The Long Play

BMAT turns 20 this year. Such an anniversary deserves a well-thought-out post, but it’s not going to be this one. We have the feeling that 2 decades are too long a period, too long a journey for us to be able to explain anything meaningful about it.

We’ve always treasured Holden Caulfield’s final statement: “Don’t tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” So we will spare you having to read about old battles involving coding, money, bugs, banks, fights, competitors, laughs, leads, delicious meals, clients, hugs, breakthroughs, viruses, trips, losses, scary hotels, wins, madness, and growth. We will also spare you having to read about how transformative these 20 years have been – for the people who have lived the odyssey and for the industry to which we’ve devoted ourselves. In Lebowskian jargon: a lotta ins, a lotta outs, and a lotta what-have-yous, yet all water under the bridge.

What we plan to share with you is actually the opposite: a brief tale about the things that have not changed, and about the battles ahead.

Back in 2006, when we started BMAT, we knew nothing about building a business. To be honest, we hardly knew anything about anything. We had spent 10 years in a music technology research lab. But we came across a one-page strategy form where, every 3 months, we had to write down our vision and plans for BMAT for the next quarter, 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, and forever. And these are the things we declared in those early days that have stayed with us all along in the forever section:

PURPOSE
Make music a better place for the artists (fair, transparent, and efficient)

TO-LIVE VALUES / ACTIONS
· Build a culture: nice, honest, generous, talented, lean, creative, entrepreneurial, perseverant, passionate
· Take good care of our team
· Take good care of our customers
· Provide the most exceptional service

We’ve learned that a company’s reputation isn’t what you put on a slide but what others say about you when you leave the room. For 20 years, we’ve been recognised to be who we said we’d be: a team obsessed with solving problems for our partners while having a great time doing it. We intend to keep that momentum for years to come. As a recording engineer would tell the band: do it again.

We’ll do it again to try to keep our purpose and values intact despite a changing environment. Growth, AI, and remoteness, just to name a few, all pose a threat to our status quo. Ergo, acta, non verba, ipso facto. We’re building ways to grow that do not compromise our agility or neutrality. We are innovators at our core, and we plan to remain so. We test new technologies as they emerge, we create our own, and we adopt them when they’re ready to dance. We’ve used AI in our algorithms forever, but we’re still implementing new, safe ways to use it in our everyday tasks. We allow full remoteness, yet culture thrives on mimicry, which calls for new ways to propagate culture beyond emails and video calls. That’s why this year we’re bringing everyone to Barcelona, even if it’s just for a week of intense focus and some ludicrous partying. As a wise professor used to say: things like that.

We’re here for the long run. Very soon after starting, we decided this was a marathon. It feels more like an ultramarathon now, yet our determination for the long shot remains. 20 years is nothing more than the first couple of songs on the A-side of an LP. We’ve survived the scratches, the skips, and the changing formats, only to realise the best tracks are yet to come. We’re ready for the flip side, the deep cuts, and everything in between.

Long live the Long Play.

Àlex Loscos
Co-founder of BMAT, CRO

•  
•  Linkedin