What's your Drumeo strategy?

Drumeo has provided online drum lessons since 2012.

Customers subscribe and receive access to video-based lessons and songs to learn and practice. There are currently almost 100,000 active students and it’s pretty well known in music circles.

The company has produced YouTube videos for a while. As you’d expect from a business selling video content, the production values are high and the content is good.

Recently Drumeo launched a new ‘for the first time’ YouTube series. It’s an awesome concept – well-known drummers listen to a song for the first time (without drums) and create their own drum part. After playing it through, they hear the original track.

The matching of drummers to songs is really well done; everyone’s outside their wheelhouse and the casting is great. The resulting content absolutely rocks – these videos are watched until the end, are excitedly shared around, get stacks of comments and are clearly liked by the YouTube algorithm.

Most of the time drummers listen to the song at least once before playing their own part. Not Chad Smith from Red Hot Chili Peppers – after just 30 seconds, ironically, he jams along to Thirty Seconds to Mars and feels his way through a song he’s never heard. It’s mind-blowing. (Language warning – NSFW).

Watching the very happy and humble Dirk Verbeuren from Megadeth perform a different take on The Killers in such a nice and respectful way will brighten your day.

You could say this was an easy idea for Drumeo to execute. I don’t think so. Video production is a core competency, but that’s the easy part. Booking musicians at this level for one-off studio days is a challenge. You can bet some of these shoots took months to happen. Cancellations. Logistical challenges. Drumeo would be approaching drummers and hearing ‘no’ a lot. The concept is genius, but not all drummers want to be put on the spot like this. Even Chad Smith was nervous!

But they’ve had the confidence and determination to keep going and have produced an evergreen content series that will deliver new customers for years. It’s a very simple and compelling concept that could evolve to become a TV or streaming series. They’re also growing their market – content this good creates new drummers.

What’s your Drumeo strategy? YouTube is the second-largest search engine and can be brilliant for brand awareness, consideration and customer acquisition. I hear it written off sometimes as it’s been around for a while and ‘we’re late to it’. You’re not. With the right idea, you’ll be right on time.