Bandwith Radio
locally crafted website hopes to connect fans to the music makers
Inspiration can come from the strangest of places. A Campbell’s soup can (Warhol’s art), working at an apple farm (Jobs’ computer company), some dirty dishes (Fleming’s penicillin). For Tony VandenBush, a UWEC grad and former Fall Creek resident, the inspiration for the company BandwithRadio came from an annoying lunch hour.
At his job in Iowa, Tony was on his break listening to a guerilla radio station and really liked an indie song. He went to the station’s site, clicked on the title, and it took him to Amazon music’s home page. The band had no site of its own, and was impossible to track down online, “so 45 minutes later I’ve lost my lunch hour and that much more of my life, and still no song,” Tony explained.
Considerably ticked off, Tony called his brother Jake and a web programming friend George Andrews, both in Eau Claire. “There should be a way for indie musicians and bands to get their music out there to be listened to, purchased, and recognized,” Tony said of his realization. Jake and George both thought it was a good idea, and suggested writing up a business plan. “So over the next two months I was constructing a plan and raising money for it,” Tony recalls.
As a biomedical research scientist, Tony wasn’t exactly poised for an easy transition. But time spent in the library and mountains of help from business savvy partners Jake and George helped pave the way for Bandwith. They had created a limited liability company, and went to friends and family to sell membership units for the needed capital funds. The units act like investor shares, except here members have no say in the company and just stand to benefit as venture capitalists if the company succeeds.
They then took that capital to Jetpack Web Development, an Eau Claire company run by Don Ross and Brian Racer. “We’re all about local on a national level, so when it came time to get the idea developed, we knew we wanted an Eau Claire company,” Tony said.
Bandwith.org (think “I’m with the band”) launched March 1, almost exactly a year after the infamous lunch break, offering a new service for people to listen to truly independent music and buy it directly. The site is also meant to cater to the bands and small labels, as it costs them nothing to upload music and they take home 60 cents on the dollar track purchase (Bandwith pays the transaction fees). If a musician gives a name, e-mail, location, genre, photo, and uploads original tracks of decent production value, they’re off and running. From there they can charge for tracks, offer them for free, give previews, and/or be a part of Bandwith’s radio streams. The site also contains an event calendar for live shows, and house classifieds for bands looking to buy/sell equipment or get new members. In the future they hope to add a merch sales section.
Right now the goal is to populate the site with bands and small labels. They currently have a few dozen bands including locals The Heart Pills, Snifter, and Jim Pullman Band. “I love the Eau Claire scene – I always have – so hopefully more will get involved,” Tony said.
Once they have about 100 artists, the radio portion will launch. Because they try to cater to the bands and only stand to make 2 to 5 cents per song sold, the radio streams will have user subscriptions of $3 a month or $25 a year for all of Bandwith’s multiple streams. “That may change, based on the reaction, but we want to try to avoid corporate influence with selling advertising time on the station so people can listen to the music without constant interruptions,” Tony said.
The partnership of the VandenBush brothers, Andrews, and Jetpack has been so smooth that they’re already holding talks for future web-based ventures, all of which will have been made possible by a frustrating lunch break.
