Manhattan Beach Teens Go On Kickstarter To Fund 'Paddle' App

MANHATTAN BEACH, CA — With 25 days left in their Kickstarter fundraising campaign, three teenage musicians have amassed some $9,660 of their $24,460 goal. What will the threesome do with the funds? Well, they're already using them to create "Paddle," a mobile app the young men call "The Future of Music."

Sam Nicholson and Nick Cerofeci of Manhattan Beach have partnered with Matthew Dull of Temecula to fill the need for socially sharing music. "We saw how fast the music streaming industry was growing, and noticed that it accounted for 80% of the recorded music industry's total revenue. Clearly, music streaming was seeing a lot of success," said Nicholson. "We considered why this was and did a lot of research on the history of the music industry."

The trio themselves are musicians and college students. Nicholson, who graduated from Rolling Hills Prep and attended Pacific Elementary in MB, plays guitar, piano, bass and sings. He's been in a few bands in high school, has played bass in 2 bands at his college Pepperdine last year, led the youth worship team at my church, Journey of Faith, for 2 years, and writes, records, and produces a lot of music. Cerofeci, who graduated from Mira Costa High School and Grand View Elementary and attends UC Santa Barbara, plays guitar, piano, and sings. He also writes songs. Dull, who went to Great Oak High School and is now a student at UC Berkeley, plays guitar and writes songs.

In a nod to helping musicians during COVID-19, the trio is donating 10% of all pledges after they hit their goal to the MusiCares x Recording Academy COVID-19 Relief Fund. Said Sam, "We’ve witnessed the tragedies and troubles that COVID-19 has caused across the world and we knew we wanted to do something to help. After doing some research, we decided that the MusiCares x Recording Academy COVID-19 Relief Fund was the best place for us to donate to since we are getting into the music industry and want to help out the music community, and we just really resonated with what they were doing," he explained.

With such a passion for music, a desire to help others, and their own knowledge and skills, the trio delved into the world of music streaming. "The main reason music streaming services are so popular these days is because they allow users to pay around $10 a month for access to all the music out there. Rather than paying for each individual song on iTunes, you can pay $10 per month and listen to any song, album, or artist you want to with the click of a button. This makes exploring music so much easier and more convenient. We saw that music streaming services were designed for discovering music and they did a great job at offering a platform for that."

But what those platforms don't offer is an easy way to share music with friends, hence the birth of Paddle. "There are social media platforms that are specifically designed for sharing photos, videos, and writing, but there aren’t any that are specifically designed for sharing songs. Matthew, Nick, and I love sharing our favorite songs or new songs and artists we discover with each other, so we felt that this hole in the music/social media industry was just waiting for us to fill it."

To share music on Paddle, users will download the app and then log in to their streaming service, said Nicholson. "Once you’ve signed in, you will have access to all the music that is on the streaming platform you sign-in with," he explained. "After your initial sign-in when you create the account, you will never need to sign-in with your streaming service again; everything will already be set up.

"Once you’re in the app you can listen to any song you want to just by tapping on it. You will have access to your playlists on your music streaming service within the Paddle app, and will also have the ability to create custom-made playlists that are exclusively on the Paddle app. However, the main reason you would use Paddle is to share music with friends," noted Nicholson.

Right now, the trio is nearly done with Phase I of the project. "In this phase, we’ve programmed the different functions of every single page you will see when you’re using the app [the front end]. We’ve also programmed all the back end or admin functions that we will use to monitor the app," explained Nicholson. "If we reach $10,000 on Kickstarter, we’ll be able to begin the next phase of development where we’ll complete the graphic designs for everything in the app."

Should they hit their Kickstarter goal, Nicholson said they "plan on launching Paddle in December of 2020." That goal, $24,460, "is the exact amount of money we need to raise to pay for the development of the most basic version of our app [our minimum viable product], pay income tax on the money we receive from Kickstarter donations, and give up 5% of the pledges we receive to Kickstarter [they take 5% commission]."

Once Paddle takes off, the trio intends to collect revenue from Paddle by displaying music and entertainment-related advertisements and, eventually, offering an enhanced subscription version of the app, which will include a full music streaming service as well as several other exciting features, said Nicholson.

And the trio has a well-thought out plan for those who can donate $25, $100 or more, and $240 or more. All of the details are explained on their Kickstarter page. They also have a website for Paddle and are on social media @paddlemusic on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. They've also been using their personal social media accounts to spread word about Paddle, including Snapchat, Nextdoor and LinkedIn.