From Sonicbids' CEO: New Funding, and Time to Step It Up

I've watched Sonicbids for a couple of years now, thinking it could be a game changer for mid-level musical acts -- bands that are just starting or aren't big enough to have a manager out beating the bushes for gigs.

The site acts as an on-line broker, hosting "electronic press kits" (EPKs) for 120,000 acts and listings of thousands of open slots at clubs, festivals and other venues. Bands can scan for gigs and click to e-mail an EPK. Allegedly friction in that market gets decreased and both bands and venues find more happiness.

Except Sonicbids hasn't...quite...gotten there. Hasn't reached that tipping point. Some of the reason is purely marketing -- word hasn't gotten around enough. Some is site design. It looks a bit messy, and seems to be short of some functionality that would make it far more useful -- like being able to search venues by location, and see the results on a Google Map.

CEO Panos Panay recently closed the company's first round ever of financing, for $4.5 million. He tells me: "I did not want to raise money until we knew what exactly to do with it as we've grown a great, profitable business entirely organically until now."

What does he plan to do with the money? "Quickly speaking the money will go towards augmenting the engineering team, the marketing team, the sales team as well as expanding internationally. We really feel that the product can use a whole lot of improvement. Think of much better filters and recommendations (as a songwriter, why not get recommendations about gigs that are only pertinent to you?), collaborative tools, audience development tools, tour routing tools, etc. Sonicbids, in spite of our early success, is still fairly sophomoric as a product and we believe that we can really make a big difference by continuing to make the site better and the network bigger."