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Shane Douglas is, like many in Nashville, that guitarist who likes to play, plays well, but doesn't do it professionally. He'd never been in a position to record in a studiountil recently.
Earlier this year, the commercial real estate broker heard about VibeGoo, a new business that uses a sharing-economy business model to match available studio space with musicians who need itthink AirBnb for recording studios. It's the brainchild of Chip Cathey, an entrepreneur and lifelong musician. Douglas booked a session with The Record Shop in Hermitage, and he found the process of working with an engineer and laying some solo classic rock tracks to be smoother and easier than he'd imagined.
'It has been this big thing to say, ‘I am going to go into the studio,'” Douglas says. VibeGoo benefits production companies like The Record Shop by publicizing their available studio space.
'VibeGoo creates a unique outlet for someone like myself to meet new artists,” explains Sean 'Gio” Giovanni, owner of The Record Shop.
While some studios use sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, they usually require the owners to offer large discounts and then take large cuts for themselves. VibeGoo does take an undisclosed percentage of each booking completed through the site. Studios pay $10 or more to be featured, and listings are live for up for 120 days. Some listings are by time periodhours or a full week, for example. Others are for the product: three fully mastered songs, five acoustic demos. Cathey says studios like The Record Shop also get an SEO boost from being featured on VibeGoo.
The online marketplace currently focuses on the greater Nashville area, with its 250 studios and 40,000 musicians, according to Cathey. Other participating studios include Center Street Studios and Blue Grotto Sound. Cathey hopes to expand nationally, drawing in everyone from local first-timers like Douglas to professional musicians in other cities who want to come here to make demos and albums. Musicians can also shop around to different studios to get the right sound.
'There are some real tricked-out home studios in Nashville,” Cathey adds.
For those who want to take their music-making to the next level, a professional studio is a necessity. At some point, Cathey says, 'you can concentrate on your songwriting or your musicianship, but you cannot excel at both.” Douglas expects that his VibeGoo experience 'will encourage me to take my writing more seriously. It helps me to know that [recording something I wrote] is affordable.”