Product: Madverse Music Role: Brand and Product Marketing Manager Timeline: 6 months Scope: Product marketing, lifecycle marketing, growth, creator partnerships, CRM, community, product communication, customer education, crisis communication
This is not a marketing case study in the traditional sense. It's the story of a trust problem disguised as a growth problem, and the decisions I made to solve it. I've organized it by decision, not by channel, because the channels (email, social, tutorials, events) were never the point. They were tools I picked up and put down depending on what the artist journey needed at a given moment.
By the end of six months, Madverse had grown from 130K to 200K artists, but the number tells only part of the story. More importantly, we evolved from being a platform that distributed music to becoming a brand artists relied on throughout their careers.
Madverse helps independent musicians distribute their music to streaming platforms, manage royalty splits, access publishing services, and grow their careers, largely serving artists across India, many of whom are releasing music independently for the first time in their lives.
When I joined in October 2025, the platform had around 130,000 registered artists. The founders wanted to grow that number meaningfully, but growth wasn't really the constraint they thought it was. Within my first few weeks, it became clear that the harder problem sat one layer beneath acquisition.
Here's the thing about music distribution platforms: you're not asking someone to try a free tool. You're asking them to hand over their music, their royalty splits, and a meaningful share of their income, often for years, based on a company they've never worked with before.
For a first-time independent artist in India, that's a big ask. And the product, while genuinely capable, had grown faster than people's understanding of it. New features were shipping, publishing tools, royalty tracking, AI-powered marketing assets, but a lot of that capability was sitting unused, not because artists didn't want it, but because they didn't fully understand what it did or whether they could trust it with something as personal as their music.
So the brief I was effectively working against wasn't "get more people to sign up." It was closer to: why do capable, motivated artists hesitate to commit, and why do the ones who do sign up not go deeper into the product?
That reframing mattered. If the problem is acquisition, you spend on ads and optimize funnels. If the problem is trust and comprehension, you have to change what people understand before they'll act, which is a fundamentally different set of levers.
So what? This distinction is the difference between a marketing plan and a business strategy. Everything downstream in this case study follows from choosing the second framing over the first.