The Power of Music

A few days ago, we got an email from a very excited individual who was eager to share his experience with us. We often receive plenty of feedback, but we felt this specific message stood out from the rest. It literally made me feel blessed, and I immediately sent it to our whole team, and later I decided I would do my best to share with the world the kind of feeling this email evoked.

We are a bootstrap company, and it’s constantly a challenge trying to figure out the next important step to take. We work with a limited budget and a small team of 10 people, therefore, we have to understand what is the next best thing to do for our customers. If we put all our efforts into improving the website (speed, user interface, publication workflow) we’ll have to delay a server upgrade. If we want to add more support staff, we have to say goodbye to that crazy marketing strategy that we had in mind. Ultimately, we sell music, and our commitment comes from the fact that half of our founding members are musicians (including me). As a result of this, we decided from the start that our curatorial standards will be the foundation of our commitment to integrity and the highest standards in the industry. This is our priority, and we try to follow through. We have grown our business to serve hundreds of thousands of customers, and we did this without external funding. We really didn’t expect to grow this fast, but it sure is exciting.

Sometimes it is hard to define ourselves as a technology company. By this, I mean that almost every company intrinsically has technology at its core. Even banks are transforming their business models and seem to be more of tech companies than financial institutions. However, we are in the art space and some people tend to spread the concept that “there is no bad art, or good art, it’s a matter of taste”.  I get the point that “we want to break free”, or “we want to have the gift of choice”, but somehow, like a friend of mine likes to say, “we all have a clear idea of when something smells good or not”. In my point of view, the same concept applies with our other four senses. We live in a world ruled by numbers. It always seems like the more you have, the better. Despite this, we go against the grain by only accepting around 5% of all the applications we receive. We only get to work with the most talented musicians out there, and we listen to every single track that is released. We also compose music in-house, and we go all-out to produce the best possible tracks. The music has to have a profound impact, and given that our customers use our music for their content, our mission is to ensure that they can rely on our music not just to make their projects better, but to make that video, podcast or film remarkable. Our objective is to help our customers differentiate and make them reach an unimaginable level of production, not just an offer them a bunch of generic background tunes. That’s why we also decided to write our own music, that we create from the ground up.

One of the most frequent questions we are asked during presentations is “how many tracks do you have?” rather than “is your music good?” or “can I take a listen?”.  I’ve always been skeptical about applying stats to artistic content. Ratings, followers, likes, are just a few factors in the complex nature of artwork that basically say, “ok, a lot of people like this”. However, you need to activate and develop your non-analytical senses to a point that you are able to really perceive beauty to be able to know what is just “good enough” and what is “awesome”. Music, like any other art, can reach a part of us that is sacred and should never be corrupted or ignored. It has the power to deeply touch our souls, inspire, provoke and create an attraction. Music artists have an immense responsibility, since the experience of being exposed to any piece of art never leaves us the same as we were before. When used wisely, it can also offer relief, by reducing the symptoms of autism, brain degenerative conditions like dementia and Alzheimer diseases and even mental conditions like depression. That’s the power of music.

This is why it makes us so proud to receive such messages of support. This guy was really touched, and we can say that we honored to have communicated using the language of music. So, when people ask us, “why HookSounds? How is it different?”. Well, we always try to express it in words, but ultimately, we like to say that you can only find the ‘why’ by listening, just listening, that’s the reason.