Splashtone: Online booking for bands, DJs and musicians

You can get almost everything over the internet from videos to furniture, but booking a band for your next event is not quite as easy. Sure, you can try surfing through Myspace and Google, but wouldn’t it be cool if you could just type in your zipcode and select the genre you want, click on your choice, and pay them an advance online? Splashtone is a website in beta stage that aims to make booking a musical act as fast and simple as possible. It’s split in half by audience type, Event Planners or Musicians–and you register an account on either side. If you’re a musician you create a profile similar to the ones on Myspace and add PayPal info if you’re down with getting paid online.

It’s similar if you sign up for an Event Planner account, except that in the Calendar area you can Plan a New Event and select what kind of genre you’re looking for. From there you can either wait for the flood of requests to come in, or you can browse around, view profiles and listen to tracks that have been posted.

The revenue model appears to consist solely of an upgraded artist profile that allows you to get paid through PayPal on the site. Nowhere is it made apparent that you’re not allowed to post your email address on your profile, so it would seem that most people could just post their PayPal address and circumvent the need to go through the site at all. There also appears to be no advertising, nor placeholder images for future advertisements, so it’s questionable if a site that has such lofty goals can pay for increased server space, load, and maintenance.

In terms of design, Splashtone is far from the prettiest with its garish rainbow color scheme, and navigation is not the most intuitive. In this middle-age of Web2.0 applications you’d expect to see lots of Ajax to help with user experience and to keep a clean look, but this ASP-coded site has nothing resembling it. There’s also nothing lateral going on in terms of adding friends or joining groups, something that would be helpful once and if the site gets large enough where it would be fruitless to attempt a search for an artist by the few categories they have listed.

There also doesn’t seem to be a way for artists to post a message regarding multiple venues at once, as if they were planning a tour across multiple states. There is really no way for an artist to announce him or herself or do any sort of promotion on the site besides being involved in an event that’s posted.

Despite its shortcomings, Splashtone is a noble attempt at executing a very good idea. Time–and the site’s cashflow–will tell what the future holds.