Friday, October 03, 2008

bandFIND Social - muso social community

Posted by Jon

bandFind Social
bandFind Social is a new online musician community which is kind of like Facebook but much more specific to networking with musicians in order to find people with similar interests to jam with, or to find a band member. Aside from finding musicians it is also a place to promote yourself and your band. The site is currently USA only but having only launched in April it will no doubt will expand to other countries soon enough. When you sign up to bandFind Social you are asked to fill out your profile in order to build a picture of exactly what you do. You choose the music styles that apply to you, enter your influences, equipment owned and musical biography including whether you are signed to a Major or Indie label and if you are a teacher you can enter a price for a lesson. This is an interesting point as it shows that this site is covering all bases, so that if you find a musician that you are impressed with you can contact them through the network and approach them for lessons should they be willing! Once you have completed this section you can fill out your Musician Talents, for instance us Guitarists can fill out how many years experience and skill level you have in each particular category such as Acoustic, Electric, Slide etc. Then moving on you select your regional area and availability and this is where you say whether you available for band tryouts, gig fill-ins, jam sessions, recording sessions etc. so that you will show up in the search.

Once you are all done completing your profile it is time to find out who is in your local area. By clicking on the Local Users link you are instantly given access to the profiles of musicians in your state and the use of icons in the profile immediately give you at a glance information about what skills and level of skill the person has with links to check out their profile, contact them, add as a friend or you can invite them to a jam session, recording session, writing session etc.

There is also a new music section which allows you to browse the latest music uploaded by musicians in the network, this is a good way to find more out about the musician if you have been invited to jam or you are looking for a band to join and they have invited you. This way you can decide whether you are a good fit before organising anything.

The New Ads section shows all the latest requests for musicians, this is US wide so you will probably need to go to the Search section and use the search filter to get exactly the ads you want, ie in your region. You can also use this search to find Professionals which is the umbrella category for anything from teachers to recording engineers to photographers.

So what bandFind Social is trying to do and I think they are definitely on the right track, is to create a one stop community for musicians to network with each other, find managers, artist relations people, promoters, engineers, teachers… well just about every part of being a musician or being in a band is probably covered. The site is new and obviously still gaining momentum but there seems to be a lot of members already. I have used a site similar to this in Australia called musolist.com but this site seems a lot more thorough and with the potential to expand. The design is probably the only thing lacking in that it seems a bit thrown together without the kind of professional design that social communities like Imeem or last.fm and it uses framesets which I hate and something that will not play nicely if they want to port this to mobile platforms but I think with a bit of spit and polish and elbow grease this could be a very useful social community.

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teak furniture on 10/03 at 05:16 PM

Great News! This is very advantageous to all musicians out there. Thanks

Cole on 10/04 at 12:32 AM

Fantastic Review!  Thanks Jon for your support.  We will be in Australia soon!  Keep doing what your doing!

‘Music is the Gateway to the Soul’
-Cole

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