I am glad to announce I have just interviewed Mr. Wil Padley from BandCentral.com, the startup I reviewed recently. You can read the review here, and also watch BandCentral’s Vimeo presentation here.
Wil’s responses are very detailed and rich, and I am very grateful for the time he devoted to this interview. Also, I would like to thank his office – they were really kind and helpful from the beginning. A special, big “thank you” to Belle for her time and dedication.
This is part 1 of the interview. Part 2 (“Music & You”) can be found here.
Mr. Wil Padley
Full Name: Wil Padley
Age: We all do
Startup: BandCentral.com
Position: Founder
PART I
THE STARTUP
Tell us a little about your startup. How was it conceived? What are its most distinctive features in your opinion?
BandCentral is a collaboration and management tool for bands. It gives you your very own online ‘Band HUB’, which enables you to manage everything associated with a hard working band (gigs, promotion, files and finances etc..) from one instantly accessible place.
BandCentral was born out of a collision between a career in digital media and a very disorganised band! Trying to communicate and organise my band whilst keeping up the day job became very difficult. We had heaps of enthusiasm but in absence of full-time management I realised that we needed a better way to get organised enough to be able to compete in today’s music industry. So, I took matters in to my own hands and built BandCentral for our band to use. Over the past 15 months, with some serious hard work, it has evolved into a fully-fledged online band manager with a fast growing global user base of independent artists.
BandCentral’s most distinctive features include; a central message board which is all about collaboration and keeping everyone up-to-date and organised, a shared band calendar and task manager with fully integrated Email & SMS alerts, a gigs, set-list and guestlist manager – vital for any giging band, a finance manager to log all your incomings and out-goings, a central file repository to host all your important files, contracts, artwork etc and some pretty awesome band promotion tools. BandCentral also gives you the ability to sync all your info to MySpace, Twitter and Facebook with one click – this is really useful as it saves you a lot time avoiding needless repetition of info across the web. The fan CRM tools are also hugely useful in helping bands nurture and grow your fanbase.
BandCentral’s features are constantly evolving and the app relies hugely on collaborative feedback from our users to ensure that we are building the most comprehensive online band manager possible. We’re working on BandCentral version 2 right now, which will be ready for release in the autumn. It’s a serious upgrade and the team and we are really excited about it!
What was the original launch date?
Beta launch was February 2009, the development has been in the pipeline since June 2008.
What has been the response so far? In which countries has it been more successful?
The response has exceeded all my expectations. Bands have been hugely enthusiastic about the application. It’s been very gratifying to receive feedback from our users and we were really proud to be featured by social media bible Mashable in their Spark of Genius series.
As for the reach, being a UK-based start-up, that becomes our natural base, but we’re also seeing a load of traffic from the US, Australia, Canada, South America and mainland Europe.
What features can we expect to see implemented in future revisions?
It’s our aim to provide all the tools a band needs to manage themselves and we have a lot of fantastic new features set for release this autumn.
There is a certain tendency to demonize the Internet in the music industry. I think it is all a matter of perspective – it all depends on the uses it is put to. What is your opinion? In which areas has the Internet left an unquestionably positive mark?
The music industry has been flipped on its head in the past decade. The dawn of the digital age hit the industry giants hard, but conversely, given a lot of power to the artist, suddenly making it economically viable for bands to record and distribute their music themselves. The emergence and enormous popularity of social networking sites such as MySpace, online sales systems such as Amazon and iTunes and taste and playlist aggregators such as Lastfm and Spotify mean that is now possible for even the smallest garage band from the Scottish highlands to reach fans from Brazil to China. I can only see that as a positive.
Essentially, if you want to make a career out of your band and are prepared to do the groundwork yourself – getting gigs, growing your fanbase, distributing and promoting your music – then there is nothing holding you back. You just need to write great music, get organised, harness the best of what the web can offer you and use it to get out there and get noticed. BandCentral fills a vital role in the new ‘DIY’ paradigm giving bands all the tools they need to streamline the self-management process and join the music revolution!
What advice could you give to anybody who is launching a music-related startup in the future? What are the obvious mistakes that should be avoided?
If you’ve got a brilliant idea, then there’s nothing stopping you but a big whack of hard work and dedication. The online music industry is at a really exciting point at the moment, too, people are searching for new solutions all the time. It can be very trying working on a start-up, in a lot of ways you’re working without precedent. You just have to believe that your idea is worthwhile, and that enough people are going to say ‘awesome, this is what I’ve been looking for’.
(Continue to Part 2)
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