Bandhub sees dramatic growth

Bandhub is aiming to build on the same market that major musical instrument makers like Moog, Fender and Gibson make the bulk of their money from: the amateur musician, the ones who just play for fun.

The service allows a musician to record a video of one part of a song and post it. Then, other musicians can come in and add additional parts as videos. When a viewer watches a collaboration, Bandhub plays all the parts at the same time, so it sounds like one band playing together.

Its cofounder, Pablo Osinaga, worked on the service from Williamsburg’s Secret Clubhouse from March to July of this year.

Much of the music on the site now is covers, which is natural for a site aiming at the recreational musician. Here, for example, is a cover of “Layla” led by a Brooklyn musician, according to Bandhub.

A screenshot of an Eric Clapton cover. Click the image to see it in action. (Via bandhub.us)

We first wrote about Bandhub after Osinaga, spoke about his platform at the NY Music Tech Meetup last year at the Knitting Factory. The growth since then has been dramatic. “A big chunk of our users are very engaged and use Bandhub 1.5 hrs in average every day, ” Osinaga told us via email. “There are people that use Bandhub more than 40 hours a week. What’s new since we presented at music tech meetup is that we are growing like crazy.”

Currently, there are 25,000 collaborative songs in Bandhub, Osinaga said. The team hasn’t spent any money on marketing the service at all.

In some ways, the service has similarities to MixLuv, which we covered last week, but it isn’t aimed at getting a recording made. It’s more for the experience of the musicians themselves, to make it easier to play with other people (even if you aren’t quite playing with them in the moment).

Osinaga said FFmpeg has been a critical tool to actually running the site. Trello, a collaborative to-do list tool and Hackpad help keep the team organized, as well as HipChat for talking along the way.

http://youtu.be/xctW1eaOPKY

Osinaga’s cofounder, Marcelo Birnbach, is in Argentina. The company has one employee.