Groover co-founder Dorian Perron traces the platform’s origins from a UC Berkeley program to a worldwide artist movement, reflecting on investor journeys, artist-first growth, AI in curation, and what independent creators can learn from the global stage.
The Inception of Groover: Biz School Basics
Sinusoidal Music spoke to Dorian about Groover’s early days when he first started working with Romain Palmieri and Rafaël Cohen.
“Yeah, so we started end of 2017. We were doing a program in UC Berkeley, entrepreneurship program,” Dorian begins. “Before that, in 2013, I had started my own music blog as like a hobby project.”
That blog soon became something more-a creative space for live acoustic sessions and small events. “I kind of knew a bit more about the music industry than any other like sectors or industry or like jobs and everything,” he recalls.
At Berkeley, he met co-founders Romain and Raphaël, and the group began asking independent artists one question: What’s the hardest part of your journey?
“We spent a lot of time, like a full month, just meeting with artists, calling artists, asking them open questions about their daily life, their issues, the things they were doing great, the things that they thought they could improve and everything,” he says. “And we ended up with the realization that the biggest issue they were facing was not creating, not producing, not releasing. It was only about once the music is released, like, how can I get more than my mom and my friends to listen?”
The first version of Groover was built in a day. “It was a Google form and with a PayPal button on a WordPress website done in an afternoon. It was very scrappy,” he laughs. “And still we had people using it.”
Why the Name ‘Groover’?
“We were just looking for names. And we thought about how on the vinyl, how the groove was called. And we only had the name in French. And we saw it was called a groove. And we’re like, oh, groove. Nice,” he says. “We heard. And we looked and nothing was. It’s a catchy name.”
From day one, the name stuck. “From the start, when you type Groover, we’re number one on Google”.
Even the .com story has its quirks. “There is a dot com, but it’s not a company. It’s a shitty service that makes like email addresses,” he laughs. “We try to buy it. Like we ask them, we call them. They ask for too much money. Honestly, it was making sense. So we’re like, okay, let’s go.”
Meeting the Right Angels : Investors and the Early Hustle
“When you meet with potential investors or people who are around like that area and that can help you support you financially, when you say it’s in music, they almost immediately slam the door because they don’t like the market. They don’t understand it. It’s like it’s small,” Dorian admits.
But passion found its allies. “The first like fundraising was mostly business angels. And as I say, it was a lot of either like founders who had started marketplaces like ours and were interested in the model and had sold their company and they could help and they were interested in that. Or they were like musicians and passionate about music and they had done like something different with their life professionally.”
He adds, “It was really like emotional on that side. And then what happened is that we had very quickly some traction, growth, and people could see we were very serious about it and we were monetizing from the start.”
Groover’s growth in France proved its potential. “Every musician or artist knew about it, like kind of,” he says. “So they saw that traction. So it became less about we’re in music and more about, okay, you have traction. It’s interesting.”
Temple by Groover & Groover Obsessions
Groover’s next evolution came with Temple, a “link in bio” tool now tailored for independent artists. “Yeah, we just acquired that company called Temple,” Dorian says. “It’s close to what Linktree does, but 100% adapted for independent artists. The design is beautiful. It’s fully customizable. It’s free. It’s really adapted for artists and musicians to be able to both showcase what they’re doing and capture their audience and fan data.”
He continues, “People can subscribe directly on the link. You collect data about it. You can run ads campaign. Then like using like the traffic and the understanding of who your fans are. You have analytics tool also on the platform on the tool.”
Temple wasn’t the only new chapter. “We have Groover Obsessions, which is our artist accelerator,” he says. “We’re discovering some artists on the platform that have great results, and we try to push them further and help them go and maximize their potential as artists to grow and gain new audiences and find their fans and just grow as artists.”
He smiles when asked if it’s like an incubator for musicians. “Exactly.”
Are You Really Paying for Feedback? Why Use Groover?
“There’s often that like, not confusion, but like understanding that since what you’re getting is feedback, like a lot of users are feeling that they’re paying for the feedback. I would say it’s not that,” Dorian clarifies. “It’s not why you’re using Groover and why you’re paying.”
He breaks it down into three points:
“The first one is artists are looking for visibility. And on Groover, what we do is we actually guarantee that the people you’re reaching out to are listening to the track and considering it properly for sharing or not.”
“It may not happen. So sometimes you don’t get the share. That’s why, like, you can feel like, oh, I just paid for that feedback. Yeah. But you’ve paid for the consideration from that person that they may for the time for listening to that.”
He continues, “The other goal that artists can have is to get in touch with labels, bookers, managers, publishers, and try to build their team. We had more than, I think, 1500 signatures on record labels, managers or management companies or with managers, publishers. So a lot of connections that happened there.”
And the final value, he adds, is emotional: “When you send music and someone likes it and gives you a positive feedback and everything, it’s re-empowering in the sense that a lot of artists have imposter syndrome about their music. Having, I don’t know, like someone from Rolling Stone, Argentina, or someone from Tubi Radio in France, liking your music and share it. It’s okay. It’s like a totally external person that likes your music and can push you to keep it going.”
The Collab with Digital Distributors
“We have partnerships with, I would say, most aggregators and distributors,” he says. “The only one we not partnered up with directly is DistroKid, but we partner with Banzoogle that belongs to DistroKid.”
Apart from that, Groover collaborates with almost all major players. “We partnered up with mostly all aggregators and distributors out there. It could be TuneCore, Unite Masters, Amuse, Symphonic. Madverse is one of them. We also work with iMusician. There’s so many.”
The partnerships, he explains, are symbiotic. “We partner up with all of them and we are their preferred partner. They showcase and highlight for pitching to playlists and blogs and get the music heard and get feedback.”
Two Cents About the Indian Market & Finding the Right Balance
“I would say it’s not one of our biggest markets. I would say that we have some curators. We have some partners there. We have some artists that are using Groover,” he says.
The pricing remains the same globally. “It’s 2 euros and can go to 4-6 euros per contact,” Dorian explains. “The average basket is between 50 and 100 euros, which is very affordable for European and American like US markets compared to what they pay usually to PR agents and everything. But if we go to like Latin America, even like Brazil, we have a huge community there. But it’s much more expensive for them than it is for other countries.”
He adds, “It would be complicated if we lower the price for like India or Brazil to match the US markets and purchasing power. What do we do for the curators on the other side? So it’s like a whole thing.”
Addressing the Competition
“There’s an overlap because we never like directly reached out to curators that were on SubmitHub, but some of them got to know about us and signed up as well,” he says. “But I would say the overlap is maybe 10%, 15% maximum. Like a lot of the contacts we have on Groover are not on SubmitHub.”
He continues, “We created this platform for artists, for independent artists, on main goal. Curators, we love you, but it’s not why we created the platform. We didn’t create the platform for you, we created it for artists.”
“Competition is helping artists and curators get better at everything,” he adds. “It’s healthy. It’s definitely healthy for artists to get more value.”
New Wave of AI Curation in the Music Industry
“For AI music creation, it’s always a bit tough because it’s always tied to how do they generate the playlist? How do they push them? Are there bots?” he says. “I wouldn’t say AI in creation is necessarily a super bad thing, especially because generally speaking, the way I see AI, and a lot of people see it the same way, so it’s not groundbreaking what I’m going to say, is that AI is feeding on human creativity.”
He pauses, thoughtful. “I’m pretty sure that at some point in a few years, when we look at our top Spotify raps, there will be some fully AI-done tracks that we love and that we feel emotional about. And we can’t differentiate as well. Because they will be able to replicate entirely our emotions. I’m sure about it. It’s scary.”
For Groover, AI already helps internally. “We’re already using some models and AI for recommendation,” he says. “So when artists get on the catalog page and they see all the lists of curators, we’re using AI to recommend the best context for them so they could get the best results possible.”
He adds, “We’re not showing the artist there’s a X percent probability of that because it’s creating like false hopes and expectations. But we’re using that, we follow our recognitions.”
Consumer Behaviour Across the Globe
“I would say it’s mostly in the number of people they’re reaching out to,” Dorian says. “I would say like in the US, they tend to have like more budget. So they really like when they’re testing, they’re really testing.”
He continues, “It’s funny how artists are kind of the same everywhere around the world. They have the same needs. In terms of like how the need is addressed, they want the same thing. They want more people to listen to their music. They want to find people to build up their team. They want to get approved by people. They want to get feedback.”
Advice for the Indian Artist
“It’s a good point. I would say for artists generally, you’re doing your passion, which is amazing. Remain authentic and everything around it is so important,” he says.
“It’s going to be hard to keep on going because you’re going to be going through roller coasters and it’s going to be hard to reach audiences. I would say grind and keep up because you never know what’s going to happen.”
He smiles, “When you find something that works, insist on it and keep on doing it, especially with visual content. Visual content is so important now because the key thing is to get people to listen to your music but they’re not going to listen if they don’t have a visual thing that attracts them to actually click on it.”
“And for Indian artists,” he adds, “If you’re doing music in an Indian language and you’re locally, I would say grow on that local scene and put a lot of energy there. But if you’re singing in English, I would say the word is your oyster. You can definitely try to grow in other areas.”
A Note on His Own Music
Dorian has been DJing for the last two years and recently started releasing his own music. “I released one track which is under my name like Dorian Flagrant. If you want to check it out, it’s good.”
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