“Bands are kind of like small businesses,” Travis Morrison said as he tried to explain how he made the jump to his newest venture – Shoutabl – from being the lead singer of a D.C.-based 90s club-rock band with a cultish following.
And he’s completely right.
Twenty years ago, with three other co-founders, he came up with the idea to start the band the Dismemberment Plan, named after a throwaway line in the cult classic Groundhog’s Day. They set out with the goal to create a completely original and branded product – something customers would buy and keep coming back for. Along that path they pitched to executives (essentially investors) and for the most part decided to self-produce, keeping the band as lean as possible.
Wait – is that the description of a startup or a band?
Still playing and making music into his 40s with the same band, Morrison’s shifted his focus from purely that of musician to one of all-around-entrepreneur.
After experiencing “the frustration with the products available” for aspiring musicians in the current marketplace, he decided to start Shoutabl – a social network of musicians, artists and bands that works more like an online intertwined music scene. “There is no LinkedIn for bands,” he added.
“Every time you have something to say, you have to log in to all these different platforms,” Morrison griped. “Why don’t I have one place where I can say it and other people following me and their contacts can see it, and they can then share it on various other sites like Facebook and Twitter.”
With co-founder Travis Donovan, whom he worked with at Huffington Post for a few years back in the late aughts. Morrison set out recreate how musicians work together in real life on an online platform. With their experience co-working in development and design at HuffPo and Morrison’s musical background, they saw it as only logical to take this step.
Donovan, in an interview with Technical.ly, further explained the platform in the context of his partner’s career. “Traditionally artists will form these scenes based on location,” he said. “You start forming new bands from other bands. Pretty soon you have 20 friends who play 12 different bands and you’re all passing out each other’s fliers and you have a scene. Take Travis’s network,” Donovan explained, “He’s in the Dismemberment Plan. He’s in a band called the Burlies and he has his own solo stuff. That’s three different bands right there. The way Shoutabl is set up, they can all seamlessly promote each other, as bands do in real music scenes.”
While Morrison said feedback on Shoutabl, which currently in closed beta, is good so far, he seemed unsure of a specific revenue model for the future. In a way, it just seems he want to see music scene thrive in the digital age where artists “don’t have the environment where they can find each other for shows and they can’t find each other to work on music together.”
“More than anything we’re just trying to make it work everyday,” he said. “Other than that, it’s exciting and people really like it. And we have to keep focused and keep improving it because we really think it’s promising.”
The Travises hope Shoutabl will be ready sometime this winter. But before then, Morrison will be back at his main gig, recently announcing the Dismemberment Plan’s return from hiatus, with shows planned at the 9:30 Club next week.
