Sophomore Ralph Moran has a mission: to draw people away from typical cookie-cutter gifts. For him, music has the power to be the ultimate gift.
Moran’s company, “Streetlight Creations,” is a custom music platform that connects customers with artists for the purposes of creating personal songs “to address the desire for meaningful gifts among the general populous.”
“Music is one of the realms of communication that is inherently human and inherently personal, except it’s still out of bounds with people who do not have a musical talent,” Moran said.
Moran, along with his co-founder and fellow sophomore Nicholas Lampson, said he started Streetlight Creations to help make the gift of music a more universal option and not an idea simply restricted to those that could produce it.
“The process is pretty simple,” he said. “So you come onto the website and you create a song, and then you’re taken to a forum on the website where you’re asked a series of questions. Our most typical songs are going to be romantic, I would imagine. We encourage you to give all the details you can, like little details where you met that person … so that we can pass on all that information then to the artist that best fits what you’re looking for.”
Moran said that currently, all of the platform’s artists are students on campus, several of whom are already fairly successful and have numerous followers on Spotify. Student artists include senior Alexis Donn Daugherty, who sings acoustic pop, and junior Joey Warner, who specializes in EDM.
“We hope to eventually recruit artists from all over the country, both hobbyists and people who are trying to break the industry, to give them a means to hone their craft while also receiving some sort of pay for doing so,” Moran said.
Streetlight Creations was founded in November of 2017, Moran said. The company already has customers and recently launched its Valentine’s Day special, which includes a song and a lyric presentation for $75.
“We had a sale for a guy from Texas; he was getting married and he wanted a song to commemorate the day,” Moran said. “We also had a sale for the birthday of two twins.”
Moran said Streetlight Creations has provided the opportunity to bring some artists out of the woodwork who would otherwise be “closeted artists.”
“Streetlight Creations is really about the artist as much as it is about the customer. Our whole value proposition is we want to be a platform where artists can grow,” he said. “Artists that join Streetlight and write for us we’re going to … enable them to create a portfolio and we’re going to help them produce music so that they can get things out there if they’re looking to take their music career further.”
Moran and Lampson are no strangers to the music world. Lampson is a cellist and Moran is a member of both the Glee Club and the Undertones and plays the guitar and piano in his spare time.
“We both have that passion for music, but at the end of the day we’re business-minded as well, so Streetlight Creations is the perfect opportunity for us to combine the things we love and share it with other people,” Moran said.
Moran, a computer science major and collaborative innovation minor, said he enjoys the thrill of being a part of a student startup. He said Streetlight Creations provides him the opportunity to marry two interests that on the surface seem like a rare combination: coding and music.
“Inherently, I don’t think that I’m a stereotypical computer science major. From the very beginning, I’ve always been very creative, so what really gives me a thrill isn’t just writing code, but it’s the idea of creating something new,” he said. “That’s why I love computer science, because I can make things out of nothing. But business is a way I can do that too and also work with people that have complementary skills with mine.”
