User Interview: Progressive Dreamers
How a team of two managed to build a 500k subscribers strong music promotion channel and started a label.
A few months back Jelena contacted us through our Facebook page. She had a YouTube channel, which she owned with her friend Ozan and needed a professional intro and possibly visualizers for the music they publish as well. The only problem was - she had literally no experience in video-editing and hiring a freelancer would, at best, be an expensive stopgap.
Today, the YouTube channel Progressive Dreamers has over 500k followers, and not only that, Jelena and Ozan recently started the label Progressive Dreamers Records.
I spoke to Jelena about their channel, the new record label, Videobolt music visualizers, and plans for the future.
Žare Petkov
Hi Jelena, thank you for taking the time to speak to us. Your channel started as an anonymous platform for promoting electronic music but today it’s an emerging giant with 400k subscribers. Tell me something about the people behind it and the early days. What made you go into the music promotion business?
Jelena
Hi Žare, first I’d just like to thank you for choosing us for this interview. Ozan and I started the channel quite spontaneously, we wanted to create our own platform where we could share the music we love. The emerging popularity of electronic music meant our passion - Progressive house had a huge potential fan base.
Žare Petkov
A quick look at your social pages shows a reoccurring line, “We're not mainstream and we shouldn’t be”. What is the music you prefer and how does an upcoming channel fight through the abundance of lookalike mainstream electronic music channels surrounding the average YouTube user?
Jelena
Promoting underground music is indeed our main goal. Following the leading trends in our industry, we noticed how much great music there is among less known and up-and-coming producers, while obviously maintaining huge respect towards the legendary producers like Pryda(CrıezD), Guy J, Hernan Cattaneo Sebastian Leger, Guy Mentzur, SaharZ, Khen, Tale Of Us, Henry Saız and many more who also have an important place on our channel.
Žare Petkov
How do you find the music you post? Do you work with “in-house” producers or is anyone eligible to submit their music?
Jelena
Today we have a large number of producers with who we collaborate on a regular basis though we are very happy that we also receive numerous submissions from completely new authors.
Žare Petkov
Videobolt music visualizers are used by a large number of musicians and producers. If one of them wanted to publish their work on your channel, how could they contact you and where should they submit their music?
Jelena
Anyone who wants to contact us can find us through our Facebook pages (Underground Progressive, Progressive Dreamers, Progressive House and of course Progressive Dreamers) as well as Facebook groups (Underground Progressive, Progressive House, and Progressive Dreamers). They can submit their music directly by email to the undergroundprogressıvetr@gmaıl.com with the label ‘PROMO’ or ‘DEMO’ for Progressive Dreamers Records.
Žare Petkov
After the amazing success of your channel ambitions have risen and you’ve recently decided to take on the audacious step of starting your own record label. What gave you the confidence to expand your business? How does one spontaneously started YouTube channel grow into a record label?
Jelena
Progressive house is a longevous genre so there are artists and listeners of all generations. There’s also a huge pool of undiscovered artists. Our familiarity with the genre, our life-long devotion to electronic music as well as the rapidly growing number of subscribers meant the time was right. For us, it was a natural step forward. Today, we receive a ton of emails with the ‘PROMO’ and ‘DEMO’ labels in them which makes us very proud. By combining our music with Videobolt’s visual effects we managed to build a recognizable style and we believe our story is just beginning. Make no mistake, it wasn’t easy to reach that number of followers and we are extremely grateful to those who have stuck with us from the beginning.
Žare Petkov
You’ve recently added Videobolt’s music visualizers to your channel, what made you decide to expand your channel’s offer with video. How have your fans responded to this change?
Jelena
After some research and reaching out to your support team we were convinced that Videobolt was ideal for Progressive Dreamers. The number of views is rapidly increasing by the day, thank you for that! We’ve noticed an increasing number of positive comments in regards to our videos. A lot of subscribers seem to really like them and many are asking how we created them.
Žare Petkov
Speaking of that, how would you describe your experience with Videobolt? What does a successful channel like yours gain from a platform like Videobolt?
Jelena
We can honestly recommend Videobolt music visualizers to anyone still on the fence or who knows nothing about video-editing (as was our case). You are very transparent, happy to help or provide instructions and suggestions which helped us a lot. The platform is very serviceable and easy to use. The whole process of video-creating is surprisingly quick and takes much less time than anything we might try creating privately. This saves plenty of precious time, letting us concentrate on what we love and know best.
Žare Petkov
Finally, tell us a bit about your plans for the future.
Jelena
We started independently and spontaneously and plan to continue in the same manner. We continue building our business through our love of Progressive house, Deep melodic and Techno music. We would like to thank Videobolt for providing the impressive collection of visualizer templates and send a special shout out to our awesome followers and all the producers we collaborated and continue to collaborate through the years.
I hope you enjoyed my chat with Jelena from Progressive Dreamers Records and got inspired to start your own music promotion channel. And if you're looking to start publishing music on YouTube, Videobolt music visualizers can help you create branded music videos directly from your audio, just like Progressive Dreamers do. You can test everything simply by registering so visit Videobolt's music visualizer library now and find a design that is a natural extension of your beats.