I was a white-labeler of Masterchannel's AI mastering widget. I even admit that their mastering will always sound better than ours...I'll explain why at the end
Stemmer's mastering widget is designed to help you upsell your other products and services. Masterchannel's whitelabel widget is designed to sell AI mastering.
If you want to sell the best sounding AI mastering, Masterchannel is for you. If you’d rather have a mastering lead-magnet that integrates into your marketing funnel, go with Stemmer.
I went viral on Tik Tok in 2022, when Stemmer was a buggy automated mixing service. My tech failed, I quit, but I was still getting 1,000 monthly visitors to this website. I saw on LinkedIn that Masterchannel offered whitelabeling of their AI mastering. They would give me a branded widget that I could add to my site with 1 line of code, and start printing passive income. It was a no-brainer.
While the experience may vary, this was mine.
Money. Masterchannel kept most of the revenue my widget was generating, and I realized I could build my own AI mastering and keep all of the money instead.
I found some open-source mastering code called "Matchering". Its algorithm tries to make the input song sound like a reference song. I realized, "I could let famous artists and engineers clone their sound into an AI mastering widget which they could sell to their audience!" Each influencer could have an AI mastering widget with their own unique sound.
This unique angle prompted me to build my core business such that other people and businesses could whitelabel Stemmer into their own unique widget. I found there weren't many influencers willing and able to take advantage of cloning their sound into a widget, so I gradually shifted to selling more to online music businesses.
Though I ended up building some unique features for these businesses, like our Spotify Reference mastering, I had a problem...
I had copied Masterchannel's pricing strategy of taking a revenue split from sales my whitelabelers would get. I initially chose to do a 50/50 split because it felt fair. This meant that only thing I cared about was getting my whitelabelers to embed the widget on the most high traffic places of their website. This was an issue, because some businesses felt it was competing with their other products. It also made me too pushy, which upset some partners (rightfully so).
Furthermore, I ended up competing with Masterchannel themselves. Some businesses I would approach had already been approached by Masterchannel; These leads would prefer Masterchannel because their AI sounded better than Stemmer's.
This is where I shifted away from Masterchannel. I realized our mastering widget could be an incredible way for our partners to collect contact info from the people who upload a song, so I doubled down on turning this into a marketing funnel.
I added a marketing gate, where users had to put their contact info, right before they could hear their song. Turns out this form gets a 66% completion rate! We even added an upsell page for our partner AI Mixing Mastering, where we'd nudge purchasers to try their manual mixing service.
My focus became less about profiting from AI mastering sales, and more about helping businesses build an awesome marketing funnel that starts with AI mastering. With this, I started charging a monthly subscription and let my partners keep 100% of their sales
Masterchannel has always been focused at creating a great mastering AI. Stemmer is focused on building a great marketing funnel and lead magnet. They will beat us at what we're not focused on.
If you want to embed industry-leading AI mastering on your website to make some passive income, Masterchannel is a great choice.
If you want to build a marketing funnel that begins with an AI mastering lead-magnet, Stemmer is for you.
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