SceneBuilder connects artists, venues, and listeners within geographic music communities we call Scenes — creating vital communication infrastructure with Local as a priority. Discovery, streaming, communication, and event promotion, all organized around the places you live and play. No corporate algorithms picking winners and losers.
Without artists, there are no shows. Without shows, there are no venues. Without venues, there are no listeners. Everything starts with the people who make the music.
A well-established local artist in Duluth might earn tens of dollars a year from streaming. Most make less. A year of Spotify revenue won't buy a single set of strings.
One ticket sale > a year of streaming royalties for most local artists.
Instead, we give artists something worth infinitely more:
direct access to the people who listen to them.
Those listeners become the audience at your next show. They buy your merch. They tip you at the bar. They bring friends.
Venues take a risk on every booking. Without data, artists have no way to show they have a real, local audience. Cold emails and Instagram follower counts don't cut it.
SceneBuilder gives artists verifiable local listener counts, follower engagement, and scene activity. Venues can see exactly how many people in their area already listen to you. That's a booking conversation, not a cold pitch.
Posting to Instagram, managing a mailing list, running Facebook ads that reach nobody local. Independent artists spend more time marketing than making music -- and most of it doesn't work.
Push notifications, email, or SMS -- sent directly to the people who already listen to your music in your area. No algorithm. No random ad spend. No guessing. Automate new release alerts and gig reminders so you can get back to writing songs.
Without venues, there's no place to play. They take the financial risk on every show. SceneBuilder gives them the tools to fill every seat and know their money is well spent.
Venues spend $50-200 per show on Facebook ads that target by zip code and age -- not by who actually listens to the bands on the lineup. The result: empty rooms and wasted money on people who were never going to show up.
SceneBuilder lets venues promote directly to listeners who follow the artists on their lineup. Push, email, or SMS -- consent-gated and targeted by engagement. A 3-band Friday costs about $5.70 to reach 380 real fans. Not impressions. Fans.
Venues have no idea what a fair marketing cost per show should be. Facebook gives no feedback on who actually came. There's no connection between ad spend and butts in seats.
No contracts, no minimums. Pay per recipient -- you see exactly how many people you're reaching and how much they've interacted with the artists on your lineup. Venues can track promotion results and tie spend directly to audience response. Confidence, not guesswork.
Without listeners, there's no audience. No energy in the room. No reason for artists to play or venues to book. SceneBuilder gives listeners the easiest way to discover, support, and show up for their local music community.
Streaming platforms surface what labels pay to promote. The music you hear is optimized for engagement metrics, not because it's good. Real people making real music in your community get buried.
Every artist on SceneBuilder is a real person in your community. No label payola, no algorithmic promotion. The music you discover is made by people you could meet at the show on Friday.
You're paying $12 a month — where does that money go? It certainly isn't going to that artist playing at the bar down the street. Major labels take the lion's share while the local musicians you actually care about see almost nothing.
Stream local music, build playlists, save for offline -- all free, forever. No subscription. Zero-egress infrastructure means streaming costs us nearly nothing, so we pass that to listeners.
Your favorite local band is technically on Spotify — among a sea of 100 million other artists. The platform wasn't designed to help you find them, and it would take real effort to get there. Nobody opens Spotify to search "who's playing in Duluth this weekend." It's simply not how people want to use the service.
SceneBuilder organizes music by geographic scene, not genre algorithm. Browse artists in your area, see who's playing this week, discover the band your neighbor is in. Local-first exposure, not global noise.
Check Facebook, Instagram, the venue's website, the band's page, maybe a local blog -- just to figure out who's playing where tonight. It shouldn't be this hard to go out and hear live music.
Get push notifications about shows you'd actually want to attend. See what's happening in your scene tonight. Follow your favorite local artists and get notified when they release new music or book a gig. All in one app.
Every music scene has someone who knows everyone — the promoter, the radio host, the person who books the open mic. We call them Scene Champions. They curate and grow their scene on SceneBuilder.
Browse artists and events in your scene. Geo-localized, not algorithmic.
Full player with gestures, queue, playlists. Works offline with auto-caching.
Get push notifications from artists you follow. Control your consent per-artist.
Auto-caches on play. Save playlists for offline. Built for spotty rural connectivity.
A web portal where artists manage music, venues promote events, and champions run their scenes.
We pay musicians with connections. Not royalties. Not subscriptions. Revenue scales with engagement.
Compare: a single Facebook ad for the same event typically costs $50-200 with worse targeting.
Most music platforms hemorrhage money on bandwidth. We use Cloudflare R2 — zero egress fees. Our per-stream cost approaches zero regardless of scale.
This is the structural advantage that makes a local-first music platform economically viable for the first time.
Per-GB egress cost comparison
Our SAM: ~15,000 scenes across US rural and mid-size markets. If we capture the communication spend in even 1% of these scenes, that's $12M+ ARR.
Every great network starts hyperlocal. We're building SceneBuilder for northern Minnesota first — a region with a vibrant music culture and zero digital infrastructure to support it.
Onboard 20-30 artists, 5-10 venues, recruit first Scene Champions. Prove product-market fit.
Expand to Iron Range, Brainerd Lakes, Bemidji. 5+ connected scenes sharing artists.
Twin Cities, Fargo, Eau Claire, Madison. 50+ scenes. Scene Champions as growth engine.
Self-serve scene creation. Champion network drives organic expansion. 500+ scenes.
| Feature | Spotify | SoundCloud | Bandcamp | SceneBuilder | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Local discovery | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ~ | ✓ |
| Direct fan messaging | ✕ | ✕ | ~ | ~ | ✓ |
| Venue promotion | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ~ | ✓ |
| Music streaming | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Offline support | ~ | ✕ | ✓ | ✕ | ✓ |
| Zero streaming cost | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | n/a | ✓ |
| Scene communities | ✕ | ✕ | ✕ | ~ | ✓ |
App scaffold, Convex backend, R2 storage, portal MVP
Playback, player UI, library, offline cache, upload flow
Scene model, discovery, search, onboarding, profiles
Blasts, automation, venue targeting, billing
Analytics, production builds, instrumentation, launch
Currently a solo founder shipping fast with modern AI-assisted development. Looking for co-founders who share the vision — especially on the music industry and community-building side.
SceneBuilder makes those scenes visible. It gives artists the tools to reach their people, venues the power to fill their rooms, and listeners a way to discover the music being made in their own backyard.
jon@scenebuilder.app
Artists increasingly own their distribution. They want direct fan relationships, not algorithmic discovery.
Post-pandemic audiences crave live, local experiences. "Support local" isn't a slogan — it's a behavior shift.
Cloudflare R2 makes streaming nearly free. The economics that killed music startups no longer apply.