How My Music Workshop scaled from classrooms to global subscriptions with Recurly
279% more revenue recovered: How My Music Workshop scaled from classrooms to global subscriptions with Recurly
A passion for music education
My Music Workshop was founded by husband-and-wife team Lianna and Elias Berlinger in San Diego nearly two decades ago. Lianna, a finalist on American Idol, and Elias, a professional music educator, shared a passion for making music fun and accessible to children.
They started small — teaching preschool kids, developing their own original curriculum, and quickly attracting a loyal base of families. The program grew, teachers were hired, and by 2018 they began franchising across the US.
“It was this cool growth vehicle for us, allowed us to put our creativity into it, and we loved it.” – Elias Berlinger, Co-Founder & CEO, My Music Workshop
Then COVID-19 hit — and overnight, everything changed.
Reinventing a business during the pandemic
Like so many small businesses, My Music Workshop’s in-person teaching came to a sudden halt in 2020. With franchises forced to shut down, the team faced a critical choice: wait and hope things reopened, or reinvent their business model entirely.
They chose reinvention.
“We said, ‘Let’s try to put some videos together of our curriculum, share it online, and see what happens.’ We made a few lessons and they started doing really well on YouTube. Now we’re one of the top piano lessons for kids on YouTube.” – Elias Berlinger
Encouraged by the demand, they launched their first subscription product, building it themselves on Wix with various plugins and paywall tools. It worked — but it wasn’t built to scale.
Building a platform for growth
Over the next few years, My Music Workshop kept refining its online experience. Videos became more polished. They added interactivity, avatars, rewards, and gamification to create a truly immersive learning platform.
“We envisioned this whole music learning platform for kids that was like nothing else we’d ever seen — kind of what we wished was available to us growing up.” – Elias Berlinger
By the time they were ready to relaunch with a custom-built platform, they knew they needed a subscription partner who could scale with them. After researching options, one name kept rising to the top: Recurly.
Migrating with confidence
The thought of moving all existing subscribers onto a new platform was intimidating. For a small business, it felt like a high-stakes gamble. But Recurly’s migration team made the process painless.
One of the things that completely confirmed my decision to work with Recurly was how awesome the migration team was. They let me know everything was going to be okay, that all the payments were going to work, and it was all seamless.
Customers didn’t even notice. Aside from resetting their passwords, families simply logged in to a better, more interactive platform — without missing a beat.
Accelerating growth with Recurly Navigate
One of the biggest turning points for My Music Workshop came through Recurly Navigate — a series of workshops and programs designed to help subscription businesses adopt best practices, optimize their models, and grow faster.
In a Navigate session focused on dunning and payment recovery, Elias learned step-by-step strategies to improve failed payment recovery and trial conversions.
“I just followed all those best practices — different cycles for trials, monthly, yearly. It turned things around for us.” – Elias Berlinger
The impact was immediate and measurable:
279% increase in recovered revenue in just 30 days
Dramatic reduction in churn caused by failed payments
There’s nothing worse than losing customers because payments fail. A customer kept is like five customers gained.
Empowering a small team to scale
For My Music Workshop, a critical factor was usability. As a lean family business, they needed tools that were powerful but didn’t require endless developer hours.
“I needed to be able to do everything myself. With Recurly— it’s simple.” – Elias Berlinger
They also loved that they could rely on Recurly for payments and dunning, while keeping their small dev team focused on product innovation.
A team that feels like family
While the technology was a win, what stood out most was the partnership.
“It feels very small company, very sort of family type atmosphere — and I really appreciated that. The product is fantastic, but the team is what makes the difference for a small business like us.” – Elias Berlinger
Even without a dedicated enterprise account manager, Elias found Recurly’s support team responsive and personal.
Everyone has been so helpful. Who do we want to actually work with? Who gets it? Recurly was the perfect bridge between a big company that can do a lot of things, and a team you can communicate with and get along with.
Expanding into the future
Today, My Music Workshop has subscribers in more than 60 countries. While the platform is designed for kids, adults are finding their way to it too — including one 56-year-old learner who wrote to say she cried tears of joy after finally learning to play piano.
The future includes expanding into pre-teens and teens, enabling digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay to make signups even easier, and tapping into new international markets.
“The more we can lower the barrier for parents during signup, the more we can grow. And with Recurly, you have everything out of the box to make that work.” – Elias Berlinger
My Music Workshop’s story shows what’s possible when a small business harnesses the right subscription infrastructure. From surviving the pandemic to scaling globally, Recurly helped them keep customers, recover lost revenue, and focus on what matters most: helping kids around the world discover the joy of music.
