Meet Bardo Novotny of Swiff in Downtown LA

Today we’d like to introduce you to Bardo Novotny.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I grew up in San Luis Obispo. CA which is around three hours up the coast from LA.

I played in a handful of different alt-rock bands growing up where I started to learn music production and songwriting. As I got older and deeper into it, my love for production developed even more and I really dove in.

I moved to Nashville, TN to attend Belmont University for Music Business. Here I met my current business partners (Joseph Chandler & Mikey Newell). We naturally gravitate toward each other to work on musical releases, video projects, events and everything in between. We all have different personalities and different skill sets, but all have a background in music and a similar mindset that brings us together in an awesome way.
After our Junior year of school, we decided we decided to move to LA to bring our ideas to fruition.

As beneficial as the college social scene is for a budding entrepreneur and musician, it can also be extremely distracting. It was crucial to have the support of close friends and business partners in making the decision to pack up and relocate. Making the move has had a lot of ups and downs for sure but has also helped give us the space to focus 100% of our time into our passions.

Has it been a smooth road?
There has been many ups and downs.
The college scene has awesome advantages to it, like meeting people and creating those lasting connections, but also carries many distractions.

The tricky part is navigating those distractions so that you can focus more of your time into what you care about.

We have had so many different iterations of our business, from the management company to party promotion, to a label creating and releasing original music and content and have learned so much from every failure and every success. One of the big things we like to remind ourselves is that failure is impossible. You will always learn something from failures so at the end of the day, it’s not really failing.

Actually moving out to LA was interesting too because we had no idea where we were going to be living for the first month. We almost went broke Airbnb-ing around LA until we happened across a live/work office space in downtown which we fell in love with and was the perfect fit for us and within our budget.

It was a good lesson in patience. There were many spots we could have jumped at right away because we were impatient, but instead, we decided to wait and ride out the storm even though it kinda sucked but ended up finding something better than we could have dreamed of.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Swiff story. Tell us more about it.
Swiff is the first subscription instrumental catalog service for artists.

Upcoming talent that may not have access to producers or label budgets can feel left in the dust when it comes to securing top quality instrumentals consistently, easily, and affordable. Instead of dropping $200 for a random type beat you found off YouTube, artists can now access a catalog of instrumentals created by awesome producers that they can choose from to create their own tracks to.

Swiff also offers other services like mastering, as well as industry guidance and excited to be growing and adding marketing, distribution, and label services within the year.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I see labels having much less power over artists careers and more and more independent artists taking over. We keep on seeing independent artists winning and the number is only going to grow. Streaming and social media have ushered in a new era for music artists, producers, and their teams in which it’s much easier to make do with less.

The barrier to entry is lowering for anyone looking to get into making music, which increases competition so the big deciding factor is going to be the ability to put out consistent quality content. That’s why Swiff is excited to be helping young artists have access to the right tools they need to create consistently and grow from that.

Pricing:

• Swiff Club Membership – $97/year
• Swiff Club Plus – $227/year

Contact Info:

• Website: www.swiff.io
• Email: contact@swiffbeats.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/swiff.io/

Image Credit:
Mikey Newell

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