EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Vocsta, short for “Vocal Star'', is building a mobile music platform for singing talent discovery and fan engagement for original content artists. By focusing on rural areas, such as Africa, South, & Latin America, and Asia, they want to provide singers an opportunity to expose their self-written songs & receive funding. The London-based Start-up was enrolled in the accelerator program of the University of Oxford Elevate and is starting it’s seed round.

Goal

Our goal was to analyze and innovate their current business model by applying methods we learnt during our project course. As there are many platforms close to Vocsta, we aimed to discover ways for our project partner to stand out of their competition and deliver unique value propositions to their users. 

Methodology

During the first mid-term, we made use of the business model canvas in order to visualize and analyze Vocsta’s business model. Furthermore, we deep dived into their competitive environment and visualized the main differences to their main rivals using “Harvey Balls”. With help of the value proposition canvas, we analyzed which pains of Vocstas users are being solved and which products and services deliver gains and satisfy their needs. After drafting an innovative business model regarding NFT marketplaces for our project partner, we used the PESTEL methodology to analyze the NFT sector.

Results

Consequently, we have predicted that the entertainment industry is expected to experience a disruptive change where existing competitors will either have to adapt or perish. Using the secondary research, we have conducted on NFT's, our final decision in terms of business model innovation, was to introduce an NFT marketplace as a new revenue stream to fund aspiring singers. As non-fungible tokens can replicate any physical or virtual asset, we identified ten NFT usecases for aspiring singers including shares of future royalties, access to unreleased content, Zoom-Calls and many more. The beauty behind these NFTs is, that the aspiring singer receives new revenue streams and can earn a transaction fee for every secondary sale. Since NFT's are traded within decentralized financial assets, a reliable and sustainable blockchain had to be determined in order to make the idea feasible which had to be secure, cheap (low gas fees), be able to execute a high number of transactions per second (TPS > 2000), and finalize new blocks at a high pace (finality <10 seconds). After conducting in-depth secondary research and comparing several main networks of prominent blockchains Avalanche (AVAX) checked every box in terms of the aforementioned criteria, and was chosen as the most optimal solution for an upcoming NFT marketplace. We think these decisions will elevate Vocsta's business plan above its' competitors and will be able to reap the benefits of being an early adopter of the new financial trends in a rapidly changing industry.

Cooperation Partner

• Vocsta Ltd. 
  86-90 Paul St
  London EC2A 4NE, UK 
  vocsta.com 

Contact Person

• Henry Klenk - henry@vocsta.com 

Student Team

• Mete Gurun

• Henry Klenk

Project Manager

• Jakob Pohlisch 

• Benjamin Monsorno