Drooble Starts the Wheels On a Collaborative Music Community

Collaborating used to be difficult for musicians, but these days, artists essentially have all the tools they need for collaborative creation.  Well-established players like Soundcloud, Dropbox, Skype, and YouTube all facilitate the process of global jamming, teaching, and learning, though these are more tools than communities.  Into that landscape comes Drooble, a startup that wants to bring the now-global community of musicians and artists under one roof, and inject some soul into the musical interweebs.

Drooble, started by guitar enthusiast Melina Krumova, is initially focusing its energies around a few core areas: teaching and taking lessons, pairing compatible musicians, facilitating collaborative jamming, and band pages.  Those areas have been explored multiple times by other ventures, with companies like Giggem unsuccessfully trying to replace age-old methods for finding fellow bandmates; and Berklee College of Music very successfully expanding into online lessons.  But Drooble is aiming to connect these areas into a thriving, online musical community.

Drooble wants remove a lot of the friction from music teaching and learning, including cost, traveling, and geographical limitations.  On the teacher side, Drooble handles the backend chores of price-setting, scheduling, and collecting payments, with the resulting platform more focused on concentrated learning and technique-building.

Undoubtedly there’s something to the in-person learning experience that can never be replaced, though Drooble could easily complement in-person teaching with digital check-ins and remote lessons (while the student is traveling, for example).  Or, offer a great platform for quick tutorials and check-ins (on this fingering, that improvisation, a professional second opinion,  etc.)

Other teaching features, like a built-in metronome, are nice and show some musical DNA among the entrepreneurs.

Beyond the instructional areas, simple jamming is also a core component here (not to mention a great pleasure of life).  Here again, technology has caught up, with latency once a giant problem with internet-based musical collaboration.  Now, Drooble is bringing people together from all around the world, though perhaps the biggest issue here is that Drooble is still building: if you play French Horn and want to jam with other French Horn players, for example, there isn’t much to choose from (yet).  It’s a ‘build it and they will come’ situation that will hopefully evolve into a rich selection of different instrumentalists across all skill levels.

On the artist page side, Drooble offers a full suite of setup capabilities, with audio, video, image, and other aspects forming a landing pad.  That will allow Drooble musicians to more effectively connect with one another and fans, and bolster the community with jam outtakes and tips.  The ultimate vision for Drooble, now a DMN partner, is to build a serious community for musicians of all types, with a (hopefully) rich outpouring of great music and sustainability the result.  “Imagine a place where you could connect with people who are passionate about music,” Drooble blue-skies.  “Where you can learn from others and share your own knowledge and inspiration.

“Imagine a place where you can grow as a musician and earn a living doing what you love.”