The first enemy of a new musician is rarely rhythm. It is embarrassment. The piano waits in the corner with all the tact of unpaid debt. The guitar has become a handsome piece of furniture. A drum kit, meanwhile, advertises every mistake to the household. Before technique can enter the room, someone has to decide that sounding terrible for a while is a price worth paying.
Chad Kettner has spent more than a decade marketing that decision. As Chief Marketing Officer of Musora, the Abbotsford company behind Drumeo, Pianote, Guitareo, Singeo and PlayBass, he leads the team responsible for turning attention into students. His concise description of the job is to “lead and empower the marketing team, strategy, and outcomes.” The corporate sentence is accurate. It merely leaves out the interesting part: the outcome begins in a person’s imagination, at the instant they can picture themselves as someone who plays.
This is a peculiar thing to sell. A lesson is tangible enough. A practice library can be counted, priced and arranged into rows. Confidence arrives later, without a receipt. Musora’s public language has steadily moved toward that less measurable territory. Its purpose is to create more musicians and keep them playing longer. Its recent “Make Some Noise” campaign led with tiny stories about why people begin. Method followed motive.
A career in the edit
Kettner joined the business in 2012, when Drumeo still lived much closer to the age of discs. A company credit from that period places him among the Railroad Media crew producing drum instruction. A 2013 announcement for Drumeo’s online lessons still described both DVD training packs and a membership with live instruction. The old product and the new model briefly shared the stage.
By 2020, Kettner could narrate the transition on a podcast devoted to recurring revenue: the critical move from DVDs to membership, free channels such as YouTube and Instagram, and annual offers designed to improve the economics of retention. The language is that of subscription marketing - lifetime value, offers, trust. But music makes those abstractions unusually literal. A retained customer is also a person who returned to the instrument.
His education in English at Canadian University College fits the public shape of the work. Kettner talks about hooks, headlines, email openings and offers with the absorbed fussiness of an editor. A former Railroad Media colleague remembered his appetite for books about psychology and marketing, along with the inventive Kickstarter campaign he ran. The thread is not a devotion to any single channel. It is curiosity about the small hinge on which a choice swings.
Headlines, videos, emails, offers and the sequence that moves a curious viewer toward a lesson.
Make a beginner believe the first bad note is an opening scene, not a verdict.
The free lesson before the paid path
Drumeo’s widely shared videos reveal the strategy at its most enjoyable. Put a renowned drummer in a studio. Remove the drum track from a song they do not know. Ask them to invent what comes next. The format gives an expert the same condition that terrifies a beginner: uncertainty. Skill keeps it impressive; suspense keeps it watchable. A viewer who came for Chad Smith or the Blue Man Group may stay for the craft, then notice the learning platform surrounding the show.
The scale became visible in Musora’s published 2022 review: 37.5 million visits to four brand websites, 139.7 million YouTube views, more than 475,000 marketing-email signups and 21,320 new annual students. These are company figures, not a personal scorecard, and marketing never operates alone. Yet Kettner was the CMO praised in the same account, leading a team that connected free attention to a structured next step.
The transferable playbook is not “make viral videos,” advice roughly as useful as telling a restaurant to become beloved. It is to separate discovery from progression. The public material earns attention by being useful or remarkable on its own. The paid environment gives serious learners order, feedback, songs and a community. Free media answers, “Is this worth my time?” Membership answers, “What should I do next?”
The offer has a tempo
Subscription businesses like annual plans because a year is kinder to cash flow than a month. A music student has a different clock. The first week can be thrilling, the third untidy, the seventh vulnerable to a holiday, a deadline or a television series with excellent cliffhangers. Kettner’s discussion of annual offers and retention points to a central tension: the company sells access in blocks of time, while the student experiences progress one practice session at a time.
The marketer therefore has work on both sides of the purchase. Before the sale, the promise must be credible enough to overcome hesitation. After it, the experience must keep renewing the promise in smaller forms. A completed lesson, a recognizable riff and a useful comment from another player are miniature proofs. They make the distant identity of “musician” feel less like fancy dress.
Kettner once advertised a role at Musora with three blunt instructions: “Build funnels. Write emails. Inspire musicians.” The order is funny because the last item is vast and the first two sound like errands. It is also honest. Inspiration needs plumbing. The beautiful campaign still requires the correct link, the sensible sequence and the email that arrives when encouragement can do some good.
This balance keeps Musora from fitting neatly into either the education or media drawer. A curriculum without discovery may be worthy and invisible. Entertainment without a path produces applause that evaporates. The company operates in the relay between them. One team creates the moment worth watching; another turns the spark into steps; marketing carries the baton without dropping the reason anyone cared.
The Musora audience journey
The sandcastle standard
On his twelfth anniversary at Musora, Kettner declined the expected ceremony. He did not produce twelve polished maxims. After putting his children to bed, he poured a glass of whiskey and used the quiet to write about strengths. His own is the art of marketing: the hook, the adjustment, the attention to how a real person meets a website headline, a YouTube title, a landing-page offer or an email.
Then he introduced sandcastles. Find people with ideas, perspectives and tools you lack, he wrote, and keep playing around until the group has built the coolest one it can. “Build with people you like building with!” It is a cheerfully impermanent image for a durable career. Sand resists lone-genius mythology. It rewards many hands, a shared picture and somebody willing to repair the lopsided turret.
Public recommendations from people who worked with Kettner emphasize the same combination: creativity and care, psychology and craft, compassion and trust. His volunteer record tells a quieter parallel story. He has coached youth basketball, assisted a high-school team and helped young children with skating and hockey. His own spare-time pleasures include family and ice hockey. Teaching, teams and encouragement recur off the marketing dashboard too.
Marketing the why
The “Make Some Noise” work sharpened Musora’s position into a neat reversal. Most instructional marketing starts with the how: modules, teachers, exercises, a more orderly tomorrow. This campaign asked for the moment behind the instrument - the pull that made someone enter a music shop, return to a childhood ambition or decide that now was finally the time. Kettner described the five pieces as “3 sentence stories” meant to celebrate and inspire musicianship.
Selling the why before the how is not sentimental garnish. It solves the central retention problem. Technique may organize a Tuesday evening, but identity brings the student back on Thursday. A person continues because a song matters, because playing with others feels good, because progress has become proof, or because noise is the only honest reply to a tidy day.
That also explains why the company’s entertainment formats and its curriculum belong together. The spectacular performance creates desire. The lesson gives desire somewhere to go. The community makes the awkward middle less lonely. Marketing is the connective tissue, carrying a viewer from “I wish” toward “I practise.”
Kettner’s most revealing line about twelve years at Musora was not backward-looking. He said it still felt like the starting line. Executives are fond of horizons, though usually while standing beside a hockey-stick chart. His version landed differently. The company had already crossed formats, instruments and audience scales. Yet every new student begins at zero. In music education, the starting line keeps arriving.
That is fortunate for a marketer who enjoys the final adjustment. There will always be another hesitant player, another headline that can meet them more clearly, another improbable video idea to test, another wall on the sandcastle. The instrument waits. The lesson is ready. The remaining question is whether tonight feels like a good night to make some noise.