Bandwidth - Channeling Local Music

Today we're very proud to launch a brand new app - Bandwidth - a new social network for musicians and bands.

We were tasked with the challenge of building a network for musicians that offered something different to the various others which are out there doing a similar thing. Our brief was to make it easy for people to connect, play together and ultimately form bands together.

We studied the current landscape of apps for musicians - notably BandFriend and JamCompass - but out of all the 7 apps we studied, they all lacked a few key elements, which we're worked hard to bring out for Bandwidth users.

We've focussed on music discovery - allowing users to not only upload music and video to their profiles, but allowing others to instantly listen to music while browsing throughout the app (in fact, even when not using the app).

We've centralised the location of bands as well - since your proximity to others is the real reason why you would connect with them and ultimately meet up.

We've allowed users and bands to choose a profile colour, allowing them room to express their identities visually and breathing life into an app which otherwise would contain numerous profiles which look almost identical.

We're focussed on bringing musicians together, so we made the decision early on to NOT automatically add every user to the map, but instead to invite only those users who want to appear on the map to create their profiles. This keeps the map clean from unwanted users who were just checking the app out without forming part of the community.

And finally, we worked incredibly hard to find a way to really connect people in a useful way. Whilst it's great to browse other people's profiles and hear local music, the real need we are addressing is that our users want to find others to jam with, or new members for their bands. Simple profiles aren;t able to communicate this, so instead we ask all musicians and bands to tell us what they are open to, so that others can search quickly and easily to find potential matches.
We're not finished with Bandwidth. This is just the beginning of our journey with Juan Criollo and Openmusic. Please feel free to send us any feedback or suggestions and we'll be sure to discuss them amongst the team.

A huge thank you to the best app dev team I've ever worked with, Álvaro Pinacho and Timo Kloss. You did good guys.