Music Traveler: Recent Episodes
Music Traveler
Julia Rhee laid out Music Traveler in 2017, a commercial center that works in centralizing venues and spots for individuals and families. This is achieved by leasing music studios, Practice Areas, and recital venues. However, extra administrations are additionally offered, for example, the leasing of live music venues, concert halls, festival locations, celebration areas, outside music venues, and theaters, and the organization likewise teams up with the educational sector.
“Search, reserve and touch”. With these three simple steps, the new "Music Traveler" application aims to solve one of the biggest problems that musicians around the world have - the lack of cheap space to rehearse.
The platform, which began operating a few weeks ago in Vienna, eliminates intermediaries and makes available to the musician, at affordable prices, venues, and even instruments, to rehearse without worrying about neighbors, family, or roommates.
The application has a mechanism similar to Airbnb, a pioneer in the rental of homes around the world. Through filters, you can select the city, the day, the time, the size of the venue, the price range, and the need to rent a particular instrument.
Once the priorities are defined, Music Traveler shows a map with all the offers, from large concert halls with a grand piano for 20 euros an hour in the center, to a small office with a xylophone for 7 euros on the outskirts of the city.
The idea behind Music Traveler is that anyone can become a space bidder, as long as they have a free room.
The Russian-German violinist Aleksey Igudesman is one of the founders of the platform and offers his own apartment in Vienna, the only city where this service is currently available.
The spirit of Music Traveler is "to give value to the power of opening doors to people," he told Efe.
The group, which “Trio KlaVis” has used the platform from the beginning, considers that it was something that the world of music needed.
“When we were students, we used to stand in long queues to get a room, only to have to leave it a few minutes after the rehearsal had started,” recalls Miha Ferk, the group's saxophonist.
He assures that finding a space to rehearse for hours was previously "almost impossible" and that the platform will facilitate his work abroad as well.
"When they include more cities we can forget the stress of giving a concert without being able to practice anything before due to lack of space," says Jenny Lippl, violinist of the ensemble.
According to Igudesman, safety is one of their priorities and that is why they have insurance that covers the value of the instruments by up to 100,000 euros.
The idea for Music Traveler was born in 2015 out of sheer necessity. Igudesman and his partner, Julia Rhee Music Traveler, a businesswoman, and former professional pianist, had experienced the stress of not being able to rehearse when traveling abroad on multiple occasions.
- Julia Rhee / Founder and Managing Partner of Alpha Institutes
Q: Let's talk about the penetration of Android versus… What should we actually compare this to right now?
- Ajay Rajani / InVenture CMO
A: I think what's Android's doing is amazing. I think it's made more amazing by just the massive prevalence of a social platform like Facebook. For example, in the venture, when we choose new markets we look first at Android penetration. Then we look at Facebook penetration
Q: Why Facebook?
A: Because Facebook, if you have it, you check it a lot. And it's very easy to reach people on Facebook. Their self-serve ad platform, I think it's one of the most powerful business tools that's ever been created.
Q: But, in most cases, it's just my opinion, Facebook has been mostly used by the younger generation. So let's assume that obviously, these GDP-rising locations do have a significant amount of younger people, but what if they are not very into it? What if you have the wrong data?
A: I think it's certainly not everyone, but if you look at it, Facebook users actually track exactly 50% of the global internet connections. So there are about 3.2 billion people in the world with access to the internet and Facebook users about 1.5 billion.
Q: But what about China? They don't really have Facebook at all.
A: It's a very fair point. So like Facebook is just an example. I'm using it conveniently now because we have experienced it a lot. But I think anytime you have something that you can reach people on that they use very actively, it's incredibly powerful, right? Otherwise, it's really hard to distribute a product, especially in the early stages in markets you don't have a physical presence.
Many musicians are likely familiar with the issue: You are on the road, move from one location to another, have to professionally rehearse or prepare for a show, and you struggle to locate an appropriate and reasonable rehearsal room for it in a foreign city. MUSIC TRAVELER, which was introduced in the fall of last year, aims to change this. a website that connects musicians looking for music enthusiasts with instruments at home who are willing to share them and space for rehearsals. Aleksee Igudesman, a musician and co-founder of MUSIC TRAVELER, spoke with Michael Ternai.
For more, visit: Julia Rhee Music Traveler