“I’m a musician!” These are three words that typically raise the eyebrows of your conversation partners – and the ones of those within earshot – unless you’re in South Korea. It’s common knowledge that being an instrumentalist or vocalist by profession is a tough life – it’s hard to land regular gigs or make a name for yourself.
Because of this, there are few proud musicians left standing, making it hard for consumers on the other end to find bands for live performances. It’s kind of a chicken and egg situation.
Just ask Brian Foo, who hails from Malaysia. “I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard the line, ‘Hey, do you know any wedding bands?’ from friends, or simply, ‘Do you know any musicians?’ from friends who own bars,” he tells Tech in Asia.
Not that he doesn’t understand why there is such a stark shortage of music professionals around. Foo was once in a band which eventually broke up because they could not keep it up as a hobby, neither could they bring in enough dough to call it a job.
Foo was understandably frustrated by this situation, so he decided to do something about it. “I wanted to build a platform where people like them [consumers] could simply log in, browse through super talented local dudes and dudettes, and pick and choose according to what tickled their fancy,” he explains. A platform like that, he adds, would give people like his younger self the monetary reason to keep doing what they love.
Enter Gigfairy, a website that does just that. Despite not having any relevant experience, Foo and his co-founder Fabio Miceli, who was formerly a market expert at Airbnb, managed to bring the idea from inception to product in about a month. Once Gigfairy went up last December, they took another two weeks to populate the website with talented musicians.
“In my adventures to various open mic night spots, I was honestly very, very pleasantly surprised at how amazing some of the local guys were – and the worst part of it all was a lot of them were doing it for free,” he recalls.
Gigfairy prides itself on being a simple go-to place to book musicians. There are only two steps that need to be taken to get a rocking live band: browse through the profiles of local musicians, and book them right from their profile page. “We have also just secured a partnership with a sound system rental company, so we’ll be able to provide that as an option as well,” Foo adds.
Musicians helping musicians
Foo’s background is in sales, though he had built a mobile app previously, and Gigfairy is his second venture. Happily, he hasn’t been able to find any close competitors in Asia just yet, though he concedes that there are directories of musicians in Kuala Lumpur. Still, they’ve gotten some good feedback from the ground so far, and are encouraged by it.
“Bar owners cannot wait to use it, and I know of some restaurateurs who would also be very keen to get a live band for a weekend brunch session simply because booking live music is so simple now,” he says.
“Musicians love it too, and I think it says a lot that one of the most popular Malaysian bands, Paperplane Pursuit, have signed up on our platform. I managed to speak to tons of musicians in December, and every single one of them loved the idea.”
The duo thinks that their main advantage is that they are musicians themselves. “So we just start from our own habits. We are going to work closely with the community offline and online to ensure every artist can easily sign up and enjoy the benefits of the platform,” Foo explains. “As for the demand side of things, we will reach our target market mostly through online marketing campaigns and strategic partnerships.”
Gigfairy currently takes a 15-percent cut of each artists’ fee, which is determined by the latter – this makes up the service’s revenue. Operations to date have so far been completely self-funded – the duo are now looking for seed funding for Gigfairy.
The team also won the recently concluded edition of the Alpha Startups pre-accelerator programme, which saw them receiving US$3,000 and mentorship from 1337 Ventures, the organizer of the programme.
See: 18 Malaysian startups poised to breakout in 2015
This post Both hiring and being a professional musician just became a whole lot easier with Gigfairy appeared first on Tech in Asia.
Both hiring and being a professional musician just became a whole lot easier with Gigfairy
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