The first Webinar takes place on Wednesday 24th May at 4pm BST. Sign up free here.

Byta’s mission has always been to provide artists and their teams with the tools and knowledge needed to move their careers forward. The Byta platform remains the best tool to simply and securely share your audio files. Learning how to use Byta as effectively as possible in this new, exclusive user webinar series.

Sharing audio properly moves a career forward on numerous fronts, from early-on collaborations to sending your mastered final mix to radio.  A key goal remains being as efficient as possible and keeping everything secure.

In this new monthly series, join Byta founder Marc Brown as he demos and conducts a walk-through of key features. He will also be suggesting best practices when sharing your audio files while using the Byta platform. Each session will focus on two Byta features, including an explanation and a demo. Webinars will also include Byta updates: new features or future plans. Each session will conclude with Marc opening the floor for questions where you can ask about anything to do with audio file sharing, what the Byta platform has to offer and what makes it unique.  

Join us & learn more Byta.

Register free for the webinars here.

The post Byta Features: A Monthly Webinar Series appeared first on Byta Blog.

For Byta Creator, Freelancer and Teams Plans. Securely add audio to your website using Byta’s new Embeddable Player feature. Create a simple Embed by copying a few lines of HTML and dropping it into a web page you control. Limit to stream-only or share downloads in lossy or lossless file formats and track stats. Users stay on your website, no need to click away to a streaming platform in order to access the music.

Working in tandem with Byta’s Playlisting Feature, the Embeddable Player allows you to customize and showcase audio on any web page: albums, singles, playlists and podcasts. Adjust the size of the Embed to fit your existing web page. Every link in your Embeddable Player is delivered with Byta’s unparalleled security. This includes tracking downloads and streams and setting expiry. Embeds also include rich album artwork previews.

“Artists, labels, managers and publicists come to Byta looking for ways to easily and securely share their audio. Adding the Embeddable Player into your web pages makes securely sharing streams and downloads even easier,” suggests Byta founder Marc Brown.

Quickly build an Embeddable Player the same way you create a Universal Link on Byta. Then, on your Activity page, click the “copy embed” button then drop your Embed code into a web page you control. Read more about embedding audio on our Knowledge Base 

The Embeddable Player allows you to share your audio as a stream or download on a website you control, confident that the music is secure and will be heard. It’s a great way to promote your music and highlight singles, albums or playlists.

More About Byta:

Byta (“Bee-tah”: the Swedish word for exchange) is unrivalled in taking advantage of the unique properties found in audio files. By simplifying the reading and writing of file metadata, conversion of file formats and delivery of fast yet secure streaming, the platform enables everyone to send and receive digital audio in a clean, simple and secure way.

The post Byta launches Embeddable Player appeared first on Byta Blog.

What are Byta Playlists?

When promoting a new release, artist, project or an entire roster, choose multiple tracks and the order they show in. Choose a custom name, upload artwork and list artist highlights to appear on shares. Once built, just paste your playlist link into any of your favourite messaging services or send it as a Direct Share. Playlisting makes promoting music through Byta even more efficient.

Byta’s development team has created a platform that enables everyone to send and receive digital audio in a clean, simple and secure way. Built for music. A platform informed by years of experience from navigating the music ecosystem. 

Byta founder Marc Brown adds, “Playlisting is something we have wanted to add to our Byta Features for a long time. It just makes sense. Now artists can create custom playlists whilst labels, managers, and PRs can share monthly roster highlights. The development team here has made it very easy to use!”

Users asked for the ability to create custom playlists that display as albums from their tracks or albums already uploaded. They also wanted control over track order and customisation. Fast and secure audio sharing using Byta now includes playlisting in response to all of these requests. Playlists still allow users to attach a press release, press shot or a third party link, with Smart Attachments. And with Byta’s Mailchimp integration, users can share regular audio playlists within any email campaign.

More About Byta:

Byta (“Bee-tah”: the Swedish word for exchange) is unrivalled in taking advantage of the unique properties found in audio files. By simplifying the reading and writing of file metadata, converting file formats, and delivering fast yet secure streaming, the platform enables everyone to send and receive digital audio in a clean, simple, and secure way. Byta has also launched #HowWeListen, a not-for-profit organisation that complements the company’s ultimate goal: providing artists and their teams with the tools and knowledge needed to move their careers forward.

The post Byta launches Playlisting: Create the perfect playlist. appeared first on Byta Blog.

Put your music into context: introducing Smart Attachments from Byta. Add recognised third party links when sharing audio files. Strengthen that first impression by including links to Spotify Artist Profiles, Soundcloud links, or Dropbox or Google Drive folders. Helping artists and their teams include relevant assets, streaming platform profiles and previous releases to music shares.

Byta’s development team has created a platform that enables sending and receiving of digital audio in a clean, simple and secure way. Built for music, a platform informed by years of experience navigating the music ecosystem. 

Byta founder Marc Brown believes “…sharing music often requires giving recipients as much context as possible to encourage discovery and to connect with newer artists and creators. Smart Attachments help build that narrative.” 

Sometimes more is more. Users may need to add some context to their music, such as a back catalogue, public streaming profiles, press releases, interviews or videos. Byta has answered this need by introducing Smart Attachments. Users can now quickly and easily include links to streaming platforms or assets when sharing their audio files. Smart Attachments arrive with the audio file(s) and show third-party logos alongside your message. This new feature helps put the music and the artist’s narrative into context.

Byta already allows for the inclusion of press releases, press shots and release dates. Now, with Smart Attachments, include everything required in one simple share.

The post Introducing Byta’s Smart Attachments appeared first on Byta Blog.

Byta’s goal is to provide artists and their teams with the tools and knowledge needed to move their careers forward. So, we are very excited to announce the launch of our new plan: Solo. 

“One of the challenges of being an up-and-coming artist, musician, producer, or creator of any discipline, is the cost. Early on the same work needs to be accomplished, with the barrier of little or no income,” explains Byta founder and CEO Marc Brown. “Solo is designed to help,” 

The Solo subscription tier sits comfortably between our existing ‘Free’ and ‘Creator’ plans. Solo includes everything that the Free plan offers with additional 1GB of audio storage [≈300+ mp3 files], plus save and tag contacts. 

Solo is only $1 / £1 / €1 per month.

Use Solo to quickly upload, stream and securely send and receive audio files on the go. Share your music with the right people quickly and easily by storing and tagging contacts. Stream or share whilst on-the-move. A perfect pairing for Byta’s upcoming iOS app. 

Byta enables the sending and receiving of digital audio files & streams in a clean, simple and secure way. Built for everyone working with music today. Byta remains unrivalled in taking advantage of audio files’ unique properties – reading and writing file metadata, converting file formats and delivering fast yet secure streaming. All of these features come with every Byta plan, including Solo.

The post Announcing Solo: a new monthly plan for creators appeared first on Byta Blog.

When we launched an MVP to the public back in 2015 we were a tiny team of 3, building Byta out of our own pockets. We had a big idea, the skills to be able to turn that idea into a living product, and an app we were proud of. Fast forward 6 years. Our users have grown and so have we. Now a bigger team thanks to our seed round in 2020.

There had been many new features we were wanting to build, We needed to make improvements with speed, and also had plenty of user feedback that we were eager to work on. Unfortunately, the way the site was previously built meant that we weren’t able to deliver the improvements at the pace our ambition required. So I sat down with the whole team, from marketing through to developers, and we rebuilt the app from the ground up. Undertaking a redesign of something that is now so familiar can be a difficult and daunting task but we knew the reward for our users would be substantial, so we were eager to get going. 

Byta Redesign: So what is different?

We had four main goals when it came to the redesign: user satisfaction, improved speed, flexibility for future development and ultimately a unified experience across our brand.  

New cleaner look and feel

The new, cleaner layout makes the whole Byta experience even easier to navigate, saving time whenever you need to send and receive music.

The sharing and listening experience is always at the forefront for us. We want to ensure that as a recipient you can quickly stream and/or download the audio you have received. As a sender, you should know that your audio is being displayed (and played) in the best way possible. With this in mind, all of Byta’s features should now be easier to access, whatever plan you are on. Any information that you need to know about your audio is right at your fingertips.  

The Share page

You can find our biggest and best changes on the share page. We have now introduced a clearer step-by-step process: Add/upload audio is the first, as before you can easily add any combination of albums and tracks, with cleaner more organised search results for paid plans. Once you have collected your audio you can then move on to customise your share settings. We now allow you to easily toggle between our main share options: Direct Share, Universal Links, Private Links, Mailchimp (Freelancer +) and Forward (teams only); you will only see the fields required for that share type. Once you have filled out the relevant fields, review your audio and hit send. Simple!

Want to know more about sharing with Byta? Check out our features page for share breakdowns. 

Distinct differences between shares and audio cards

Activity and public-facing Universal Links also had a refresh. Your audio files now sit combined into one “Share” that holds all the details attached to it. Expand the share card to find the individual albums and tracks, this makes your ‘Share” even clearer for both recipients and senders. Little changes like this mean that tasks such as deleting shares or downloading files are now easy to do. Saving you time. 

Easy to access help menus

We realised that help screens aren’t just necessary at the start of using a new app but should be accessible all the time, so from now on you can access information about a page and any FAQs at any point by clicking on the “i” icon at the top right of the screen. Do you still have questions? Drop us a message in the chat where someone is always around or have a look at our support centre.

New improved Universal Link pages

Our public-facing links such as Universal Links and Direct Links now include a little more information about what Byta is so that your recipients will feel like they are in safe hands when receiving your Byta link. These pages also offer up a clearer display of what has been sent, replicating the in-app experience.  

The most common feedback we received was that recipients of Universal links couldn’t access audio playback features like those in the app. So public-facing links now have access to the same audio player as users with an account. 

Even the audio player itself has had a bit of a refresh, moving to the bottom of the page. Now there is more space so you can see what is going on, a larger time bar, playback times, artwork viewer and metadata display. Volume controllers are also now easier to use. 

So, what is next? 

While this was a great step forward in the new direction of a better Byta, it is still just the start of our plans. With these initial changes, you can now start looking forward to new features being rolled out over the coming months. Keep an eye out on our socials for more details of what is to come.

Jen
Head of Product
Give our redesign an upvote on Product Hunt

The post Behind #BrandNewByta: by Jen Pomphrey appeared first on Byta Blog.

A stunning brand and product redesign introduce a new look, improved functionality and updated features. Byta continues to innovate, supporting user needs within the audio sharing space.

Byta’s redesign results from a $1.9 million CAD funding round led by the Canada Media Fund in 2020. This funding is the first new money in the audio sharing space since Soundcloud over ten years ago.

Byta (byta.com) enables everyone to send and receive digital audio clean, simple and securely. Built for everyone working with music today. Byta is unrivalled in taking advantage of audio files’ unique properties. Byta reads and writes file metadata, converts file formats and delivers fast yet secure streaming.

With more than 60,000 new tracks being uploaded to Spotify daily, artists and their teams privately share music to build pre-release interest. Privately sending files and streams—tasks repeated millions of times a day worldwide—is incredibly difficult to accomplish efficiently on a desktop. This problem is also near impossible on mobile. Shortcuts and insecure products cause leaks resulting in artists losing control of their narrative. Files are mislabelled and misplaced. Music goes unlistened, and artists remain undiscovered. With this new redesign, Byta has become even more effective in solving these industry-wide problems. In turn, making listening easier while still ensuring unparalleled security.

What is new with the Byta redesign?

“The new, cleaner layout makes the whole Byta experience even easier to navigate. This saves you time when you need to share your music,” says Byta Co-founder and Head of Product, Jen Pomphrey. Over a year, with the help of Byta’s most dedicated users, the team redesigned the app from the ground up. “A completely new colour scheme, new logo and streamlined features, which of course includes our continued commitment to security”, adds Jen Pomphrey.

Marc Brown founded Byta in 2017, inspired by his time as a radio plugger based in London, UK. DJs complained about how disorganised things had become since the advent of digital audio files. Additionally, music was arriving mislabeled and in the wrong file formats. “Music discovery has two layers. The first and most obvious is by music fans after release. However, the second, the discovery of music within the music ecosystem pre-release, was completely broken and needed reimagining,” says Marc Brown. Using this knowledge from working in the global music industry for over 20 years, he used this background to develop Byta to respond to these concerns. Specifically, the need for a more effective way to exchange audio files and streams privately. Byta’s new redesign redelivers this promise.

More About Byta:

Byta (“Bee-tah”: the Swedish word for exchange) is run as a distributed team across three continents. Byta is exceptional in being music’s only Freemium Vertical SaaS, a SaaS business focusing solely on the music ecosystem built for music. Byta’s users range from bedroom artists to the largest record companies in the world.

Byta also runs #HowWeListen (howwelisten.org), a non-profit dedicated to providing musicians and their teams with the knowledge required to move their careers forward.

About Byta Co-founder & Head of Product, Jennifer Pomphrey:

Jen is a front-end developer and multi-disciplinary designer and has been designing websites for almost two decades. She holds a degree in Graphic Design from the Cumbria Institute of the Arts and moved into digital design whilst working at IPC Media on its groundbreaking publication Wallpaper*. Before Byta, Jen worked at various London advertising agencies, including OutsideLine and Saatchi & Saatchi leading creative for numerous international brands such as Rekorderlig Cider. She then moved into the music industry, working for MAMA Group, rebranding its’ music venues and marketing collateral for its major music festivals, such as LoveBox, The Great Escape and Wilderness Festival. 

The post Brand New Byta appeared first on Byta Blog.

As we continue to develop and evolve Byta, we are looking for more users to come onboard to provide feedback in exchange for access to new products before the general public. Byta’s BETA team are on the lookout for artists, musicians, producers, artist managers, PRs, small labels and well, anyone working in music, to join our new BETA Program

We are on the lookout for artists, musicians, producers, artist managers, PRs, small labels and well, anyone working in music, to join our new BETA Program. 

What do Byta’s BETA testers do?

Participants will use Byta’s platform as part of their daily routine, providing feedback along the way. Participants will also provide valuable feedback and insight about the platform to our App Development Team. In addition, participants will get exclusive access to new features for testing and feedback before the official release. 

In exchange, we will provide you with a paid Artist Plan free of charge, for your own personal use, so long as you are part of the program.

Who can apply to be one of Byta’s BETA testers? 

Anyone actively creating, collaborating or working with music can apply to be part of our BETA Program. Byta can be used by anyone from bedroom artists to global record companies. Work with music? We’d love to hear from you! 

Sound interesting?

Read more and apply directly on our Byta’s BETA Program page

Byta is the platform for sending and receiving digital audio in a clean, simple and secure way. Built for music.

The post Announcing Byta’s BETA Program appeared first on Byta Blog.

The 1.9m CAD funding round was led by the Canada Media Fund (CMF) and a series of private investors including musician Scott Kannberg (founding member of 90s indie rock superstars Pavement) who came to Byta as a user – “In the old days, I would share my music with others via cassette tape or a cdr. It would take hours and lots of postage! Today, with Byta, I can share my music with bandmates, labels, promoters, writers, dj’s, etc in one click. I haven’t found anything as easy and digitally sound as Byta which is why I invested.”

Byta was founded in 2015 by CEO Marc Brown. Until recently, the company was bootstrapped by its founders. This seed round represents the first new money in the audio sharing space in over 10 years. “We built Byta from the ground up, it’s the same advice I give to artists: Get everything in place yourself first, make sure you are ready, then look for outside help. Byta is ready,” says Marc Brown, who has worked across the global music industry for over 20 years.

Co-founder and Head of Product Jen Pomphrey emphasizes how privately sending files or streams—tasks repeated millions of times a day—is incredibly difficult to accomplish efficiently on desktop, and virtually impossible on mobile. Time is wasted, music remains unheard and artists go undiscovered. Shortcuts and insecure products result in leaks and artist’s lose control over narrative and rollout. “This is the problem Byta is solving and why we are committing substantial new capital to product development,” explains Jen Pomphrey.

Byta will also be investing in our new non-profit HowWeListen Education, inspired by our #HowWeListen blog interviews. The series evolved into curated panels and talks at conferences worldwide in 2019. The strand is being further expanded in 2020, including a podcast and workshops from Tallinn to Toronto. “We are developing all kinds of new opportunities for artists, labels and industry partners” says Colin MacKenzie, Byta’s Head of Global Marketing.

–

About the Canada Media Fund (CMF)

The CMF is a not-for-profit corporation that delivers more than $350 million in funding annually to support the Canadian television and digital media industries through two streams of funding. Byta was funded through the Commercial Projects Program. The program is in place to fund projects that have a greater probability of commercial success. Projects are evaluated based on their potential to attain stated commercial objectives, demonstrate business opportunity and achieve profitability. 

About Byta

Byta (“Bee-tah”: the Swedish word for exchange) is run as a distributed team across three continents. Byta is unrivaled in taking advantage of the unique properties found in audio files – reading and writing file metadata, converting file formats and delivering fast yet secure streaming. Byta is also exceptional in being music’s only Freemium Vertical SaaS, a SaaS business focusing solely on the music ecosystem. Byta’s Free Plan enables artists to efficiently share their music with their collaborators and team. Byta’s Paid Plans offer higher security and collaborative features essential for today’s largest music organisations.

The post Announcing our $1.9m CAD Seed Round Led by the Canada Media Fund appeared first on Byta Blog.

Byta is the audio platform for everyone working in music today. From the newest of artists to the largest record companies in the world.
We make this possible by ensuring everyone can privately share their music the way they want, with share settings they control.
To further that goal we are announcing Universal Links.
Think Private Soundcloud Links but without the ads, better streaming security and the option to allow downloads without recipients needing to log in. Simple as that.
As part of this upcoming release we are updating the names of each type of Sharing to better reflect the unique properties offered by each type of private streaming link.

Direct:

Each trackable link is sent directly to one or more users via their email address
For Users Of: File Transfer Services or Watermark Music Promotion Services
Best For: Higher security releases, where you are targeting certain people and/or sharing pre-requested music direct to individual recipients

Universal Links:

Your Universal Link is sent to you via email, pass to others for further sharing to their contacts
For Users Of: Private Soundcloud Links
Best For: The perfect one listening link solution when sharing single tracks or albums more widely, instead of sending a Soundcloud link for streaming and a separate link to download the audio file

Protected Links:

Your password Protected Link is be sent to you via email, pass to others and audio will immediately appear in their contacts account once they click on the link and login
For Users Of: Watermark Music Promotion Services or Box / Dropbox Password Protected Shared Links
Best For: Passing a link in email or over chat yet need to retain the same level of tracking and security offered when sharing a Direct Streaming Link

Mailchimp:

Your Mailchimp embed code is sent to you via email, for pasting directly into your Mailchimp campaigns
For Users Of: Mailchimp for their music marketing
Best For: Anyone who is looking to embed and track audio in their Mailchimp campaigns as well as managing one contact mailing list
Users should start to see the new Share page dropdown options in early January.

The post Private Sharing Links Update appeared first on Byta Blog.