The “Beatshed” was a dedicated electronic music production, teaching, and rehearsal studio.

A sister endeavour to Soundpond.net. It was born primarily as a way to generate revenue without compromising the radio stations ad-free values, and secondarily as the most ideal venture that met this goal while providing a valuable service to our community. To not dilute the core station brand and performance focus, it was spun off with it’s own business name, website, and social media. Beatshed was your place to learn and practice the basics of DJ’ing, music production, and live recording.

First challenge : Raise capital to secure $20k worth of equipment.

Rather than raise capital directly we looked for a partnership opportunity, and approached a major music retailer with a simple premise.

We’re awesome. Help us be even more awesome.

Initially the sponsor balked at the capital investment, which was only fair. After all, so did we. Fortunately I came up with a solution : The equipment would be provided on a rolling 1 year lease. If the partnership was judged beneficial the lease could be extended. If not they could retrieve the gear and sell it with only a years depreciation, still a net profit above cost price, or we’d buy it out. The net financial risk to them was nil. It was a guaranteed profit either in value from the partnership driving sales, or revenue from the eventual sale of the equipment, albeit depreciated. Worst case scenario, this also shifted our capital investment in the gear forward a year while depreciating it slightly. Bargain. So not matter how the successful activation turned out, both sides still stood to benefit financially.

These terms were immediately accepted, and it was our privilege to unveil the sponsorship to our dedicated community.

The business was far more popular than we anticipated and was a definite win for the stations bottom line and fanbase, with many of our students cutting their teeth here before “graduating” to the main broadcast studio and even eventually securing shows, getting represented to the great city and securing gigs!

I personally discovered an unexpected joy to teaching. Imparting confidence to youth, particularly disadvantaged youth seeking assistance in creating something to express themselves, has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my career to date.