Love live music gigs? So do I. I bumped into Clarence, founder of Bandwagon.sg, through a common friend during our event, Startups In Asia. Bandwagon, founded in October 2011, is a live music gig search engine which helps users look for places that play live music.
Bandwagon has an instant search, where users are only required to load the site once, and the search happens instantaneously. You can filter gigs by genre, schedule, date or even location of the gig. One thing I like about their website is that it is optimized for mobile browsing, which caters to users on-the-go.
Clarence, a fresh Singapore Management University graduate, tells us that he started Bandwagon because of three problems that he faced:
- He wanted a site which allows one to discover new places and new live acts instead of going back to the same old venues again and again.
- He wanted to create a platform that bridges the connection between musicians and music lovers.
- He wanted an application that would allow him to search for live music information in different cities, even when he was travelling.
The site offers pretty basic features at the moment, but Clarence says that they will be developing their next version pretty soon. In a nutshell, the next version will offer more information and features that will make gig finding a whole lot more social, useful, and engaging. Users would be able to indicate the gigs they are looking for, build their own personal gig calendar, collect badges, and make new friends who are into the same genre of music.
Bandwagon will also have sub pages for events, venues, and artistes. In these sub pages, the relevant stakeholders can pay to list additional information. For instance, a venue can list a promotion, or a band can list an album sale.
They are currently developing their mobile application to build a more holistic user experience so people can search for live music gigs while on-the-go. Artists would be able to track the buzz around their gigs, the effectiveness of publicity and communication channels, as well as real-time analytics which will better help them gauge the demand of music lovers.
I really admire Clarence’s passion for Bandwagon and his vision of wanting to help the local music scene in various cities. In Clarence words,
What makes Bandwagon special is that its built for music lovers by music lovers. Meaning there’s a whole lotta love that we put in to every single thing we do, be it sourcing for gigs or building the next version. All of us didn’t have to do this, we really didn’t. It’s a lot of sacrifice. We chose to do it really out of the love for music and wanting to contribute to the scene in the best way we could think of.
His personal dream? To see more people attending live gigs and facilitate the entire local music scene through his platform, Bandwagon.
The team consisting of developers, gig searchers and writers are currently based in Singapore and are looking to expand into other cities within Asia, becoming the single application that music lovers can turn to as the search destination for live music.
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