Brian Wentzloff will join other entrepreneurs to discuss the future of Memphis music at Music in the City presented by High Ground News and the EPIcenter on February 23. Register for free.
Technology developer and audio engineer Brian Wentzloff merged his love of technology and music into his company,
Musistic.
Several of the co-founders all related to the same pain point: each was in a band, one member moved away causing the band to break up because they could no longer collaborate with that member. Musistic solves this problem by creating software tools for musicians to easily collaborate with people anywhere in the world.
"We’ve created a product that integrates into the software that musicians are already using to record to allow them to collaborate with other people that might be using different software," explained Wentzloff. "When musicians record, whether it’s in a professional studio or on their laptop in their bedroom, the software they use is very complicated. There are dozens of different programs for them to use to do this, and if the people they want to collaborate with are using a different program, traditionally one of them will have to switch and learn something completely new so they are using the same program. Not so with Musistic. We integrate into all the existing systems with a plugin that allows people to send tracks back and forth to one another regardless of the program they are using. They can do all the recording without having to get out of their creative space and deal with a ton of IT issues."
Aside from allowing musicians to collaborate from afar, Musistic is also launching a marketplace for musicians to find others to collaborate with.
Launched in 2013 through
Start Co's tech start-up accelerator,
Seed Hatchery, Musistic has grown to 12,000 registered users.
"Musistic serves as an example of startup innovation playing to Memphis-area industry strengths. Since Start Co.'s original 2013 investment of money and mentorship into Musistic, we have seen the business continually evolve to meet the needs of the music production market," said Eric Mathews, Start Co CEO and Founder.
Wentzloff admits that raising capital for start-ups in Memphis has been difficult, but he feels the tide is turning with the changes he's seen since inception in 2013.
"When we graduated from the Seed Hatchery business accelerator program we were one of two companies that ended up getting investment and it wasn’t until six months later. Back then, people weren’t really hot on investing in tech startups. However, since then, we’ve seen investors invest even more money than we got in many different tech companies. It seems every year that more and more local investors are warming to the idea of investing in tech startups."
For potential entrepreneurs looking to start their business in Memphis Wentzloff says there are a lot of local resources. "Get out and find them. Plug in to the Start Co events, the
EPIcenter events. Come to Undercurrent. All those things. There are incredibly knowledgeable people there that have decided to make their career helping potential entrepreneurs. That’s all they want to do, so get out there and talk to them."
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