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The ElectroSpit is a product formed by Bosco Kante! The ElectroSpit is a musical insturment that "transforms your body into a speaker and enables you to sing with a supercharged electronic voice." This product is the worlds first tubeless mobile talkbox and it's lightweight and portable design gives music creators the chance to easily create their own kind of music.

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Bosco Kante, the founder of ElectroSpit states that" You place the ElectroSpit around your neck and launch the ElectroSpit app. Next you chose a song, press play, the background music starts playing out of the ElectroSpit speaker, and the melody vibrates through your neck and out of your mouth. You form the words with your lips and then bamm… you're singing in perfect pitch. You can customize the sound and share on social media."

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The Loan is $15,000 funded by 288 lenders. The length of the loan is 42 months with no interest and monhtly repayments. The loan will be used to purchase more parts and inventory, as well as retain diverse team members (Black, Women, LGBTQ+ Members).

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ElectroSpit has an incredibly diverse team behind the product (As mentioned above). The company is based in Oakland, California. Oakland is ranked as the third most diverse city in the United States, with a large percenatge of African American and LGBTQ+ citizens. With the recent surge of support for black owned businesses, ElectroSpit's has potential to use their diversity as an assest to help sell the product.

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Oakland, CA is ranked amongst the top cities in the US for sustainability. ElectroSpit has the possibility to help shape the music industry's impact on the planet. A Rolling Stones article discussed the impact that streaming music has on the enviroment, and stated that between 200 and 350 million kilograms is needed to use streaming services. Since ElectroSpit is used by streaming music, they have room to make the process more sustainable. There is little information online about the production process, but musical instruments last for a long period of time. If ElectroSpits can improve the production process of the product, they can have a better impact on the planet.

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Around 2013, University of Oslo professor Kyle Devine was reading a lot about junk. He'd grown fascinated with a subset of media studies that grappled with the growing problem of e-waste - old cellphones, computers, printers, etc. - and wondered if the problem was also plaguing ostensibly intangible things like music.

"There's this old quote, 'Music is the most immaterial of the arts,' and I think that that idea about music has become more widely held as music has become something that we increasingly get from the cloud," Devine tells Rolling Stone. "So I started looking at the contemporary picture and thinking, 'I bet that music has some kind of significant contributing role in pollution and e-waste.' What is a CD actually made out of? What is a record made out of? How are they made? What are the materials? What are the human and environmental costs of these formats?"

Over the next several years, Devine explored the environmental impact of music consumption, from the early days of shellac and vinyl through the cassette and CD booms to the streaming age. The results of the study, done in coordination with Matt Brennan at the University of Glasgow, estimate that the amount of plastic used to make physical records has plummeted from 61 million kilograms in the 2000s to about 8 million kilograms as of 2016. But the energy it takes to stream and download digital music has caused greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to rise sharply: The study estimates that music consumption in the 2000s resulted in the emission of approximately 157 million kilograms of greenhouse gas equivalents; now the amount of GHGs generated by the energy needed to transmit music for streaming is estimated to be between 200 and 350 million kilograms.

Devine, who will publish his findings in a new book Decomposed this October via MIT Press, conducted his research on streaming using data from the Recording Industry Association of America for 2015 and 2016. He averaged the number of songs streamed and downloaded in those years and factored it with the amount of electricity it takes to download one gigabyte of data, which at the time was roughly equivalent to the amount of electricity it takes a standard lightbulb to shine for an hour. Devine then used Greenpeace's "Click Clean Scorecard" to find what kinds of energy were being used to power streaming sites - coal, nuclear, gas or renewable - and used the average amount of carbon dioxide equivalents created by each to create an approximate picture of greenhouse gas emissions in the streaming era.

"That electricity figure doesn't include storage and processing in a data center and it doesn't include user devices and the electricity to charge your phone or anything like that," he says. "There's additional complexity - file resolution matters, it's more data if you're watching a video on YouTube versus streaming a high definition album on Spotify. The variables are almost endless."

Devine is quick to note that he's not on an anti-streaming crusade, nor is he out to make anyone feel guilty. He actively uses Spotify and calls the study "a simple exercise in transparency and accountability; to talk about things and think about them."

In recent years, the major players in music streaming have been working to improve the sustainability of their facilities and operations. When Devine was conducting his research, he was unable to get anyone at Spotify to discuss the environmental impact of their service and its data centers (the company's lack of transparency at the time was a big factor in the D grade it received on Greenpeace's Click Clean Scorecard). Though a representative from Spotify also declined Rolling Stone's request to discuss the issue on the record, the company did share its first public sustainability report in 2017. In it, the company committed to achieving carbon neutrality and touted the migration of its server operations onto the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Per its 2018 sustainability report, the move to GCP allowed Spotify to decommission six of its seven data centers (the last is expected to close by the end of 2019) and reduce its carbon footprint by almost 1,500 tons. The report also claimed that the move made Spotify's computing platform nearly "100 percent carbon neutral," though Devine cautioned there is some reading in between the lines involved.

"That doesn't mean that Google is running on completely renewable energy or that their CO2 emissions are any lower," he says. "What they're doing is purchasing or investing in renewable energy at a rate that equals or matches the amount of energy that their using anyway."

As for the other major streaming services, SoundCloud relies primarily on Amazon Web Services, which also hosts Amazon's own streaming service, Amazon Music (a representative for SoundCloud declined to speak with Rolling Stone). Apple, meanwhile, hosts Apple Music, the iTunes Store and Beats 1 radio on its own cloud operations (a representative for Apple Music did not return Rolling Stone's request for comment). Both Apple and Amazon have invested heavily in renewable energy to power their cloud operations, though Apple has been far more forthright about its environmental footprint in recent years. Only this past March did Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos promise to release a full emissions report by the end of 2019.

In 2018, Apple announced in its sustainability report that all of its facilities - data centers, offices, retail stores, etc. - were powered by renewable energy, and its most recent sustainability report proudly touted data centers that produce close to no carbon emissions from electricity. But just like Google, Apple also relies on renewable energy certificates to reach that magic 100 percent number. As Nicole Kobie recently wrote in , these certificates, like carbon offsets, are purchased when tech companies still have to draw some power from the grid - power that is inevitably produced by dirty or non-renewable sources.

Data centers are reportedly responsible for about two percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, a carbon footprint nearly equal to the airline industry. And music streaming is obviously just one component of the internet that these data centers power, along with video streaming, social media and this article. Getting to a point where data centers legitimately run on wholly renewable energy is a massive and important undertaking, but it's also just one component of greening the internet.

"The amount that people are streaming and downloading is increasing at such a rate that they may outweigh any gains in the efficiency of the system," Devine says. "This is just in the U.S. and once we take into account places where streaming is huge - China, or Africa or India - places where there are less stringent requirements on the generation of power for the internet, I don't have those numbers, but my sense is the picture gets even uglier."

All of this places some responsibility on the listener, even if the steps they can take seem small. In an article for The Conversation published in January, Sharon George and Deirdre McKay outlined a few potentially greener methods of listening. They suggested buying a physical album may actually be more environmentally friendly if you plan to listen to it repeatedly, as 27 full streams would likely use more energy than it takes to produce and manufacture the same record. They also noted that downloading music from streaming services for offline listening could cut down on the energy it takes to get a song from the cloud to your ears.

Devine's work also serves as a reminder that the production, dissemination and consumption of music has always cost energy and resources, whether it was the plastic for CDs and cassettes or the oil-based PVC used for vinyl records. Early 78 RPM records made out of shellac - a biodegradable resin secreted by lac bugs - might've been truly sustainable, but Devine notes that these records were often produced under horrific, sweatshop-like conditions. Though the findings of his study may seem overwhelming and dire, Devine hopes his work will help listeners reconfigure our notion of music as immaterial and recognize the tremendous amount of power and energy generated when we press play.

"We can't snap our fingers and magically go back to records made of shellac or anything like that, because you can't just ... undo the culture that's built up around our expectations of access to music," he says. "I really think that any solutions come from looking forward."

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Is Streaming Music Dangerous to the Environment? One Researcher Is Sounding the Alarm

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Around 2013, University of Oslo professor Kyle Devine was reading a lot about junk. He'd grown fascinated with a subset of media studies that grappled with the growing problem of e-waste - old cellphones, computers, printers, etc. - and wondered if the problem was also plaguing ostensibly intangible things like music.

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The ElectroSpit sells for $750. Since it is a unique product, with celebrity edorsements, it has the potential to sell well. The KIVA website states that the company has run out of inventory. It is safe to assume the company has had high sales, and is making profit of the product. With little to no information avaliable in regards to profit or marginal costs, it is hard to determine what ways they could boost revenue. Since this device is a very niche product, it may not perform as well as others in the muscial instrument category, but I think it has potential to sell well those those interested in new musical instruments.

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I was born in Ghana, West Africa, and raised in Portland, Oregon to a family of engineers and musicians. At family gatherings, my grandma played the trumpet and my mom taught us math games.

I've been producing music since winning some music equipment in a breakdancing contest at 10 yrs old. The journey's led me to Tonight Show appearances, #1 billboard hits, and Grammy nominations.

I fell in love, got married, had a kid, and moved from LA to Oakland. I've experienced first hand the challenges and instability of a career in music, but I was determined to stick with my passion. While searching for a new way for myself and other artists to make a sustainable living from music, I discovered the Zoo Labs Music Residency Program and Music Tech Incubator.

With some key mentorship from Zoo Labs (and a Kiva loan we repaid in full), I leveraged my USC Mechanical Engineering degree and Music Production experience to invent a new musical instrument and co-found the World's 1st Black and Women-Owned Music Tech Hardware company: ElectroSpit Inc.

It helps a repeat Kiva borrower continue to grow their business.

Business Description

ElectroSpit's mission is to make music creation easier and inspire musical creativity in everyone! Our first instrument, the ESX-1 talkbox, transforms your body into a speaker and enables you to sing with a supercharged electronic voice.

In January 2020 after 6 years of development, we began manufacturing the electronic musical instrument I invented right here in Oakland, California.

At the start of March 2020, we won the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition (our industry's top award) and began shipping the ElectroSpit mobile talkbox, only to be completely shut down by COVID-19 a few days later (March 14th).

But I wasn't ready to let our dream die. Throughout lockdown, I safely drove parts around the city to our incredible team and together we assembled each instrument remotely and fulfilled 100% of our pre-orders.

Artists around the world have begun creating incredible music with the ElectroSpit and it's now being used by Dua Lipa, Stevie Wonder, David Guetta, and many more.

What is the purpose of this loan?

This loan will be used to purchase more parts and to retain our diverse team of Black, women, and LGBTQ employees to assemble our electronic musical instrument locally in Oakland, California.

Demand for our ESX-1 Talkbox doubled in November and tripled in December and we are almost out of inventory.

We need your help to build more instruments to support the renaissance of live music that is about to explode in summer 2021!

Together we will come out of this pandemic with more love and more understanding.

Thank you for your support!

Trustee: Uptima Business Bootcamp

Why are you endorsing Bosco?

We started working with Bosko through our partnership with RUNWAY's Friends & Family Loan Program for African-American entrepreneurs. Bosko knows his industry, has created an award-winning product, and has developed a solid marketing and sales plan to grow the business. He has demonstrated a strong desire to lean into the social impact of his business by hiring a local team and collaborating with non-profits on projects that uplift artistic expression. He is an active contributor to our entrepreneur community, generously sharing his knowledge and skills with earlier stage entrepreneurs - so much so that we invited Bosko to participate in teaching one of our courses. We are grateful for Bosko's presence in our community.

Why are you endorsing Bosco?

We started working with Bosko through our partnership with RUNWAY's Friends & Family Loan Program for African-American entrepreneurs. Bosko knows his industry, has created an award-winning product, and has developed a solid marketing and sales plan to grow the business. He has demonstrated a strong desire to lean into the social impact of his business by hiring a local team and collaborating with non-profits on projects that uplift artistic expression. He is an active contributor to our entrepreneur community, generously sharing his knowledge and skills with earlier stage entrepreneurs - so much so that we invited Bosko to participate in teaching one of our courses. We are grateful for Bosko's presence in our community.

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I was born in Ghana, West Africa, and raised in Portland, Oregon to a family of engineers and musicians. At family gatherings, my grandma played the trumpet and my mom taught us math games. I've been producing music since winning some music equipment in a breakdancing contest at 10 yrs old.

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Bosco

A loan of $15,000 helped Bosco a black & women-owned business retain employees and build an award winning musical instrument.

United States

Entertainment | Entertainment

This loan has been funded.

I was born in Ghana, West Africa, and raised in Portland, Oregon to a family of engineers and musicians. At family gatherings, my grandma played the trumpet and my mom taught us math games. I've been producing music since winning some music equipment in a breakdancing contest at 10 yrs old. The journey's led me to Tonight Show appearances, #1 billboard hits, and Grammy nominations. I fell in love, got married, had a kid, and moved from LA to Oakland. I've experienced first hand the challenges and instability of a career in music, but I was determined to stick with my passion. While searching for a new way for myself and other artists to make a sustainable living from music, I discovered the Zoo Labs Music Residency Program and Music Tech Incubator. With some key mentorship from Zoo Labs (and a Kiva loan we repaid in full), I leveraged my USC Mechanical Engineering degree and Music Production experience to invent a new musical instrument and co-found the World's 1st Black and Women-Owned Music Tech Hardware company: ElectroSpit Inc.

Learn more about Bosco's Loan >

Loans that change lives

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ESX-1 Tubeless Mobile Talkbox - ElectroSpit

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Electrospit Mobile Talkbox, The world's most expressive instrument.

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Diffrentiation
Cost leadership isn't an option for the ElectroSpit since it is expensive to produce and still new. There are ways costs could be cut down the road, but the product would lose some of it's qualities. Since the product is so niche and new, I would reccomend the company aim for diffrentiation.  The ElectroSpit is such a unique product, there is no product similar to the ElectroSpit and customers find value in that authenitcity. Since the product is unique, the company can charge a premium price and gain buyer loyalty. The product achieved diffrentiation due to the technology advances, innovations and special features. As the company grows, they can market their product differently, and conitnue to market on the basis that the product is so unique.

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Value- Chain Processes to achieve Diffrentiation 

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Value- Chain Processes to achieve Diffrentiation 

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Since the ElectroSpit has a very niche audience I think it is important to focus on Inbound/Outboung logistics and service to the customers. If ElectroSpit focuses on service, cusotmers will be more likely to leave good reviews and talk to friends/family members about the product. Customer service can be enhanced in many ways. The company should follow up with their customers, offer assistance to the product's users, and help when the product is malfunctioning/ troubleshooting any problems. The quality of service provided will put customers at ease when they are choosing to purchase the ElectroSpit. Inbound and outbond logistics focus on production and delivery of the product itself. While the product is being produced, there should be quality tests and procedures in place to reduce the amount of defects. While the product is being shipped to consumers, it should be done safely to reduce any problems and there should be protocols in place for if the product does happen to malfunction.