The Power of One: DropTrack’s Founder is Customer Number One, Helps Artists Hone Singular Brands While Evolving His Own

Paul Loeb, the 29-year-old CEO of DropTrack, an innovative file-hosting service providing simple tools for artists and producers, has been playing at the intersection of music and tech since his age was in the single digits.

DropTrack’s pioneering founder has always been a music-consuming self-starter. Loeb describes himself as “a big nerd” who’s been programming websites and apps since the promising dawn of the 21st Century. Add that to playing piano, clarinet, guitar, and trumpet—plus a keen ear for what drives dance parties wild—and you’ve got a Renaissance Man for the post-Pro-Tools world.

Loeb began his career by making himself valuable to tech-needy neighbors in Aurora, CO. Starting in 1997 at age ten with his first start-up, Paul’s Computer Basics, he made house calls teaching fundamentals and fixing problems. Clients included grandparents, elderly neighbors, and a neurosurgeon. “My mom drove me to people’s houses and sat in the living room with a book” he remembers. “I started by charging $10/hour –which was a lot to me, but to an adult it was a huge bargain. Eventually I raised my prices to $20/hour. All these years later, my mom says she should have gotten a percentage of my earnings!”

Loeb had his first taste of making commerce flow more smoothly online when a neighbor’s hockey equipment store needed a website, so he created thehockeystore.com. He later hosted a web server from home called LoebNet. His mom searched for computer classes to keep him interested but couldn’t find any that challenged him and/or allowed 13-year-olds to attend. Loeb relates, “In the long run, my Mom says I just figured everything out on my own.” Now Loeb is figuring out how to capitalize on digital music’s evolution, continuously evolving his approach in the era of free-floating music files and overabundant digital data.

As a student at USC, Loeb created the award-winning www.usc.edu/transportation website, expediting campus transportation and parking for over 80,000 grateful students, faculty, and staff. Next he co-founded Portcard, a Facebook app helping protect children from internet predators, partnering with the Boys and Girls Club of America. He was personally invited by Facebook’s Chief Security Officer to the first F8 Developers conference. Then he co-created Fresh Intermedia, a freelance app and web development company, making websites and apps for musicians, hospitals, real estate companies, and more.

Loeb has a knack for seeking out and applying feedback to his personal discoveries about what works. He learned to adapt his services to his target market when he pitched restaurants on building online ordering apps. No one bit when his proposals were for six-month projects costing $20,000.  But, Loeb said, “We realized there was a huge demand, so we took our own money and invested in building a white-label solution: OrderingApps. Then we went back to the restaurants and said, ‘Give us your menu and $500, and we’ll have your app built within a week.’ This was a much easier sell! We ended up growing the company to 50 restaurants in 3 countries, with over $500k in processed monthly revenue.”  They demonstrated a successful acquisition exit by selling OrderingApps to a national advertising firm.

Loeb’s creative character, as much as his business ethos, was always influenced by technology. Back at USC, Loeb and his frat brothers discovered the magnetism of European club and house music. His DJ’ing career began in the heyday of hip-hop, but he got into electronic music “because it had more to do with software than anything else,” he admits, “and music technology now enables producers to create entire songs from start to finish on laptops—even on an airplane, in the case of Skrillex.”

Loeb has DJ’d around Los Angeles for eight years under the names BluntGuitar (with Kyle McKenzie) and as the more predictable Paul Loeb. Now he has rebranded his music producer/DJ name to Really Cute Cats, a spin-off from the web presence he’d already built. “The Internet loves cats,” he explained, “I'm tragically allergic, but I think they're awesome, and the blog is a way to share my love…I decided to leverage my cat brand as my new artist name, because who isn’t all about the really cute cats? I already had the .com, a decent email list, and fans on Facebook and Twitter, so I took it from there.”

As a prolific producer with dozens of collaborators, it only made sense for Loeb to start an indie record label. In 2011, borrowing best practices from Ultra Records, Dim Mak Records, and Insomniac Events, he launched No Ego Records, focusing on dance and electronic music. With 65 artists so far, the label has secured placements on TV shows, from E!’s Keeping Up with the Kardashians to Comedy Central’s Workaholics. Loeb says while developing No Ego Records, he’s learned a lot about protecting artists’ best interests, making win-win deals, and throwing fantastic events.

What makes DropTrack special is that Loeb himself is Customer Number One. He created it for himself. As both artist and label exec, he knows how to maximize opportunities to get through to buyers: professionalize presentations with your own logo and personalized branding: find out what objective professionals think of your music; use mailing lists, fan clubs, and social media effectively; and be patient. “It can take six to nine months to get paid when we license for sync. So if you don’t have cashflow, you can very quickly go under water.” Happily, No Ego Records has turned a profit for its five years of life. So even though Loeb considers it a side project more than an enterprise, he’ll keep doing it. And No Ego Records’ musicians submit their demos via DropTrack.

As of this writing, DropTrack’s number of uploaded tracks is in five digits, the platform’s number of industry contacts is in six digits, and its number of emails sent to these star-makers is in seven digits—all on a platform invented by one guy who still DJ’s and runs his own record label, while working night and day to elevate the fortunes of other dedicated artists. DropTrack aims not to clog the overflowing inboxes of record labels, DJs, and bloggers, but to give musicians the tools to stand out from the rest, get heard, and get deals. Thousands of users employ a selection of DropTrack functions to market their creations, according to their own goals—which remains Loeb’s goal.


About DropTrack:

DropTrack is music marketing software that helps artists manage their relationships with music industry contacts and provides a complete toolset for sharing and pitching digital music. DropTrack offers a selection of tools for music producers and record labels, including a platform for uploading and storing music, then accessing it from anywhere. DropTrack’s customer management system, download gate, short link URLs to playlists, and other features make creating successful marketing campaigns simple and precise. Instantaneous feedback and analytics complement branding tools to promote music in a more personal and professional way.