A Prince George musician is making a career out of giving away free lessons.
Andrew Furmanczyk is handing out piano tutorials all over the globe, for absolutely no money. He has become an international consultant for his efforts, speaking at tech-savvy conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco and Germany and has been singled out by Forbes Magazine for his zero-payment innovations.
"With the advent of the internet, you have access to the world and the ability to produce things people will consume on a global level," he said.
He started in 2006 with nothing more than a camera on an oatmeal box for a tripod and pushing start/stop as the peak of his video editing skills. Today, his how-to videos on YouTube and his Furmanczyk Academy of Music website have been accessed by more than 30 million people "and I haven't really added much since 2010," he said.
If you go to Google and type in "how to play piano," it is indeed Furmanczyk's beginner's videos that top the results. By going to howtoplaypiano.ca you are given full courses in keyboard skill development and music theory. All of it is for free "and it always will be," he insisted, paralleling the Facebook slogan. "It's for people who have no piano teachers in their rural area, or they don't have the finances to afford one."
Admittedly, when he invented the free online piano school, he was trying to leave a legacy without much need for a business plan. He was on death's door for years, in his later youth. Furmanczyk practiced piano four to seven hours per day, with the dream of being a concert pianist as vivid for him as many Canadian kids the same age hold for playing in the NHL. But he contracted a rare and often deadly virus called pericarditis, which affects the lungs and heart to the point he had to maintain a deliberate dullness in his life - every moment of it - to keep his heart rate safely slow. As a final blow, he also contracted acute tendinitis that shot the final arrow into any hopes of professionally playing piano.
But he had his mind, he had a computer and he had a sense of charity. He wanted others to enjoy piano as he always had. The early stages of online lessons began forming.
"I originally thought I'd die before I ever needed money, I didn't think I'd live to see 25 years old, so who cares if it was free," he said. "But then the YouTube partner program came into effect. They pay you if you get a large enough number of hits on the videos you post. It's not much, I think the first cheque I received was $8 and it still isn't a living wage, but it did pay me enough to keep the program free."
He had other income streams as well, like a penchant for photography that he turned into a business. Now well and healthy, he is aiming his career aspirations into the entrepreneurial sector, but he carries with him the empirical knowledge of life's fragility and the power of mortality.
"In that really, really terrible state I was in, I came to a point where I considered all the terrible things happening in terrible places where people had hopeless lives, and here I was in my pain, cared for by people who love me and all my basic needs met, and I could do something to contribute to my own life and my own community even if I couldn't save those people in those other places."
Now at 25, having passed the birthday he didn't think he would reach, he is considering how to use his rare relationship with death to make a more meaningful life.
"Life wasn't something I was holding onto. I faced death so early in life - now I want to give back and make an impact for the world. High impact. Make things
happen," he said.
"I'm trying to pioneer ways of doing this stuff - free online learning - and I've made some contacts in Silicon Valley to help do that. I'm connected to all these points on the globe and it's all from my own home. Prince George is the land of opportunity because what we have here is great weather - a wonderful experience each year with all four seasons - we have ample supplies of low-cost land, we have a stable government compared to a lot of countries, and we have low-risk geography. There aren't any catastrophic fault lines or volcanoes here, and no poisonous spiders and snakes. So I want to bring more business and industry to Prince George through the high-tech sector and the information sector."
The work he has done already to foster online learning with the likes of Kahn Academy and Versal - companies dedicated to erasing the financial and spatial barriers to education - are inspiring his latest work.
"One of the most important realizations I ever had was, refusing to meet your potential is actually a disservice to humanity," said Furmanczyk.
"Starting out on my business development path with music programs was helpful for me at the time, it was something I knew, something I could do, and the benefits to society of masses of people learning music are just remarkable, but that's just a stepping stone to what is possible. I want to be involved in startup companies or revamped companies that help humanity. Capitalism 2.0. And I want to do these things all based out of Prince George where we are in a position to help entrepreneurs and in a position to get it right, based on the lessons learned from the past."
What Forbes Magazine had to say...
In an article under the headline "Five Takeaways From The San Francisco MusicTech Summit That Every Musician Should Know" technology writer Zach O'Malley talked about topics alive at the conference like the impact of website services like Kickstarter and
PledgeMusic, hardware game-changers like the iPod, and the imminent death of former innovation darling the MP3.
Andrew Furmanczyk, a guest panelist at the mega-event, was one of the few he singled out. O'Malley's takeaway from the Prince George innovator was: "When you start building a community that loves you, make sure to love it back." This was followed by some context and quotes from Furmanczyk that are now circling the globe - the customary result for the online music teacher and startup entrepreneur.
