In a time where the dreaded album leak continues to plague the music industry, Haulix is quickly becoming one of the most reliable services that is helping labels and preventing their releases from seeing the light of day earlier than planned.
Haulix is now used by a wide range of major and independent labels and continues to grow. The company was formed in 2009 out of Brown’s disbelief of labels’ heavy expenditure on promotional CD’s, and by using his Computer Science Degree and Music Journalism knowledge, Matt went about developing Haulix.
With emphasis on watermark technology, simplicity, and customer service, Matt and Haulix have a well-rounded product that serves its purpose greatly.
Already Heard recently spoke to Matt about Haulix, how it was formed, its advantages compared to other services, how they prevent album leaks, future plans and more.
Already Heard: Hi Matt. First of all can you explain your role for Haulix?
Matt: I am the Founder and CEO.AH: For those who are unfamiliar with Haulix, can you tell us what its all about?
Matt: Haulix is a web-based system used for pushing watermarked music out to the press at the pre-release stage.AH: I understand the catalyst for the service was that you grew tired making space for physical promos. What was the initial aim of Haulix?
Matt: Yes, my initial idea for Haulix came from being on the Journalist side of the coin rather than the Publicist side. I was running a music review-oriented website that had 20 writers and our post office box was overflowing every week with promotional CDs. I couldn’t believe these publicists were spending $2-$4 per package, not to mention all of the costs that came from manufacturing the actual discs. It got to the point where I had to hire someone to help input the discs that came in the mail into our websites database. The whole process seemed very inefficient and expensive to me.AH: Since its launch, how has Haulix grown?
Matt: As a bootstrapped startup, things were very slow back in 2009 when we started. I was literally contacting labels one by one asking them to try the system out as we were continuing to build it. They would give us feedback and we would quickly make changes. Every year since then, we’ve experienced steady growth. From 2012 to 2013, we had a 75% increase in sales.AH: Before forming the company, what was your experience within the industry?
Matt: I have a computer science degree and I run a music reviewing website that is 12 years old. I actually think its good that I didn’t come from a publicity background before starting Haulix. People in the music industry were set in their ways of doing things and it’s very hard to get people to change. I came into this seeing physical promotions as a flawed process that was screaming for some type of a software solution.
