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Promising an artist-focused service that gives musicians, beatmakers and producers a free marketplace to trade their sonic wares, Wavetick aims to disrupt the current sample website paradigm in the creator’s favour. Let’s find out more…
As a founder of such industry tent poles as Sample Magic, AttackMagazine, Audiaire and Principle Pleasure studios, Sharooz Raoofi has already left a sizable footprint on the music production landscape. Whether wearing his entrepreneurial hat or as an artist in his own right (you might be familiar with his hailed alterego Principleasure) Raoofi is keen to shake up the mould. This is strikingly true of his latest venture, Wavetick. Alongside a small band of cohorts, Sharooz aims to bring a fairer, more flexible and entirely unrestrictive service for producers, songwriters and beatmakers, creating a platform where they can sell their creations frictionlessly whilst retaining 90% of all royalties. It all sounds fantastic, but we had more than a few questions…
cm: So firstly, can you give us an overview of Wavetick – what is it, and what benefits does it provide to musicians and producers in contrast to the other available marketplaces?
Sharooz Raoofi: “We’re really trying to do things differently. One thing I think the world doesn’t need right now is another site that’s selling sounds and tracks. But there’s certainly a lot of unique features that we offer that other people don’t. Particularly with the advent of AI, we’re really positioning ourselves as an artist-focused and artist-led operation. The first thing to say is that you don’t have to pay to be on there. With some folks, you have to pay some form of service fee whether it’s monthly or yearly in order to onboard and sell. We don’t require card details to be on-site. It’s essentially completely free and takes just a few seconds to onboard. The second thing is that we only take a very small platform fee. We take just 12.5%. That number is quite deliberately fixed there as it’s lower than Bandcamp which is 15%. We figured it was the lowest possible rate we could do while guaranteeing the service we want to provide.
“From a seller perspective, that probably stands out the most, but once you start diving into the product you’ll see that we have quite a unique setup. One thing that’s quite unique is that we can offer ‘Limited Edition’ products. This means that we can offer just one licence to just one buyer. So, in essence you could sell ‘ghost produced’ tracks on there that others can buy and work with. Or, completely one-off soundpacks that only one person can buy. We can extend this further with 1-of-10, 100 or≈200 editions too, so it’s possible to sell completely limited-edition works there. We found this to be quite popular. I spent four and
