While pursuing careers as professional musicians, Tom and Rick Pernikoff experienced the difficulties bands have trying to reach their most ardent fans in the different cities scheduled on a tour. In response, they founded Tunespeak and resettled in their hometown of St. Louis, Missouri to build a business that has the potential to fundamentally alter how bands and their respective fans interact.

Tunespeak leverages the Pernikoff brothers’ experience in the music industry and software technology to create a social media platform that directly engages fans with numerous artists reflecting a diverse range of American music genres. The members of the Tunespeak team each have different talents that contribute to the growth and success of the company. Most notably, they’re all musicians–thus, it is common to find the Tunespeak office not only bustling with the tempo of a tech startup but filled with the eclectic mix of music enjoyed by individuals that are truly passionate about music and expanding the ways in which musicians can share their art with their fans.

Our team, comprised of Alaina Flowers (MBA 2015), Delisle Warden (MBA 2016), Morgan Banti (BSBA 2015), and Todd Wells (JD 2016), is consulting for Tunespeak this semester to help the company take another step toward cementing their position as the industry leader.

Fans are currently actively engaging with their favorite artists in a myriad of ways, including internet streaming, concerts, social media and merchandise sales. For our project, we are working to collect this data and segment the market for music in the United States. Our research and recommendations will directly impact future strategic and product development decisions Tunespeak will make.

We initially faced difficulty in defining the scope of the project. We wanted to present research about which fans drove revenue, how to reach those fans, differences in fans from genre to genre, and the various ways that they consume music, along with a whole slew of other questions.

Mountains of music industry data exist, but what information will be meaningful to Tunespeak? We’ve ultimately narrowed our focus a great deal in order to answer this critical question.

After realizing that Tunespeak, by its very nature, is pursuing fans that will be most profitable to artists, we have begun segmenting the market with this in mind by focusing on which fans are driving revenue and how.

Ideally, we want to present information regarding the effect of various traits like location, age, and genre preferences on consumption and spending habits. For example, does a fan of hip-hop in New York consume music in a different way than a fan of country in Nebraska?

The answers to these questions will ultimately help Tunespeak evaluate its approach in attempting to reach the music industry’s most profitable fans. We are currently focused on continuing to define the categories for segmentation and how to ultimately present the data we find in an easy to digest format. We are looking forward to the opportunity to create a set of information that could revolutionize the way that the music industry understands and interacts with the market.