Craigslist ain’t the place to book a band, man. Buying an old Ektorp Ikea couch on the cheap? OK. But there’s a lot of funny stuff buzzing in that blue and white jungle. No place to score a gig. At least not one you’re getting paid for.
That’s why Gigit, man. What? Yeah, Gigit. It’s new and in Santa Monica and from Tegan Gaan. It’s a website where bands – well, ones that make the cut anyway – can be listed on a page. And where people who need a band for a thing can book one. And, using PayPal for now, really pay ’em. (Gigit takes a percentage cut of each booking.)
Gaan’s no musician. She’s mostly from the tech world, doing turns with Microsoft Inc. and a few others. Was even meeting with the cats from Google to gig it over there until she chose to go a different way.
But she knows the artistic type, having jumped the corporate ship herself and once pursued a life as a photographer and writer.
Living near other artists, but still with her mind in the business world, she saw how musicians need a clean, easy and transparent tool to get their gigs.
“Gigit answers the problem of how to make the process streamlined and super easy. We want to be the Uber of band-booking,” Gaan said, referring to the mobile app for hailing taxis. “Booking bands is a multibillion-dollar industry; I wanted it to be less painful.”
Gigit is still in beta testing, though Gaan said it’s already booked a handful of gigs. The company has brought in $365,000 in venture capital funding in a seed round that included angel investors and New York’s FF Venture Capital.
This is not a festival seating free-for-all app. Not everyone who wants to get listed can. Gaan vets the acts herself, based on word of mouth, music blogs and how good a band’s Web presence is. The site works much like a social network profile page, where the acts can post audio and video as well as a short bio.
Bands are added continuously, while prices for booking an act can range widely: from $200 on the low end all the way up to $5,000. That’ll get you Bone Thugs ‘N Harmony. Yeah, the guys who did “Ghetto Cowboy” are up on there. Plans for Gigit are to cycle out acts that aren’t getting any bookings, so if there’s no action for two months, Gigit says “quit it.”
Gaan’s not just targeting bookings at bars, clubs and corporate events. Using Gigit can be for something small. Like a gift for someone you love.
“We’re trying to create new venues,” she said. “The next time it’s your wife’s birthday, don’t send her flowers, send a hipster with a guitar.”
Another Edge
We’re getting more comfortable shopping online, as rising traffic and revenue at e-commerce outlets show. And for the online stores, the more traffic that flows through their services, the more important it becomes to ensure sites are consistently up and running.
To that end, Santa Monica content delivery network EdgeCast Inc. has built Transact, a dedicated service for e-commerce.
A content delivery network acts as a backup for sites, keeping them fast and efficient should their main servers go down. In that sense, the newly launched network isn’t too different from the regular service EdgeCast offers its clients.
However, EdgeCast’s primary service stores data from all sites, no matter their content, on the same network of servers. Though company executives stand by the robustness of that network, they said separating e-commerce from the rest will offer even more reliability.
“Just a few moments of downtime with an e-commerce site can mean some big losses in sales,” said Anthony Citrano, vice president of communications and marketing at EdgeCast. “Time really is money for them.”
Although the company already has a few e-commerce clients, such as boutique online crafting store Etsy, it controls a tiny fraction of the market. Boston content delivery network Akamai Technologies Inc. partners with 90 of the top 100 e-commerce sites and handles more than 50 percent of the world’s e-commerce traffic.
Staff reporter Tom Dotan can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 263.
