There’s a new player on the market for internet booking services. Gigmit will start soon and wants to improve the communication and collaboration of musicians and concert promoters. I talked to CEO Marcus Rüssel about their service, the benefits for musicians using gigmit and their further plans…

50K MUSIC: You’re about to start gigmit.com, a service to bring musicians and concert promoters together. Could you please explain how it works.
Marcus: In a nutshell, it concentrates business specific contacts, simplifies search and booking processes, secures contract design and implementation so that in the end, creative people may concentrate on what they are best at and reduce the tedious, time-consuming management part to a minimum.

For both sides, gigmit is equally easy to use and offers many functions. Musicians and promoters logging in at gigmit.com are provided with a digital assistant that brings them together – like an intelligent mixture of Basecamp, eBay and Match.com for musicians and promoters. With its integrated matching, gigmit offers a broad network of contacts and a very condensed approach to promoters and their events on the one hand and musicians on the other. Gigmit optimises and automates communication as well as the whole booking process: Once musicians and promoters start talking online, based on already listed information a contract, info sheets and the bill are being generated in the background. The whole process is comprehensible, transparent, simple and fast.

50K MUSIC: What are the benefits for musicians when using gigmit.com?
Marcus: gigmit is a contemporary booking solution for musicians who are not yet famous enough to have a great deal of contracts and take care of the booking themselves as well as musicians who are bored with the poor service of their booking agents (though of course there are a lot of agents doing a very good job!).

When registered, musicians can put up their own microsite (which they can also use for external reference) and include all the necessary B2B information promoters require. They no longer need to research venues and contacts as gigmit offers direct contacts to matching promoters and venues and musicians may apply directly for suitable events. If a concert is agreed upon, through gigmit musicians can cut down on the time the booking process usually takes as all necessary documents are generated in the background.

And the best thing is: it’s free! No hidden costs. There will be a premium version with more features available by the end of this year – but promoters and musicians may also use gigmitÕs basics without paying a premium fee. When a deal is agreed upon, the platform merely gets a handling fee of 8%.

50K MUSIC: Is your service only available for German artists?
Marcus: During the first stage: yes, or rather: German-speaking artists and German promoters. But already at the beginning of 2013 our website will be available in English so that international artists touring Germany may register at gigmit.com. In 2014, we plan on going international as the booking market problem that gigmit addresses exists everywhere. Of course international artists who are fine with using google translator can register already.

50K MUSIC: You’ve already announced the international rollout of your service. There are a number of other websites offering a similar service such as UK based Bandwagon, Sonicbids or Indie On The Move. How will you deal with these competitors?
Marcus: We are well aware of international competitors and have analysed them closely so as to improve our own services and learn from their weaknesses. Many of them concentrate mainly on musicians and not as much on promoters while gigmit equally aims at both. Moreover, from a user’s point of view many of those international competitors lack transparency and enjoyable usability, especially when it comes to the multitude of services and features, or pricing models. We’ll see how the situation is when we’re closer to stepping on the international stage – for now, we’ll concentrate on the German market.

50K MUSIC: To finance your venture you’ve chosen the way of crowdinvesting … why not the conventional way?
Marcus: We love to be independent. That is basically why crowdfunding and crowdinvesting are very smart opportunities for us. What turns out to be problematic, though, is that creative industries and especially the music industry have a very noticeable problem to get investments. However, we hope that we will find enough investments this week! For now we are in the last week of our first crowdfunding attempt, having an investment of 20.000 EUR, and hopefully we will get the required amount on www.innovestment.de. But this is a different topic. So if not enough people are ready to help the startup growing yet, there will be at some stage and we will give them another try.