Gigmuse Stories and Model
Discover and book live music artists for gigs.
As an exercise in Story Models, let’s examine a hypothetical gig marketplace for musical performing artists called Gigmuse. People needing live music for events browse the Gigmuse catalog. Artists seeking gigs contribute to the catalog by creating profiles and uploading music samples and videos.
Let’s construct a few stories about Gigmuse. For our first story, let’s consider a venue called The Harpie.
Venue - The Harpie
Situation
The local bar The Harpy features live music on most nights of the week, often 2 or 3 bands in a night. Often The Harpy struggles to find enough decent artists to fill the bill. Relying on word of mouth in the community and networking is unpredictable and time consuming, and misses out on new or alternative possibilities.
Vision
A band told The Harpy about Gigmuse, a website featuring local artists looking for gigs. Harpy staff browsed profiles and music samples from the listings and wrote to a few prospective bands. Results were good, and Gigmuse became a regular destination for Harpy staff when arranging the schedule. Was so convenient to view artists in a central listing that The Harpy even encouraged their regular bands to sign up as well.
Insights
Venue owners that book an ongoing bill of regular and new bands find it useful to have a centralized catalog of available artists.
Convenient to be able to contact the artists directly from the platform.
Venue owners might promote Gigmuse, encouraging their regular artists to join.
Discussion
The story centers around The Harpy, a music bar.
The Harpie experiences issues related to finding artists. Their current process is inefficient, unpredictable, and misses possibilities. There is an opportunity for improvement.
The Harpy learned about Gigmuse and changed how they acquire and manage artists. The Harpy now has access to a greater selection of artists and a better organizational process, which will improve their business.
All was good for the Harpy, as evidenced by them adopting Gigmuse as a central part of their operation and encouraging others to use it. Gigmuse is certainly happy that the Harpy is promoting them.
The Harpie’s story demonstrates that venues seeking artists might find Gigmuse’s catalog to be useful, and the platform itself to be helpful as as organizational tool.
Let’s consider a second story, about a private event organized by an individual.
Party - Edison
Situation
Edison needs a quirky string quartet for his investors event, to celebrate his startup going public. Although Edison is a great CEO, he is not connected to the local string quartet scene. He fears using an agency with its own agenda will waste his time and money, and not deliver what he imagines, the right mix of classical and playful. Edison tried googling, but got only general results. Edison is not sure how to proceed.
Vision
Edison was discussing his dilemma with a designer at his company. The designer had seen a google ad for Gigmuse recently when checking out a club online. A delighted Edison sampled the extensive choices on Gigmuse, filtered for string quartets. He loved the playfulness of a particular group from watching their video. Had his assistant contact them.
Insights
The average person is not skilled in finding music artists.
Googling for artists yields little information.
Communicating needs with an agency is cumbersome and time consuming.
A catalog of local artists extends an inexperienced individual’s reach.
Videos and music samples provide confidence regarding one’s choice.
Discussion
Here the story concerns Edison is an individual who is organizing a one time event, a party for his investors.
A lot is at stake for Edison. He needs a band, but not just any band. He needs the right band to help make his important event a success.
Edison is connected to Gigmuse through a google ad seen by a colleague.
Edison uses Gigmuse to finds a string quartet, relying on filtering to narrow his search, and videos to get impressions of different artists.
Edison is satisfied that his issue is well resolved and that the chosen artist suits his conception of his event.
We see that for an average person, an online catalog with videos is a good option to find the right artist for an event.
Let’s next consider the story of a band.
Artist - The Dialups
Situation
The Dialups is an electronic music band with an artistic, counter-culture pop style. They have been playing for a few years and have a fair catalog of their own music as well as their own takes on various covers. The Dialiups have a small but devoted following, and would like to grow their audience. They would play more live gigs but being struggling artists with other jobs, they don’t have the time to promote themselves other than maintaining a facebook page.
Vision
The Dialups heard about Gigmuse from another band on the same bill one evening. They created a profile and uploaded samples. Reaction was slow at first. But over time, with Gigmuse’s prompting, hiring parties wrote positive reviews. The Dialups began receiving frequent offers, and were contacted to perform at private events, something they were not expecting.
Insights
Artists would rather focus on their music than on promotion.
Artists would like a central place online where they can gain exposure and be matched with parties interested to hire them.
Artists can build reputation and increase business over time as hiring parties leave ratings and reviews.
Discussion
The entity of interest here is The Dialups, a band. Possibly talented, but with limited success. They have an issue of growing their audience, but lack time and resources to address it.
The Dialups experiment with creating a profile on Gigmuse. Results were mediocre at first, but improved along with their reputation to eventually offer more than anticipated.
The example of the Dialups shows that a band with talent but lacking in resources resources can succeed in an open marketplace.
Model
From the stories we can derive a model for Gigmuse.
Gigmuse offers a catalog of artists who can perform at live events.
Artists create profiles with information, music samples and optional videos.
Parties and venues needing bands for gigs can search, browse and filter artists.
Artists can be contacted directly for gigs.
Hiring parties are encouraged to leave reviews and ratings of artists.
The model was derived from the stories for Gigmuse. It relates entities (artists, profiles, gigs, reviews, …) and their relationships (an artist has a profile, a hiring party has a set of reviews), as well as processes (creating a profile, uploading a sample, leaving a review).
Summary
Here we have seen several stories and a model for Gigmuse. These help us to understand what Gigmuse is, how it works and how it helps people.