Sitting on a sunny rooftop overlooking Neukölln gives a nice metaphor for how on top of the Berlin scene the Beatguide team is. With Berlin’s renowned electronic scene and rising entry fees, the necessity for informed club-goers is greater than ever before. That’s where their electronic music event platform comes in – think a more user-friendly and more modern Resident Advisor.
The Berlin-based startup has just released the free iOS app in the iTunes store. After a low-key prototype, and the launch of the web app in February, the startup is ready for its rebirth.
The idea for Beatguide came to co-founder Tino Ehrich when he was in London. With high prices, the colossal size of the city, and a lack of any complete guide to music events, he settled for staying in rather than wasting his money on a club with bad music.
Tino, alongside his team Brendon Blackwell and Stefan Baumschlager, aims to provide a comprehensive platform where you can find the music and the events together. While scrolling through an aesthetically pleasing grid of upcoming events, you can click on the SoundCloud bar at the bottom of the screen to listen to any one of the artists playing in Berlin in the next 14 days. Users can sync artists they follow on SoundCloud with Beatguide in order to inform them when their favourite artists are playing.
Brendon said: “Beatguide is really trying to inspire people through discovery rather than giving them just texts, lists and the broad data that you see on most of these music platforms. I think all types of music could benefit from this kind of platform.”
There is plenty of competition to Beatguide, most notably in the shape of Resident Advisor, but Brendon added: “They are loved but a bit old-school with its all text and no images approach. It’s not inspiring, it doesn’t make me think ‘oh wow that’s an awesome bunch of text, gotta go there’. We can offer something that appeals to everyone.”
The team has collective experience with startups like Last.fm, Crowdpark and Rdio, and so they are no strangers to the Berlin tech scene. For the moment they are internally funded but plan on seeking funding later on.
In future, there are plans to give users the ability to add events, venues, artist profiles and labels. The team are currently finishing up a widget for blogs, Facebook and Twitter. The widget will be the complete package of the event – with the URL, artist and event info, and the option to listen to it. The overall idea is to hook promoters in with this and then move on to the venues and artists.
Beatguide will also be expanding to other cities in the coming months.