Music to me is, and has always been existential. From when I was a little boy growing up with a concertmaster – in many of the world’s most famous orchestras – as my dad, in Vienna, and constantly visiting his workplace, the famous Musikverein, to today where I am a music aficionado, an avid vinyl record collector as well as a (fairly amateur) music producer. Music is a passion, or ‘addiction’ as my wife would say, and a great source of joy for me.

Having Till Janczukowicz on this show was a big personal pleasure. His classical music streaming app, IDAGIO, is constantly running a fine line between catering to the young and the old, the classical novice versus the expert, and it is a fascinating branding game.

Till discusses how classical music, as a brand, was intimidating, and how he and his team are breaking that wall down, out their offices in Berlin, Germany. And how classical music’s role and perception in society has changed over the years, and what role technology played in it.

We discuss how to showcase music visually, with all of its nuances, is an extremely difficult task, one that IDAGIO mastered from day one.

So many fascinating takeaways in this conversation, one that struck with me, and that should give you an idea on how deep we are diving into not only the brand discussion, but also the entrepreneurial journey as a whole: “The bigger you grow as a corporation, the more you have to bring things that are on a subconscious level to a conscious level.”

A delightful conversation that truly inspired me, and I believe it will do the same for you.

To support this show, please head to Patreon.

____Full Transcript:

F Geyrhalter: Welcome to HITTING THE MARK.

Today we welcome a guest who I have been looking forward to for a while now. The subject hits home in many ways. Not only is this founder based in Berlin, Germany, hence you will get a double-German accent episode today, but his is the world of classical music, which is the same world in which I grew up in, back in Vienna.

Till Janczukowicz is the founder of IDAGIO, which is often described as being the Spotify for classical music.

Till has more than 20 years of experience as an artist manager, producer, and concert promoter. In 2000, he established the European office for Columbia Artists Management, heading it up as managing partner for 11 years. He was responsible for organizing several of the Metropolitan Opera’s European tours, and his personal clients included conductors Christian Thielemann, Seiji Ozawa, André Previn, and Jukka-Pekka Saraste, as well as pianists Ivo Pogorelich and Arcadi Volodos. In 2008, he founded the Abu Dhabi Classics, a performing arts series merging culture, education and tourism for the government of the United Arab Emirates. That is where he arranged debuts for the New York, Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics; the Bayreuth Festival; and Daniel Barenboim, Simon Rattle, Zubin Mehta, Yo-Yo Ma, Ben Kingsley, Jeremy Irons, and countless other musical and artistic luminaries.

I am thrilled to welcome you to the show, Till!

T Janczukowicz: Great, pleasure to meet you and to be here.

F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. So as I mentioned in my intro, this is truly a pleasure for me since my father was an amazing violinist who spent most of his life as a concert master and some of Vienna’s best orchestras from the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, the Vienna Tonkünstler Orchestra, the Kammer Orchestra, all the way to the Vienna Philharmonics, and appeared on over 50 records and radio productions. So he was also a sound purist who loved his audio gadgets the same way that I do now. He would’ve cherished to hear this conversation today.

So listeners who are not classical music fans may wonder why. Why was there a need for classical music in an app form when you can find plenty of classical options on Spotify, Apple music and Tidal? Let me quote an article from Vogue that explained it perfectly well, “It all comes down to Metadata.” While Metadata for most popular music is quite simple, there’s the artist, the song, or track, the album it’s from. Classical Metadata might encompass everything from the composer, the orchestra, the conductor, the choir, which may have its own director, various soloists, the title of the piece, along with perhaps some sort of number or nomenclature to indicate it’s placed within the larger symphony of work.

Then artists opus number, or in the case of composers like Mozart Bach whose works are ordered by their own system, their Kochel or BWV number. So it’s not simple. Yes, there is a big need for it.

Till, your biography talks a lot about the amazing journey you have taken prior to starting IDAGIO in 2015, but tell us a bit about the founding story behind IDAGIO. How did it all start? Give us the romance, the hardship of your startup’s early days.

T Janczukowicz: So where to start? Let’s start with the Romance, maybe-

F Geyrhalter: That’s a good place. Let’s start positive.

T Janczukowicz: The very early Romance, but what I would say is that I was lucky and only looking back, I understood that I was lucky. I was offered to piano when I was six years old and that captured me immediately. So once I started to play the piano for the first time without knowing anything, I knew and felt, “Well, that’s my life. I’m going to spend my life with this music that fascinated me.

I could even say, probably I’ve never worked. I never felt I was working in my life. At the very end, it comes down to a variety of attempts to promote what fascinated me, in a very, I wouldn’t say egoistic way, but it was a very obvious thing for me. Classical music captured me. It opened stories for me. It created images and so on.

So I started to be a pianist at the beginning. Thanks god I became friends with a real pianist, Krystian Zimerman, when I was 18 years old, who by the way… You are from Vienna, it’s probably you were even still in Vienna these days. He recorded the Beethoven Piano Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonics Leonard Bernstein in the 80s. So Christian became a good friend. I saw what he did, I saw what I did and said, “Okay, he’s a pianist.” So next step for me was then he wanted to push me into management. It helped me a lot.

But first of all, I started to be a teacher during my studies, made some money. But I’m coming from a family of teachers and so, “Okay, my dad was a teacher, my mom was a teacher, my grandfather was a teacher. So do you really want to sign a contract at your end of your 20s and that’s going to determine what you’re going to do until the end of your life?” The answer was no. So I didn’t want to become a teacher. I wrote a little bit, but also as a writer I saw, well, you can speak about it in part, but you can’t really change things.

So then I went into management and now I’m coming to your question to the necessity of IDAGIO. As a manager, my perspective was always a B2B perspective. If you manage a great conductor, or a great soloist, your touring orchestra, it’s about, first of all, building brands. Any young artists you see or any unknown ensemble or new music you see, as a manager, you have some possibility to make these people famous, to assist them to find out how they work and how you can help them.

What I saw then having spent my life in management, putting on concerts in all parts of the world and we can cover that a little later because there were many fascinating learnings. But the main thing for me was that, if the future of music listening is streaming and the all-genre streaming services aren’t designed for classic music because as you said, they are around pop music and they’re pop driven where you only have three criteria: The song, the artist, and the album, my clients are going to be invisible in the digital ecosystem.

So the moment there is no digital structure that could trick down a recording where you have a conductor, you have an orchestra, you have singers, you have a soloist, you have the composition, and so on. The moment that doesn’t exist, I saw that as a luxury problem from the user’s perspective because you can still curate and so on. Maybe yes, it’s a problem for aficionados, but at the very end, I want to push a button, and I want music to play without a huge cognitive investment that I like, fine, but even there is a huge group of aficionados worldwide that suffering from bad metadata, and bad usability of classic music streaming platforms.

But if you look at it from an artist perspective, this is a real threat because if you can’t be tracked down in the digital space and people don’t find you, you cease to exist and with you, the entire genre ceases to exist. That was a motivation from you, I said, “Well, you have to do something.” The main question at the beginning for me was, “How can we use technology in order to maintain that music genre that was the passion since I first encountered that.

There was not at the beginning, the idea of, “Well, I have to found the best streaming service for classical music.” That was the result of a chain of it durations. For us it’s rather the beginning than the end.

F Geyrhalter: It was really more of an action cry, right? It needed to be done in order to… in the biggest terms possible, save classical music for generations, right? To me, that’s where it gets really interesting to think about who the audiences. When you think of classical music, many think of an older audience, but you’re obviously a digital tool that already eliminates, I would say, the too old for tech audience, right?

T Janczukowicz: Yeah.

F Geyrhalter: You also clearly understand that you have to capture the hearts and souls of the next generations as the IDAGIO or IDAGIO… You and I had a little chat prior to this, it could go either way. So I don’t feel guilty. The IDAGIO Instagram account, for instance. It nicely shows that it’s going for the next generation. It’s 29,000 followers. You have features like a relax playlist, which are perfect gateway drugs to anyone regardless of musical preference, right?

T Janczukowicz: Sure.

F Geyrhalter: Who do you cater to and how do you capture them in your brand communications? Do you constantly run that fine line between young and old, and classical novice versus expert?

T Janczukowicz: Well, there are various levels to answer that. When I left my peer group, the classical music world that had been spending my life in, and started to enter into tech, I was, of course, reading a lot and all these blogs and I traveled to San Francisco, went to Silicon Valley just to be there to talk to people, to understand what it’s all about.

The first thing I learned, or the first thing at least that I remember is that one of the most failures of startups is to solve problems that don’t exist.

F Geyrhalter: Right.

T Janczukowicz: For me, it was obvious that this problem does exist, both from a customer or user perspective and also from an artist perspective. So that was the beginning. Based on that, we did build our own technology, make a data model and so on and so on. Based on that, we can now, answering your question, cater for all varieties of audiences.

What was interesting for me to see that after having spent 20 to 25 years in that world, more or less looking at things and reacting to things through my instinct, the assumptions I got over the years, they were confirmed in real numbers. Because the classical world is not really about numbers, it’s about opinions. It’s about being right, everybody is right. Everybody knows everything, it’s very controversially, very ego driven also.

Now, I entered in a world where its numbers, “Okay, what you say is nothing more than a thesis, let’s prove it.” So that was totally new to me and very fascinating. What we found out that there are five, 10, 15, 20, maybe 50 use cases of listening to classical music and you can, of course, go and start segmenting classical music listeners.

But interesting, is also to me that you can probably break it down into use cases because there are use cases that you would probably apply to an aficionado that sometimes also apply to a millennial listening to classical music and vice versa. So, for example, you mentioned this mood search we have and why do we have it? I wanted a tool where everybody, who opens the app and comes in contact with classic music, they can execute an action, move something, just touch screen with a finger, remove the finger, but already make a choice. So it can go to relaxed or meditative or joyful and so on. Then it’s simply a playlist opening up with joyful or relaxing or focusing music.

However, this is a use case and also some aficionados’ life, because also aficionados are sometimes, I don’t know, ironing their shirts, or cleaning the home. So this is the first thing I wanted to highlight because it was very interesting to me.

Secondly, there are, of course, the obvious different segments. You have, the fact that classical music around the globe as a genre that’s aggregating the high achievers. Classical music has always been, the music genre of the emerging communities. If you look at South America, you give underprivileged kids instruments and playing Beethoven makes their lives meaningful from one day to the other. So this is still system up. Gustavo Dudamel is one of the most known represented-

F Geyrhalter: Well, he’s here in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s now. So yeah, he’s close to home.

T Janczukowicz: Exactly.

F Geyrhalter: Yeah.

T Janczukowicz: Yeah, exactly. This is something that at the same time you have 50 million piano students in China these days. [] for example, used to say that the future of classical music is in China, which I wouldn’t say the future of classic music, but also be in China. But we see that a lot of young people in the Nordics, in Europe, but also in the United States are more and more turning to the classical, but they see and look at classical music in a different way, because especially in Germany… You’re from Austria, central Europe, classical music is a heavy, serious thing. You have to gain some knowledge before you really understand it, which I believe is total bullshit. If music is great, everybody understands it immediately.

The new use case that’s coming up that I am listening to classical music because it helps me focus, it helps me calm down. But another word that I see in classical music as belonging, because if you listen to classical music and if you listen to a great concert with friends and a social environment, it also makes you feel connectiveness. You are connected with other people, you’re connect with the musicians on stage. You are connected with the people you are listening with.

So there was a very nice quote, which is very famous, but I heard it first from Yo-Yo Ma who once said, “The great thing about classic music is that it makes you part of something bigger than yourself.” This is a very, very needed and a great value proposition.

F Geyrhalter: I think, playing devil’s advocate, that could be said about pretty much every musical genre, right? Because it is a very communal tribal idea. But with classical, just the idea that a lot of it happens in ginormous orchestras. There’s so much where one person talks to the other via their musical instrument and jazz is kind of one step up from pop where you’ve got a couple of people that need to perfectly sync in an orchestra, make this 10, 20, 30 fold. So there’s something by just the structure of classical music where it’s more communal from the get go, I believe.

T Janczukowicz: Yeah, I mean, jazz, I would say goes very much in the same direction, because it has various levels, but if you’re looking at what is constituting music, first of all you have a melody, number two, you have rhythm, and number three you have harmonies. Then you can have one melody, which is the case in pop music, but then you can have two melodies, two themes.

Then it starts with something that probably 70% or 80% of classical music have in common, which makes it so fascinating. You have two themes, and very often in the Sonata form, the first theme is male and the second theme is female.

F Geyrhalter: How chauvinistic?

T Janczukowicz: It’s very chauvinistic, but everybody apparently seems to like Beethoven sonatas or Mozart symphonies where exactly this is happening. Then you have an exposition where the first theme, the male theme is being presented and after the female’s theme is presented.

Then you have the second part where these themes start to interact and to talk to each other. Sometimes there is tension and then comes down and so on. So it’s very, very close to storytelling without words. This is something, probably, I said that earlier, what captured me at the very beginning, and I think it’s a fascinating role because you can close your eyes, but you see stories, you feel stories, but you don’t need to know when Beethoven was born, you don’t need to know what is an overture. You don’t need to know what is an aria. Just close your eyes and listen to it. This music is so appealing to everybody.

I think one of the mistakes that classic music or classical music has made over decades is, is building this huge wall around it. Because if you go back to Mozart or Bach, it was entertainment music. It’s agenre that comes from the courts and the people were eating and drinking and laughing and walking out and coming back. Something that the middle-class that occupied classic music for themselves, started to forbid. This created an intimidating…

Let’s say when we speak about branding, a part of this brand that is intimidating and it’s not necessary because it’s so embracing, and it’s such a great genre.

F Geyrhalter: I so agree with you. I so agree with you. Coming from a household where we constantly went to the Vienna Musikverein to see my dad play and others, it was always a big deal. Even though it’s my dad on stage, and it’s just normal, we go to his workplace, right?

T Janczukowicz: Yeah.

F Geyrhalter: There’s something, there’s an aura around classical music that feels like it’s a cloud that should be broken. It feels like… I love how you talk about it. Even though I did not really realize that, but as I started looking through your brand work, through your website, through your app, it actually really is what you’re doing. You’re breaking that stigma. You’re breaking that wall down, and I think it’s beautiful.

While we talk about musical terms, let’s talk about IDAGIO, the brand name, for a second. It sounds a lot and pretty obviously to me like ADAGIO, which only has one letter replaced. ADAGIO for our non-musical listeners signifies a music played in slow tempo. So what was the inspiration for the name? Walk us through that a little bit.

T Janczukowicz: It’s very end simple. We needed a name, first of all, and we wanted the name to be self-explanatory. So we wanted something that people around the globe would associate with classical music. So ADAGIO, as you said, it’s an international word. Many albums are just having one title, which is ADAGIO. If you have music that calms you down.

At the same time, we wanted something that people understand context of technology. This is, I. The funny thing is that we had a law firm working for us this time and they were also representing a very famous American brand that has created many new devices that are starting with an I-

F Geyrhalter: Whatever that could be.

T Janczukowicz: Whatever that may be, and they called us back after three days said, “We checked it. You can use the name. No problem at all.” So IDAGIO was born. That was the funny incident.

F Geyrhalter: That’s hilarious. Yeah, and it’s not always the case. I heard of other firms that try to use names that started with I, and couldn’t do it based on that same conglomerate that tries to own that one letter. But obviously, those are words where the, I, has more of a meaning in front of it with IDAGIO. It is a word. The, I, itself is not as meaningful.

So, great. Well, I’m glad I got that quiz right. I’m proud of myself. How did you and your team obviously derive the brand’s visual aura, so to speak? I use the word aura specifically since the gradient based imagery surrounding your brand has a very meditative feel to it. Even talking about IDAGIO, the idea of slowing down. Then you have the nifty mood selection feature, which we talked about in your app. Overall, you really crafted a beautiful slick visual identity that mixes the atmospheric, like in many of the Instagram posts with the harsh and crisp in the actual logo or the line work that apps dimension to the gradient artwork.

Now, for everyone listening, unless you’re currently driving a car, head on over to @IDAGIOofficial on Instagram to see what we’re actually talking about. Till, how was the look derived? I think it just really found its groove, no pun intended, back in May on Instagram where everything started to have this very distinct and beautiful look. Can you talk a little bit about how this came about?

T Janczukowicz: I think there are three factors probably, and, of course, none of these factors was conscious during it was there. Only looking back, you’re connected in a meaningful way. Probably the first thing is that my grandfather, who offered me the piano, he had a Braun stereo system at home. We all know that Braun was one of the decisive branding and visual influences for this very, very famous brand we have been speaking about. I remember it was that it was the first thing.

The second thing, as an artist manager, I was always in the second row. So that means you work as a catalyst. You are doing a great job if you work invisible. So you mentioned the Abu Dhabi Classics I created. The star was the series. If you manage an artist, if you build the career of a conductor, the conductor is the star, not yourself. You are always in the background.

I think this is a thinking that also my co-founder was aesthetically a very big fan of minimalistic architecture. We said, “We want a look and feel that really highlights the musicians and the music and that’s not dominating them. I think that’s the second aspect.

The third aspect is that, we had, at a very, very early stage, I think, our designer was a part of the founding team. He started on day one. I think he was one of the third or fourth people we hired. Because we believe it’s very important that you reflect the beautiful and fascinating and special role that you also described. We were just speaking, that you going to the Musikverein with family when your father was playing. It’s a fascinating thing. We wanted to translate that into a user interface and into a look and feel that respects the music and the artists.

F Geyrhalter: Which is really, really difficult to pull off. It’s very easy to look at and then criticize or get your own emotions about it, which by the way, I would never criticize because I think it is brilliant. It is so easy to look at something after it has been established. But to showcase music visually with all of its nuances, is an extremely difficult task. So bravo to that. It’s really, really well done and it was one of the reasons why I got sucked into your brand.

So while we talk about that, we might as well talk one more second about the actual icon, about the logo. It’s a play on the play button and there is a horizontal line to the right of it, right below it. Tell us a bit about the idea behind it. Obviously you are not the designer, but I’m sure that that you played a role in signing it off and adopting it. What is the key idea behind it?

T Janczukowicz: Well, I don’t want to take a credit of others. My role was to not say no to it. Let’s put it like this, which at a minium I disliked it or I liked it, but my thinking here is rather, and thinking big, I was designing all this myself five, six, seven years ago. I had the first ideas of IDAGIO and I was very proud of, I don’t know, copying some letters from an Italian luxury brand and I showed it to our designer when we hired him and he laughed at me. He was right there laughing at me.

So I understood. I don’t really understand this. I can express what I wanted for the brand and I could express how I believe it may look like, but he really did it. Then I think it’s at the very end minimalistic thinking. I think when it comes down to that. Not something that disturbs and then some people get some agencies from outside before and they we’re proposing a logo with some music scores and all this, a key, so it’s really…

I think we are in a different world.

F Geyrhalter: Yeah.

T Janczukowicz: Yeah. The icon that we have. Maybe one other thing. It’s a little bit high level, but I was thinking when you were talking about… Again, I’m seeing in front of me your dad sitting on the stage of the Musikverein and what was the classic music 20, 30, 40 years ago, and what has really changed? Because also we were talking about different customer segments.

When I started to work as a manager, that was ’96, that was still a period where a conductor was still a maestro. He was the icon, you couldn’t reach him, you couldn’t talk to him. The entire management approach was to create a myth, create something that’s unavailable because the less it’s available, the more people want it. This is something, and this is an understanding of value. It’s to the old world, which is an old world value thinking.

I think in the digital world, and this is a big shift, in the digital world value is being created by being visible, by being transparent, by showing with as many people as possible what you are, who you are, what you do. So this is a total paradigm shift. If you look, for example, at a Karajan, you could not reach out to him. A Schulte was the same running the Chicago symphony orchestra for many years.

If you now these days at young comebacks like Yannick Nezet-Seguin, the music director of the Philadelphia orchestra, music director of the metropolitan opera Andris Nelsons, music director of the Boston symphony and the Gewandhaus orchestra in Leipzig Germany. It’s a new generation of open minded and more communicating conductors.

What was very interesting to me, I had a meeting with the Juilliard School of Music in New York some months ago. I didn’t know that when you are making your degree there, if you leave school, you don’t have to only play, you also have to moderate the performance. The way how you talk about the music you play, as an artist, is also being judged. I think it’s a very interesting thing.

But this is all owed to transparency that came through technology. All the scandals that we are seeing and witnessing these days, it’s not that humanity has apparently become immoral, just our ways to measure things and to see things are much more granular than 10, 20, 30, 50 years ago.

This is also an aesthetic shift in classical music and this is also creating a new type of classical musicians. I find that a very interesting thing to see how technology even has some impact on the way you perform classical music.

F Geyrhalter: That is absolutely fascinating. I agree. I’ve never thought about it that way. But just like everything else, classical music is being touched by it and it’s great to be on the forefront of that like you are. While we were talking a little bit about philosophy here, what does branding mean to you? The actual word, branding. How do you see it?

I know we talked a lot about emotion, we talked a lot about how people feel something rather than just listen to something. But maybe even in the classical arena, like where you are, what do you think when you think of branding?

T Janczukowicz: Well, I would spontaneously say branding is an aggregated public perception. If it goes well and first of all, you have a good intention and you succeed in running the brand, the way you want, then it’s probably aggregated trust that says, “Well, yeah, I can turn into this complex thing without making a mistake, without failing.”

Because I’ve heard of the brand from, whomever, my brother, my peers these days, then through, through, through advertisement because I think trust is getting more and more local, and we less and less trust governments and we less trust corporations. So I rather trust my peers because I’m so over flooded with information and bombarded by visual things that want to get my attention.

But I think branding for me done right it’s something of, well, yes, I can go. It’s a safe harbor, safe place for me. I can recommend it. I can package that when I talk to other people pass it on to others and recommend to others.

F Geyrhalter: You talked about trust and failures. I’m not as familiar with the entrepreneurial scene in Berlin, but here in the US we love to talk about failures. There are entire business book sections dedicated to it. Even though in my eyes it’s blown way out of proportion, there are great things to be learned from mistakes that startup founders have made or witnessed during the early days of the brand formation.

What was an enormous fail that you went through with IDAGIO in the very early days? Was there something where you just look back and you’re like, “Okay, that was a fail, we could have prevented this, someone can learn from this?”

T Janczukowicz: Well, I have to say, I think we were lucky in leaving out many mistakes you can potentially make. But, of course, there were mistakes, but there is not this story where I would say, “Well, this is really, really, really, I’ll never forget it.” I think it’s rather a pattern.

What I’ve learned over the years is that, if you do something for the first time and being an entrepreneur and forming and building something new has to do a lot of with trial and error. Probably the biggest mistake that I’m trying to avoid more and more is that I wasn’t listening early enough to my natural instincts. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but I’m more and more convinced that this is the right thing. It sounds like cliché, but this is a principle that you can break down into any daily decision. If you feel something, but…and this is a personal problem that I have because everybody is, of course, different. I’m coming from the world of the arts. I’m rather intuitive, some people say visionary, but at least I have ideas. Some of these ideas have worked out in my life so far.

But I’m also analyzing it. But if I feel that something is right, I start to do it. The bigger you grow as a corporation, you more and more have to bring things that are on a subconscious level to a conscious level. Then it has to arrive on the conscious level and then you have to explain it to everybody. Then you have to also give ownership to the people with whom you work with your team, because you are nobody with a team.

You can form the North star, you can say that the direction and give a vision and the mission, I think in our company everybody is on that mission and people coming to the office, to our premise here in Berlin they say, “Oh wow, this is a great chemistry here. It feels good to be here.” So that’s the thing.

But we’re not talking about the good things, we’re talking about failures. Of course, at the very end, nobody wants to fail. But thanks God, I was brought to this life by really an American entrepreneur, who was the owner of Columbia Artists, Ronald Wilford, and he was a typical American self-made man. One of his quotes was, “I didn’t learn anything and that’s why I can do everything.”

I think this is a good thing and this, and the combination that when I met him after our job interview in ’96 where we even didn’t perceive it as a job interview, but afterwards we had the first meetings. They will tell, “We are in an industry of ideas.” Usually, we all have a lot of ideas and if you fail with 10 ideas, it’s bad, you’re gone. If you make one of the 10 ideas work, it’s really great. If you make two of your 10 ideas work, this is highly above average.

I think this is a mentality that’s very, very un-German and having inhaled this kind of thinking for 16 years, I got more comfortable with the idea of making failures because, a young artist is like stakes you buy a company, you see something and you believe all to be there in two, four, six, eight years. Sometimes you’re right and sometimes you are wrong. Then you have principles to figure out and to understand why you may be right.

But going back in a nutshell, re-listen to yourself and if you feel something, you’re really convinced, do it, whatever others say.

F Geyrhalter: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, absolutely.

T Janczukowicz: But listen to them, then think, but then do what you feel.

F Geyrhalter: And the same holds true for data, because I’m sure, at this point, your app has been downloaded over 1.5 million times, I think it’s the latest in 190 countries?

T Janczukowicz: Yeah.

F Geyrhalter: So you must have so much great data about your users at this point, and I know you’re using it and you have studies made about listenership and about what classical music means today. But on the other hand, you have to balance that out with not always listening to customer data and just solely basing decisions on your instinct as well. It’s always a fine line that an entrepreneur walks.

T Janczukowicz: Yeah.

F Geyrhalter: On the flip side now, we talked a little bit about failures. Now, let’s climb over that hill to success. When you look back, what was that big breakthrough moment where you felt like, “Okay, the startup is slowly moving into a brand.” People start using the name, the app becomes part of daily life. When did you know that you had something that would become a major player in the music world? No pun intended. May it have been a funding round or the Salzburg Festival where you launched or early user feedback. What was it for IDAGIO where you knew that this will actually be a success?

T Janczukowicz: Well, I think in order to do something like that, you need a certain, what we call… I don’t know how you may be able to translate that in German. There’s a nice word, Gottvertrauen. I don’t know how you translate it. You put your trust in God. You have to do something. Everybody was, “Oh, you’re going to fail, you’re stupid.” But to trust, you trust that it will work.

So this is something that was always there. However, I, would say two things. One thing was quite early. It was that we were indeed launching, not the app, a minimal viable product, even not the beta at the Salzburg festival in 2015. We were launching there and we were sitting on stage in the premises of the festival upon invitation of the Vienna Philharmonic.

Then some days later there was an article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. They wrote, it was 2015 and they wrote, “If they’re not going to run out of money, they could change the way how people listen to classical music.” This is something, I remember, we were by far not yet there, but having read that and then securing the next funding round, the combination of those two things that we say, “Okay, we are on the good way. Let’s put it like that.”

F Geyrhalter: Right. That’s amazing. For our international listeners, which is not the majority of our listeners, I think we have 6% German listeners. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is the authority, not only in Germany but it reaches through all of the central Europe. So that is a huge deal. To go back to when you talk about Gottvertrauen, the idea of you trust in God, just to make it universally accessible. It’s also for atheists. That idea that you just trust in the universe, right? You have this ideology where you trust in the universe.

All right, Till, we’re coming slowly to a close, but none of my guests can get away without answering this particular question. Mainly because I believe it is such a great exercise for any entrepreneur to give some thought to as they keep building their culture and brand. I gave you a heads up on that. If you could describe everything about your brand in one or two words that would turn into your brand’s DNA, as I call it, what would it be like? Examples could be freedom for Harley Davidson or happiness for Coca-Cola. What would that brand DNA be?

T Janczukowicz: I have to answer that with an anecdote and then I try to answer your question.

F Geyrhalter: Perfect.

T Janczukowicz: There was a young Romanian conductor, Sergio Celibidache, amazing, amazing conductor. Was for many years the music director, legendary music director of the Munich Philharmonic. He believed he would get the job of the music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, then Karajan got the job. I just have to say that because he said Karajan is like Coca Cola.

F Geyrhalter: I think I know that story from my dad actually because it’s so classic.

T Janczukowicz: Yeah, exactly. So sorry to… But it’s not exactly an answer to what you asked, but I had to raise that. If you would allow two words that are not very romantic, I would say, what people should think in three, five, 10 years when they hear IDAGIO, it’s classical music. If you would ask me to really distill it down to one word, then I would rather turn to what the classic music does with people. Then we could say happiness because it brings happiness. It gives people a more happier life because it makes you healthy.

There are all these studies, classical music connects when you’re growing up the right and the left half of the brain in a more meaningful way. You learn empathy, the social skills and so on. You could say health, but probably if we could nail it. Ask to really nail it down to one word, I think it’s belonging.

I think it’s belonging because, if you look at what happens, we come alone, we go along but we have this 60, 70, if you’re lucky, 80 years. To overcome this, this illusion of loneliness and classical music has this power to really connect you with other people. You don’t need to touch them. You don’t need to look at them. You close your eyes, but you feel connected with other people. I think this is probably best described by the word belonging.

F Geyrhalter: That’s beautiful. I knew that belonging would come back up because you had talked about it in the beginning. It is such a perfectly emotional word to really capture the brand beyond, right, really the entire genre. Where can listeners find IDAGIO if they are intrigued enough after listening to us for the last 45 minutes to give it a try and perhaps even become converts to the magic of classical music?

T Janczukowicz: Very easily, on the internet, idagio.com. In the app store, there’s an Android version. Anybody, for example, who has a Sonos device. There’s been Sonos implementation of IDAGIO. But I would say go to the internet and there you’ll find all the app stores to find IDAGIO and the different partnerships we have also with hardware manufacturers. Yeah, that’s probably the easiest way.

F Geyrhalter: Excellent. Excellent. That’s the beauty of owning your name online. So I know you launched the company at the Salzburg Festival or the Salzburger Festspiele in 2015.

T Janczukowicz: Yeah.

F Geyrhalter: That is exactly what I would be heading next week. So watch out for me Till. If you’re in Salzburg, you might run into me at one of the many Festspiele locations.

T Janczukowicz: Cool.

F Geyrhalter: Thank you so much for staying late at your office in Berlin to have this conversation with me today and to share your stories and your thoughts on branding with me and my listeners. We really appreciate your time.

T Janczukowicz: A great pleasure. Thank you so much.

F Geyrhalter: And thanks to everyone for listening, and please hit that subscribe button and give the show a quick rating – it only takes 5 seconds and it helps the podcast’s visibility and growth.And if you really enjoy it, please head on over to PATREON.com/Hittingthemark to become a sustaining member supporting this show.

There has never been a more important episode in which to give the theme music some credit. It was written and produced by Happiness Won. If you want to know who is behind Happiness Won, then also head on over to PATREON.com/Hittingthemark and you may find what you learn amusing.

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