Com­mu­ni­ty man­agers and social media man­agers who have any seri­ous musi­cians in their friend­ship cir­cles will prob­a­bly be aware what a headache it is for them to find oth­er, kin­dred-spir­it musi­cians to play with. Plead­ing lit­tle ads in news­pa­pers like “gui­tarist seeks bassist” prob­a­bly don’t deliv­er. But thanks to a social media start­up called Giggem, lone­some musi­cians are like­ly to find them­selves spoilt for choice.

Mak­ing music together

It’s the kind of idea that the more musi­cal­ly-ori­en­tat­ed social media man­agers and com­mu­ni­ty man­agers might wish they’d thought of first: a plat­form that lets musi­cians cre­ate pro­files for them­selves and then pro­ceeds to rec­om­mend peo­ple with sim­i­lar musi­cal inter­ests to con­nect with.

The Giggem pro­file show­cas­es a musician’s inter­ests and expe­ri­ences (sim­i­lar pro­files can be cre­at­ed by song­writ­ers, bands, man­agers, music labels and even fans). Emir Turan, Giggem’s founder and CEO (and, unsur­pris­ing­ly, a musi­cian) lists on his pro­file all his musi­cal pref­er­ences (amongst them, glam met­al, alter­na­tive met­al and alter­na­tive rock). He also lists the instru­ments he plays, his musi­cal expe­ri­ence and what and who he’s look­ing for.

Giggem’s algo­rithms then work their mag­ic, find­ing users who’ll ‘har­mo­nize’ with the data on your pro­file, fil­ter­ing them down to the most like­ly match­es and rec­om­mend­ing that you con­nect with them. The pro­files, Turan says, func­tion as résumés and Giggem acts like a match­mak­er, bring­ing kin­dred musi­cal spir­its togeth­er. Musi­cians end up find­ing peo­ple they’d nev­er have come across with those wist­ful news­pa­per ads – and if they’re not impressed with Giggem’s rec­om­men­da­tions, they can use the site to con­duct their own searches.

An unri­valled network

Although it’s been around for a few months, it only launched offi­cial­ly on June 10^th. Musi­cal­ly-mind­ed com­mu­ni­ty man­agers and social media man­agers may be sur­prised to find that, accord­ing to Turan, no sim­i­lar musi­cians’ social net­works exist out there. Fan­dal­ism focus­es on help­ing musi­cians show­case their work and even con­nect with oth­ers, but it lacks the close match­mak­ing capac­i­ty of Giggem and it doesn’t let oth­er indus­try pros join.

Giggem, says Turan, “will always be a use­ful tool for a band to find a new mem­ber quick­ly, any­time they need.”

He’s got a lot faith in his cre­ation, hav­ing invest­ed $600,000 of his own into the start­up. In the future, he plans to gen­er­ate mon­ey by offer­ing pro tools and by advertising.