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ON TRACK, ON LINE
17.02.2012 / Over to you / 0 Comments
The creators of a successful global music listing website have moved out of their spare bedroom to create a big new arts resource
The dot com millionaire, the individual with a nerdish understanding of web tech-nology who had one good idea that almost overnight went glob- al, was a phenomenon of the Noughties. Too many crashed and burned for it to last, but the expansion of the web into our home lives has not slowed down, quite the opposite.
Success now does not come without a lot of hard work, patience, appreciable amounts of money and, most important, a flexible business plan.
All of which serves to introduce a new kid on the online block: One Stop Arts, "The new guide to London's glorious and eclectic arts scene".
The new site, which was launched on January 25, offers listings and reviews of music, dance, opera, theatre, visual arts and museum exhibitions. You may not recognise the bylines of the reviewers, they are mostly young, post-grad age, and essentially not professional (although some use pseudonyms).
And if all this sounds somehow familiar, it is. It is the creation of the husband and wife team, Alison and David Karlin, that four years ago in a back bedroom of their family home in Muswell Hill created Bachtrack, the listings site through that has now gone global and has 60 reviewers from around the world. One Stop Arts already has 30.
"They're people who have got something to say about what they see and who want to communicate their views" says Alison Karlin. "Through them we want to make the arts more accessible to a larger group of people. We want people who can write in an interesting way, not the George Bernard Shaw school of criticism which is all about the cleverness of the reviewer."
Now their operation has its own premises in nearby Crouch End, in a former piano factory and more recently the home of KTel Records. In some ways there are similarities with the dot com myth, but without the element of the progenitors being high school drop-outs or, sadly, becoming overnight millionaires.
David Karlin had been a professional computer whiz, working for Sage where he had been head of research and development. Weary of corporate life, four years ago he left to think about the next path his professional life might take, and took the Bachtrack.
He invented that system, and has now invented a new one - he calls it Plasmapp, plasma being the whole collection of stuff out there being made available through a single application - to create sites that will carry a depth of information devised for easy use at the recipient's end. "The starting point is the user, not the data" he says.
Twenty-five years before Karlin had built the first home business computer for Clive Sinclair, the legendary QL (for Quantum Leap) which beat Apple Macintosh to be the first mass-produced personal computer by a month. So he not only knows the technology, he has invented much of it and continues to do so. He is also aware of the business hazards along the way.
Alison Karlin was a City stock- broker before she married and had children. Both she and her husband have an instinctively deep love of music and, discussing what projects they could do together, came up with Bachtrack, something that could make commercial sense as well as be a shared interest.
Over the four years - a long time in the contemporary computer world - Bachtrack has been modified to make it more secure and compre- hensive, and it is now the largest classical concert finder on the web. After three years they were getting applications for events, often festi- vals, that wanted to be listed on Bachtrack. "We like to believe that classical music is larger than the mar- ket" Alison Karlin says.
In fact, Bachtrack took much longer to get moving than David Karlin has expected, because it was so hard to convince marketing departments of venues and orches- tras that online was sensible. The London Symphony Orchestra was one of the first to get the message, some still haven't been convinced.
One Stop Arts is altogether more sophisticated and larger, and staff are being taken on to run the operation in the new headquarters. From April, venues and arts administrators will be able to add their own listings to the site, when contractual details have been settled.
One Stop Arts is not Bachtrack. "It's not high art, it's the arts as entertainment" Alison says. "Next we want to look at art film, and the difficulty is going to be identifying what that is - does it include theatre and opera performance in cinemas? It can only grow as a resource and we have learned a great deal with a successful project. We are offering arts producers a platform to find audi- ences they don't know exist yet."
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