TommyJams

May 23, 2013

WhatsApp Music festivals and concerts are not a new phenomenon in India, over the past decade or so these events have climbed up the pace. It has witnessed raft of innovation during the same, yet there are many areas which are still untouched and need improvement. Parth Saxena from TommyJams started working on eradicating the mess existing in organizing these events. They take the artist- venue-fan interaction to a whole new level, making the system more transparent, hassle-free and inexpensive in the process. TommyJams is an initiative to collect artists and venues, and provide a transparent, hassle-free and inexpensive web-platform for them to interact. There is a huge potential in the creative works of the artists of India, TommyJams works on showcasing their talent. Parth shares “TommyJams as a platform connects artists, venues and fans like never before. We aim to revolutionize live entertainment by consistently providing innovative technology.” All the events and user details are easily accessible through the web app. So any user can easily navigate through the website and find out relevant information. The startup aims to build a community of artists, venues and fans, where booking and attending Parth Saxena performances in cities across India is made as easy as possible, through a user friendly web technology. Venues can launch their events online and book interested artists to perform, in just a few seconds, and fans get to stay tuned with all the events happening in their city and get closer to their favourite artists and venues. Founded in October 2012, the startup plans to build and support a flexible yet credible DIY culture where the works of every artist reaches out to as many people as possible. TommyJams was formed by Parth Saxena and Nikhil Kapur, computer Science graduates from Delhi college of Engineering (DCE). Both contribute to end-to-end operations at TommyJams from coding, testing of the webpage to marketing, business development, media, content etc. Parth has worked on many internationally renowned technology projects across India, USA and Europe. He also excelled in a course on Technology Entrepreneurship from Stanford University which made him combine two of his long lasting passions – music and technology. Nikhil started work at Nikhil Kapur Microsoft for two years after graduation and left the same to pursue his passion for music and technology. The duo often seeks the help of their close ones while handling the working at TommyJams. They are also looking to start a summer internship program, where few interns will handle different roles across cities. TommyJams was born at Stanford University program where the entire project conceptualization, market research and venue structuring was carried out. And by the time they created the original model for the music artist and their audience to engage, they already had few artists and venue on board. The startup has received encouraging response since then and now they have a presence across Bangalore, Delhi and Goa. In less than five months they have organized over 100 shows and have over 400 artists/bands and 80 venues on their list. They also have strong set of partners with which they work on regular basis such as Stanford University, Startup Festival and Radio One. They have hosted events at International venues across USA, Sweden, Spain, Ireland, Russia and France. While the work at TommyJams seems to increase with each passing day, the founders are keen on maintaining the pace with which they had started out. However, Parth feels that getting quality people on board is one of the main challenges they face “Getting the right people into the company and taking the expansion plans forward, with limited resources at our disposal, is one of the biggest challenges that we face.” The startup faces some sort of competition with the event agencies distributed across the music industry. But Parth thinks they have enough in the kitty to face the same. “The database of artists and venues at our end is many times bigger than that of an event agency, and even smaller artists/venues can participate very easily. Moreover, they tend to charge exorbitant amount of commissions from both parties for their match-making services. Also, a lot of information regarding money is not revealed to the artists/venues.” Check out TommyJams to know more and follow them on Facebook Advertisement