With Covid-19 shutting down live events, more and more artists and musicians found themselves detached from one another. On top of this, anyone looking for an opportunity to start a career in the music industry is now facing an even bumpier ride — getting access to professionals who made their way in the music industry has become even more challenging in the new circumstances. The entire experience of aspiring musicians searching for their place in the world of music business can be frustrating and disheartening, without having any connections and experts to guide them.
These circumstances gave media companies a big boost. According to the recent BCG’s analysis of the media industry, from 2016 to 2021, the combined market value of the 63 media companies more than doubled, reaching $5 trillion. A large portion of this increase was driven by the Covid-19 pandemic. Five media giants—Alphabet, Meta, Tencent, Walt Disney, and Netflix —accounted for more than 85% of the shareholder value that the industry added during that time.
In essence, in a post-pandemic world, more and more music and entertainment companies lean towards making consumer-facing products, and are increasingly concentrating on new revenue drivers for industry players and artists. Once again, it seems that the media industry is showing other businesses and industries the disruption that awaits them on their transformation journey.
Jammcard mentorship platform: taking a leap forward in your musical journey
The opportunity
Elmo Lovano, the founder of Jammcard, a network of vetted music professionals, is one of those change-makers and status-quo shakers who recognized the opportunity to create a community for all the enthusiasts looking for guidance when choosing their music career path. But, once the pandemic broke out, he started to see how they could pivot around this core functionality and then came up with the idea to build another service — Mentorship. He recognized the people’s need to always have somebody to look up to, someone who can offer advice which path to take. And this is how the idea of Jammcard Mentors was born.
Their ambition was to provide everyone, from music professionals and beginners learning the ropes in the music industry to creative entrepreneurs and enthusiasts looking for a unique perspective, with the access to music experts to help them make it in the industry.
Having worked with Jammcard on building an invite-only app for music professionals, designed to facilitate bookings, communication and networking among users, HTEC Group moved on to step two — building Jammcard Mentors — a music mentor marketplace offering 1-on-1 live video mentorship sessions with music’s leading pros.
Value created
First, we started working on the booking functionality that allows users to book a music professional based on the service they need (recording session in the studio, or a live performance) and negotiate the terms, the rate, and the service that would be provided.
In less than six months, we developed the first working prototype. The idea was to have an easy and straightforward way for visitors to view the platform’s offerings and choose the mentor they want to reach out to. Mentors are classified into different types, allowing users to easily scroll, browse, and see what’s available with a click of a button. Once they book the mentor, the users join the waitlist and then wait to be notified about the available slots. There are two rates – the session may last for half an hour or one hour, which then determines the rate. Finally, the users receive an email telling them that they have the upcoming session, which is then streamed online. For these purposes, we integrated with a third-party service Twilio to facilitate the video streaming part and used their APIs to customize our UI part side and bring the Jammcard experience to the user.
Challenges
One of the challenges we had to deal with was time management due to different time zones users and mentors come from. Handling and implementing calendars, moving slots, rescheduling cancellations and similar activities in different time zones can be quite tricky, but we also managed to support this functionality.
Our future ambitions are to add CMS features with an admin panel and further customize the mentorship page.
Impact
With people being isolated in their homes, it was quite difficult for them to search for experts and then take part in live one-on-one sessions. This mentorship platform not only simplifies the process of finding the right expert that perfectly matchers the users’ requirements, but it also enables more efficient sessions without having to leave the comfort of your home. It is changing the ways people face the challenges of working in the music industry by opening the door to a world of music maestros who are ready to share their wealth of knowledge and experience and help music enthusiast thrive on their chosen path. On top of this, it opened a new revenue stream for Jammcard. However, this is only the beginning. The company’s vision is to create a centralized online platform with a plethora of services designed to cater to users’ needs so that they can bring them more value and opportunities.
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Many thanks to Strahinja Zivkovic for sharing these helpful insights. Stay tuned for more interesting stories! in the meantime, visit our industries page and explore how we can help you build next-generation solutions that deliver data-powered experiences to customers worldwide.
