Going online: The Nitty Gritty
Whoa nelly! It’s happening! It’s been 5+ years, but it’s happening! The research & planning & development we’ve been working on in the background is paying off & taking shape. The irony is, despite transmuting our classes into a virtual form, they feel so much more real, tangible & more exciting than we ever could have imagined.
But this hasn’t been easy. We’ve flip flopped & failed & fumbled our way through the virtual-verse a LOT! But we reckon the journey is always as interesting as the destination, so we wanted to share some insights & context with you about what we’ve learned & our upcoming online model.
Ready? Let’s go!
#1 MUSIC 👩🎤
You’ve probably heard us bang on about this before. but if you’ve done Shut Up & Dance before, you’d know that the crux of the class is coming away having learn about a minutes worth of choreography to a popular film, musical or music video. You enjoy an epically-curated playlist & then put what you’ve learned to the actual music. So. Good. And if you’ve always been the uncoordinated one on the d’floor, a SU&D class is as empowering as it is mind-blowing – you leave feeling satisfied, sweaty & most importantly, like the diva/celebrity/icon in the music video/film/musical you just learnt that easy-to-master choreo to!
So! To use the epic pop-bangers you hear at each class, we pay for a performance license. Other dance studios, retail stores & cafes will pay a similar license – it’s just what ya do. OneMusic is the agency in New Zealand (check out our own Shut Up & Dance feature on their blog). However, when goods & services go online, things get a little more complicated – even if they’re not designed to be monetised! First of all, you need to pay for a number of different licenses, like a sync license & a communications license. You also need to negotiate a usage fee with the rightsholders of the music – that’s like flicking Ariana Grande an email (as well as the production company & all other collaborators who work on the track) – to have a chin wag about how you’ll be using her songs, for how long, on what platform, how many people will engage with it… Phwoar. Not only is this a massive job, but it’s prohibitively expensive. For us, it’d be impossible as we’d be looking at negotiating the rights for 800+ songs.
We’re just getting sweaty thinking about it 🥵
The solution? Production music & YouTube! We’ve found some awesome (& much more affordable) music that we can use thanks to our mates at OneMusic who make all the legal stuff a whole lot easier. You’ll still find some content with commercial or royalty songs, but you’ll find this on YouTube – where it’ll live for free. We’ll never make money off this. Instead – once we have enough subscribers for the rightsholders of the music we’re using on that video to be interested in us, they’ll pop ads on our content & monetise our videos for themselves. And yes, you read that right.
It sure is a tonne of work – who knew it wouldn’t be as simple as setting up our phone & hitting record?! Although, who knows what the future will hold… 😮 Perhaps we’ll be able to sit down with Bruno Mars for a chat over a whisky one day *snaps out of daydream* but for now, we’re thrilled to finally be in a position to turn the in-real-life experience you know & love into something virtual, shareable, pause-able & re-watchable. How. Good.
THE LEWK 👀
No offence to any online fitness class that uses a white wall, wooden floor & monstera in the background of their set – but that vibe just isn’t us. We know that in taking our classes online, we’re going to lose what makes a Shut Up & Dance class, well, a Shut Up & Dance class. That’s why we’ve invested heaps of a time into how the online experience not only looks, but feels, too. Yes we have a neon sign & yes we’re in love.
We’ve been working with the incredible team at Taia Studios in Kilbernie. Our friends Mark (producer/editor & Luke (camera/lighting) have spent many hours helping us make our dream a reality, & we’re stoked to have their experience & expertise on our side to help create something uniquely us.
We have always stayed in our lane, & our lane is… The. Antithesis. To. The. Gym. 👏👏👏 We want to infuse that intangible feeling you get after having shared a class in-real-life with others into the experience you have with us online – whether you’re in your bedroom or backyard, on holiday or on the go – & we wanna do it our way. No cut corners. No cookie cutter solutions. No compromises – just the raw authenticity you’ve come to expect from your dance-fitness community, right there in the palm of your hand (or on your tablet or chromecast or projector #welovetoseeit).
THE PRICE 🤑
If you haven’t gathered by now, there isn’t really a cheap way to do this…! We’re tackling this exciting phase of our business on a shoe-string budget & will be changing things up as we go so that we’re still in a position to offer a reasonable, value-for-money subscription for people who want fitness to be fun, to make the exercise accidental & to ultimately achieve our mission which is to revolutionise the fitness industry through the power of community & dance.
Yee-haw.
THE COMMUNITY 💞
On that note… Our community. Oh how we love thee! Nothing would make us happier than to create more opportunities to strengthen what it means to feel connected with a group of people that have the same guilty pleasure songs that you do! We want virtual greenrooms, where people can create private rooms during an OnDemand or Livestream class, turn on their camera & have a boogie with the people they love – whether that’s your friend down the road or your mum on the other side of the world. We want a chat box. We want an in-built community forum. We want member-exclusive content. We want… a lot. And we want it all for you 🙌
So as you can imagine, another key challenge has been finding a platform for the online classes to live & breathe that would allow us to reinforce this important part of our essence – our community. Whether we’re talking Instagram, Zoom, YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, InteliVideo, Crowdcast… there are many-a-platforms, each with their own strengths & limitations. At the moment, our content is in beta form of sorts, with it currently sitting on our website & in time, we’ll put it behind a paywall – once we figure out what the perfect platform is.
The good news for you (& your teenage girls) is that we’re working on an important, national campaign called #itsmymove (learn more here) so all the content you find on our website is totally free to view & enjoy. So, enjoy! Comment, like, give us a thumbs up – tell us what you love (& maybe what you don’t love too!).
TIME & RESOURCE ⏳
We’re not sure we should tell you this but… contrary to popular belief, Shut Up & Dance is not our full-time jobs & our cards decline at least once a week 🤣 Whether we’re working late into the evening or over-time, we (the three directors, Abby, Lesa & Clair) juggle other jobs to stay afloat. If we were meshed into one human, we’d be a triple, quadruple… octuple threat, as a copywriter, spin instructor, standup comedienne, mom, gardener, actor, babysitter, performing arts teacher & well, the list goes on. No day is ever the same for us – we never set up Shut Up & Dance thinking we’d begin a business, yet here we are! We’re still working on being able to make it our 24/7. We’ll get there.
It’s super cool to know that the brand & the business we’ve created gives off such a professional vibe that most of ya’ll sit there wondering *why has this taken them 5 years to go online, it’s 2022 what have you been dooooinng*
We know! We hear you! We’ve been dreaming of this moment for a long time too, but since starting in 2016 we’ve had kids, got dogs, taken other jobs & of course lets not forget we’ve been casually ducking our way in & out of a pandemic… Just a few obstacles eh 🤔
There you have it! A short & hopefully interesting look into where our heads have been over the last few years as we’ve been strategising over how to turn our dreams into your reality.
Thanks for reading!
*fist bump*