thousands of tech companies being started on the shoulders of people’s shared work.

We wanted to find a way to open source our own learnings from our years in the industry, and also give a chance for some of our friends in the industry to share their insights, freely. Symphony U was born, and we’ve had over a thousand people tune into the first 4 episodes we’ve done:

After each session, whether you missed it or want to revisit and dive deeper, you can access the recorded content in the Learn Tab on the Symphony App or view it on our YouTube Channel. Thank you to everyone who tuned into Symphony U this year!

Bonus: Alina Baraz, Coi Leray & Tinashe joined the community in August 🥰 this was a cool moment for our team to see firsthand. Big love to Alina, Coi, Tinashe and their teams 💜

September: Bringing the best targeting tech to everyone, Conversions 🎯

Bringing best-in-class targeting to our ads platform has always been a consistent goal - ultimately the better targeting in your ads, the more money you make and the more money you save. In September we rolled out Symphony Conversions, bringing Facebook’s most advanced targeting tech - traditionally used by top marketers & major brands - to everyone on Symphony.

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We wanted to get beyond reporting on just “clicks”, and more importantly make it easier to know how the marketing budget you’re spending, translates into the things you care about like streams, followers, sales. This build out was a big undertaking: taking something that’s very very complex, and boiling it down into a simple workflow that anyone can setup in 10 minutes.

We’ve got a lot of playbooks planned that take advantage of Conversions in 2024, to grow not just streams + followers, but also your business more generally🫡

October: UnitedMasters x Symphony 🤝

As we entered Q4, our team remained heads-down focused on building with teams who shared our mission: democratizing access to marketing tools and knowledge for every indie artist and creator. In line with this vision, we had the opportunity to partner with UnitedMasters, offering Symphony's tools and education, along with special perks for UM Select artists.

This was a big milestone for us - our first major partnership during our first major year in business.

October also came with the opportunity to join the UnitedMasters team at SelectCon 005: Independence is Global - as an official partner. It was the first time our entire team was on the ground, connecting with new folks, showcasing the Symphony product. We even got the chance to go behind-the-scenes in the greenroom (Symphony mic included), to interview the one and only EarthGang about their thoughts on digital marketing in today’s landscape.

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At this point, you could drop us anywhere and we’re interview ready ⚡️

November: Symphony Artists were Grammy Nominated! 🏆

Collaborating with such incredibly talented artists is a true honor for us at Symphony! Witnessing many of you earn Grammy Nominations was a standout moment for our community in November. Big congrats to SZA, Summer Walker, Davido, 6LACK, Pat Junior, and many others! 🏆💜

In November, Symphony had its moment in Times Square. Beyond being a billboard, it was a genuine reflection on how far both the Symphony Team and our Community have come together.

December: Audiomack + SoundCloud x Symphony 🚀

As we wrapped up the year, our goal was to finish just as strong, if not stronger, than we started. Understanding that your fanbase is global with streaming preferences across various platforms, we went after covering nearly every base for you.

We partnered with Audiomack and Soundcloud, giving your fans the option to pre-save & Forever Save your tracks on these platforms - making Symphony the only platform to offer every primary streaming service by default, for free.

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This, alongside our 'one-click' Pre-Saves on Spotify (where fans can automatically login to Spotify) has cemented Symphony as the most powerful pre-save platform in the game today.

Here's a little fun fact: last year in December, we set a goal to reach 10k followers on IG by the end of 2023, and we finally hit this milestone this month (we started the year with less than 2k followers) 🥳

And that brings us here…

A year into Symphony Pro & many milestones later, we find ourselves at the close of an amazing chapter for Symphony.

To all of you: our sincere gratitude and appreciation. Your support, passion for your artistry, and commitment to steering your own career have been one of the driving forces behind this year.

As we stand on the brink of a New Year, our commitment to innovation continues, equipping you with tools to make a living from your passion all while educating the next generation of creatives through Symphony.

Big cheers to our Community & Team! We’re excited to keep building with you and for you. Let’s run this new year up and make some history together 🥂⭐️