Speaking to a roundtable of MTUK members, Tom Allen, CTO of Downtown Music, shared the contrasting journeys of two music tech ventures – the first a failure, the second a success that led to acquisition. Drawing inspiration from William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” Tom’s story is a masterclass in recognising market signals, understanding customer needs, and building sustainable businesses in our industry.
The Innocent Years: Metable and the Metadata Dream
Tom’s first start-up, Metable, emerged from his time working in digital distribution. Watching labels struggle with metadata management, he saw what seemed like an obvious opportunity: “I can see that I can solve their problem with this,” he recalls. “I can get them to integrate metadata and cataloguing once and send it to where it needs to go.”
Armed with developer skills and entrepreneurial enthusiasm, Tom followed conventional start-up wisdom. He found a co-founder, crafted pitch decks, entered competitions, and even won some. The external validation was energising – everyone loved the concept. But there was a problem that took years to fully understand.
The Fatal Flaw: Nice-to-Have vs Must-Have
“The truth of the matter was we could provide value to customers, but it was nice to have,” Tom reflects. Despite beautiful budgets projecting five clients per month, Metable never reached those targets. The signals were there from the beginning – a carefully crafted email to his target market received only two lukewarm responses.
After years of pushing the proverbial boulder uphill, grinding to maybe 15-20 clients, Tom made the difficult decision to close Metable. The timing was telling: “Eight years after closing, I got a sales call – ‘Can we implement this?’ Where were you when I needed you?”
Key Lessons from Metable:
- External validation doesn’t equal market demand
- Organising data is often a “nice-to-have,” not a “must-have”
- Long sales cycles can signal fundamental product-market fit issues
- Most start-up advice fits someone else’s worldview and their own need to be right, including my advice here
Experience Calls: The Birth of Curve
Tom’s second venture began almost by accident. Whilst doing consultancy work, he built a royalty dashboard for MRC (Music Royalty Company). Their existing setup was failing to scale with their business and holding them back, and nothing else on the market was suitable.
This time, everything was different. The ambition was modest – “Can I make 50 grand a year to keep myself going?” The problem was crystal clear – every music business must report royalties. Unlike metadata management, this wasn’t optional.
The Must-Have Solution
“Every music business has to report royalties,” Tom explains. “It’s part of their business. They’ve licenced something from somebody, they’ve got to report royalties to them.” This fundamental difference – solving a must-have rather than a nice-to-have – changed everything.
Working 18 months in the evenings whilst maintaining consultancy work, Tom built a platform that could handle both scale and complexity. The key insight was abstraction: rather than building for specific use cases, Curve normalised data to flexible values that could be mapped to anything.
The Growth Playbook That Worked
Bootstrap and Focus
Curve grew without raising external funding, a decision that Tom now sees as crucial. “If we had raised some money, I would have definitely made plenty of plans to please somebody else,” he reflects. Instead, they focussed relentlessly on serving their customers.
Culture Through Crisis
The team’s culture was forged through “moments of truth” – when something went wrong, they owned it completely.
This transparency built unshakeable trust with clients who were entrusting Curve with critical business processes they couldn’t easily audit themselves.
Pricing Evolution
Initially, Tom priced Curve too low, thinking indie labels needed affordable solutions. A conversation with one record company changed his perspective: “They were like, ‘I don’t believe you can do it for a grand a month.’ They wanted to know they were paying enough that we could actually deliver.”
The lesson? In B2B, especially for mission-critical software, price often signals value and sustainability.
The Acquisition: A Founder’s Dilemma
By 2021, Curve was attracting acquisition interest. The process took over a year. Interestingly, many prospects initially believed they could build a royalty system themselves – a common refrain in music tech.
“Everyone thought they could build it themselves,” Tom notes. “CTOs would believe they could build it themselves – why acquire this? But having captured the market, having worked through all the problems to get to where you are, having the staff that understand the problem – that’s where the real value lies.”
The eventual sale to Downtown Music came with a crucial condition: the team stayed together. This wasn’t just about the technology – it was about preserving the culture and expertise that made Curve successful.
Lessons for Music Tech Founders
Tom’s journey offers several crucial insights for the MTUK community:
1. Recognise Real Market Signals
Don’t mistake enthusiasm for sales calls with actual buying intent. Pay attention to early signals like email response rates and sales cycle length.
2. Focus on Must-Haves
“Selling nice-to-haves is always going to be hard,” Tom warns. Look for problems that businesses absolutely must solve, not just ones they’d like to solve.
3. Consider Bootstrap Benefits
External funding can create pressure to please investors rather than customers. Sometimes the constraint of limited resources forces better focus and decision-making.
4. Price for Value and Sustainability
Underpricing can signal lack of confidence in your solution. B2B customers often want to pay enough to ensure you’ll be around to support them.
5. Culture Beats Strategy
“Own your mistakes. Everyone fucks up – own that mistake,” Tom advises. Transparency and reliability build the trust essential for long-term success.
The Blake Connection
Tom’s framing using William Blake’s poems isn’t just literary flourish – it captures something essential about the start-up journey. You need the innocence to begin the journey, but you need the experience to complete it successfully.
“You’ve got to have the innocence in order to get the experience ultimately,” Tom reflects. “Experience is just pain – it’s all the pain that you go through in order to get that something.”
What This Means for You
For music tech founders in the MTUK community, Tom’s story offers both cautionary tale and inspiration. The difference between Metable and Curve wasn’t just luck or timing – it was understanding the fundamental difference between solving problems people want solved versus problems they must solve.
As our industry continues to evolve, with AI and new technologies creating fresh opportunities and challenges, Tom’s experience reminds us that the fundamentals remain constant: understand your market, solve real problems, build trust, and never stop learning from both success and failure.
The path from innocence to experience isn’t easy, but for those who navigate it successfully, the rewards – both personal and professional – can be transformational.