No one ever said being in a band is easy. But the era of social media has ushered in a new degree of responsibilities for music groups, and with that, more challenges.
This is the issue that Travis Morrison and Travis Donovan are seeking to solve with their new service, Shoutabl. It gives bands a way to host and manage a website, social media accounts and e-commerce channel on one platform.
Morrison and Donovan are both musicians and former employees of the Huffington Post. Morrison's band The Dismemberment Plan releases its first album in 12 years on Oct. 15 (stream it on NPR Music). The band's website and social profiles have served as a testing ground for Shoutabl.
"There are a depressing number of gaps in the Internet tools available to musicians and artists right now," Morrison says. "We feel that a combination of them can be solved at once."
More depressing, according to the founders, is that most new music tools for artists are rolled out not for the people that really need them, but for the big-box artists who already have millions of fans.
"Every mock up [of a website] ever made by a music startup uses Arcade Fire as an example to show their tools," says Morrison. "But how would the mock look if a band had two fans? I want to see it for an unpopular band because every band is unpopular at the start. And there are no tools for them!"
The duo is taking an egalitarian approach to their product: "I would love to have Skrillex, Rihanna and Arcade Fire on Shoutabl, but we're trying to solve a problem for people who don't have a lot of money to throw at it," Donovan says.
The people who want to make music but might not exactly have the resources to devote to it full time are the target Shoutabl demographic. With the platform, bands can quickly get the word out, take advantage of their social connections and build a central hub where they can sell merchandise and engage fans. Ease of use is paramount.
"They just want to play music — and to figure out how to be an awesome promoter and marketer with all this digital technology on top of that ... you can't expect artists to be a master of all of those things," says Donovan.
There's also another component in the product, which is simple to use but tricky to define: Connecting like-minded bands or artists, with an eye on simulating music scenes that, pre-social media, were constrained geographically.
"The Internet came along and kind of abolished these geographic restrictions, but no technology has come along to foster that same kind of environment the way that it's worked in real life," says Donovan.
He cites examples of people in remote places making music on just a laptop but seeking collaborators online.
Morrison names Airbnb and LinkedIn as inspirations: Sites that are focused on connecting people with a more focused endpoint than simply networking. Bands don't want to just be on the Internet. They want people to collaborate with, to play shows with, and to be inspired by. Shoutabl could be the connective network that helps them do just that. For now, they're just trying to make the tools as easy to use as possible and get people on board.
"I'm not going to promise I can make anybody rich," says Morrison. "But if I can get to a place where I can make a band $20 to $40 a day selling hoodies, you start to get to a point where you can pay for that first record. It's the bootstrapping of the enterprise of a band."
Image: Flickr, mehan
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