Seller interview with Christopher Sutton, founder of Easy Ear Training

Christopher started Easy Ear Training because he was convinced that people can learn listening skills. In this interview, he chats to us about selling audio-enhanced ebooks direct from their website, giving away free content and why most people can learn to sing.

George: Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Christopher: Sure. I am a thirtysomething Londoner, lived here most of my life with a bit of travel along the way. For the last four or five years I've run a company called Easy Ear Training. It's a music education technology company. We use the latest technology to make it easier for musicians to learn and develop their skills.

George: Are some people just naturally better at training their ear? Or can you teach all sorts of people?

Christopher: One of our biggest challenges is the preconception that you need to be gifted to be a great musician. It's one of those things where there's a grain of truth. But what trips people up is the idea that if someone can play a song by ear, for example, they must be gifted. If you can't do it, then that's that, you can't do it, never mind. The reality is that all of the listening skills are learnable. Although they might come more easily to some than to others, with dedicated ear training, and a bit of regular practice, you can learn to improvise, you can learn to play by ear, you can learn to write your own songs. Our company's mission is to help people see that they can learn the skills, and to give them the tools they need to do it quickly and easily.

George: What products have you developed to teach people to train their ear?

Christopher: We started off making iPhone apps that were little quiz games, where you hear something and then you get asked a question about it, and in that way you develop your skills. Over the last four or five years we've explored a number of other ways to teach, primarily through the web. We've published a few hundred articles and tutorials about this topic, with listening clips and little quizzes you can take there. More recently, we started publishing ebooks and training albums that we sell through SendOwl. We've now published five ebooks, one audio book and two training albums.

George: Are sound clips included with the ebooks?

Christopher: Yes, and that was an interesting learning process last year. After a lot of experimentation with our ebook guy, we ended up producing a combination of formats. Both EPUBs and PDFs, in certain circumstances, let you play a sound clip directly from within the ebook.

George: What made you diversify from apps to digital products sold from your website?

Christopher: I looked around and there wasn't really a good website dedicated to ear training. Given that there are millions of musicians around the world, and the importance of this skill set, this seemed bizarre to me. I ended up ploughing a lot of the revenue from the apps back into the company to develop the website, commission articles and build up the content. We're now getting tens of thousands of visitors a month, all interested in ear training.

"The majority of our content is available for free through our website, including downloadable training apps. Our intention is to introduce people to the topic of ear training in a friendly, supportive way, and then introduce them to our course when they're ready to take the next step."

George: How do you market your products?

Christopher: There's a fair bit of cross-promotion between the apps and the info products, but essentially apps are marketed on the App store. There's not a lot you can do outside of the App store to promote them, unless you're a serious company with a big budget. I spent a year or two doing a lot of things outside the App store, hoping to sell more apps. It took me a while to accept that it's just a very strange ecosystem. We market our info products through our website. If someone comes to our website for a particular article, they learn about our free introductory email course, and sign up for that. Then, that course acts as a way to introduce them both to ear training and to our various other products.

George: How do you get people's emails?

Christopher: We've tried various things to find the right balance between being effective and avoiding being obnoxious. At this point we don't have a pop up, but we do have a feature box, at the top of the page. If you visit our website for the first time, there's a little box that says "Hi, welcome, this is what the site's all about, if you're new to the topic sign up for our free course".

"Our big focus this year is on the issue of tone deafness, and people learning to sing. I found that while our website is aimed at musicians who want to do ear training, a significant amount of our traffic was coming to a few pages on our site, that are dedicated to the complete beginner."

George: You also do a lot of content marketing?

Christopher: Yes, some people refer to it as education marketing, where you aim to give the customer a lot of value for free upfront, before you ever ask them to pay anything. That's very much our approach. The majority of our content is available for free through our website, including downloadable training apps. Our intention is to introduce people to the topic of ear training in a friendly, supportive way, and then introduce them to our course when they're ready to take the next step. The traditional marketing approach, which would be to give very little away for free, do a very good job at selling, and hopefully just drive people directly to a sale, is just not a good fit for our market.

George: So what's next for Easy Ear Training?

Christopher: Our big focus this year is on tone deafness, and people learning to sing. I found that while our website is aimed at musicians who want to do ear training, a significant amount of our traffic was coming to a few pages on our site that are dedicated to the complete beginner, like "What if I'm tone deaf?". I realised there's a significant proportion of the population that love music, but feel completely locked out of the world of learning music, because they've got it in their head that they're tone deaf. So earlier this year we launched tonedeaftest.com, which is a free test you can take to find out if you are genuinely tone deaf or not. Spoiler alert! The chances are you're not. Building on that project, and the results of that, we're now working on a new interactive app that teaches you to sing in tune. It listens to you sing, gives you feedback and helps you get to the point where you can be really confident about music and singing.

George: Chris, it's been an absolute pleasure. If people want to find you online, where do they go?

Christopher: Go to easyeartraining.com