An app to end the stress of not having a place to rehearse

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Music Traveler An app to end the stress of not
having a place to rehearse Search, reserve and
touch. With these three simple steps, the new
"Music Traveler" application aims to solve one of
the biggest problems that musicians around the
world have - the lack of cheap space to rehearse.
The platform, which began operating a few weeks
ago in Vienna, eliminates intermediaries and
makes available to the musician, at affordable
prices, venues, and even instruments, to rehearse
without worrying about neighbors, family, or
roommates. The application has a mechanism
similar to Airbnb, a pioneer in the rental of
homes around the world. Through filters, you can
select the city, the day, the time, the size of
the venue, the price range, and the need to rent
a particular instrument. Once the priorities are
defined, Music Traveler shows a map with all the
offers, from large concert halls with a grand
piano for 20 euros an hour in the center, to a
small office with a xylophone for 7 euros on the
outskirts of the city. The idea behind Music
Traveler is that anyone can become a space
bidder, as long as they have a free room. The
Russian-German violinist Aleksey Igudesman is one
of the founders of the platform and offers his
own apartment in Vienna, the only city where this
service is currently available. The spirit of
Music Traveler is "to give value to the power of
opening doors to people," he told Efe.
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The group, which Trio KlaVis has used the
platform from the beginning, considers that it
was something that the world of music
needed. When we were students, we used to stand
in long queues to get a room, only to have to
leave it a few minutes after the rehearsal had
started, recalls Miha Ferk, the group's
saxophonist. He assures that finding a space to
rehearse for hours was previously "almost
impossible" and that the platform will facilitate
his work abroad as well. "When they include more
cities we can forget the stress of giving a
concert without being able to practice anything
before due to lack of space," says Jenny Lippl,
violinist of the ensemble. According to
Igudesman, safety is one of their priorities and
that is why they have insurance that covers the
value of the instruments by up to 100,000
euros. The idea for Music Traveler was born in
2015 out of sheer necessity. Igudesman and his
partner, Julia Rhee Music Traveler, a
businesswoman, and former professional pianist,
had experienced the stress of not being able to
rehearse when traveling abroad on multiple
occasions. Speaking to Efe, Rhee says that from
the beginning they were sure that there would be
clients since "for a professional musician,
losing hours of rehearsal means losing
money." Although initially, the idea was to offer
venues for classical musicians, the investigation
they carried out revealed that the lack of
rehearsal spaces was "a chronic problem in the
world of music" in general, so they opened it up
to other styles. The success of the platform is
also related to the choice of Vienna as a "pilot
city", due to its status as a world music center
where more than 250,000 musicians play, some
50,000 of them professionals.
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Another advantage is the financial aid offered by
Austrian public bodies and which are, according
to Rhee, among the few that value creation in
the world of startups. Since its inception, the
company had famous investors such as the German
soundtrack composer Hans Zimmer, the singer Billy
Joel and the actor John Malkovich. Rhee sees a
key to success that investors have seen other
startups, like Airbnb, later transformed into
highly profitable companies. After the good
reception that the platform had in Vienna, the
company seeks to expand quickly but safely. "If
we don't take advantage of our advantage, it's
going to become a competition in which whoever
makes the most money and moves the fastest will
win," he says. At the moment the expansion will
be European, since "in the United States the
legislation is more complicated and puts more
obstacles", although tests are already being
carried out in New York. The first destinations
to which the company will expand are Austrian
regional capitals, such as Salzburg, and the
German cities of Berlin, Munich, Cologne, and
Hamburg. In the case of Spain, Madrid and
Barcelona are clear objectives, concludes
Aleksey Igudesman, founder of Music Traveler.