BandPay (bandpay.me), the milestone-based payment platform, is announcing its recent deal to support Pensado’s Place, the popular YouTube channel for audio professionals. Led by Dave Pensado, it’s a hub for the audio engineering community.

“We know that engineers are the heart of the recording industry,” says BandPay founder and co-CEO DeCarlos Garrison. “We built BandPay to help serve them and to build more trust into the deals they strike every day.”

Teaming up with Pensado was a natural way to reach audio professionals. Over the last four decades, Dave Pensado helped artists craft platinum records, winning a Grammy for his work. Since 2011, he and collaborator Herb Trawick have used their weekly show to share the tricks of the trade and to highlight their fellow engineers and producers, whose work is essential, fascinating, and often underrecognized. They have built a notable audience, with 225K subscribers and hundreds of millions of views.

“A lot of behind-the-scenes work goes into the music we hear, and BandPay wanted to be a part of what Dave and Herb have created,” Garrison notes. “We wanted to show this community how to make collaborations go more smoothly from a financial perspective.”

BandPay can empower more productive studio work by smoothing out the rough edges of project planning and negotiation. The app uses milestones, mutually agreed upon tasks with deadlines and payment amounts, to release guaranteed funds from one party to another. The milestone system prevents misunderstandings, time-consuming follow ups, and losses, when the work is done, but payment is lagging.

About BandPay

BandPay is redefining how musicians get paid. The app helps creative collaborators set milestones, release guaranteed funds when those milestones are reached, and keep focused on what really matters: making music. Founded by a Florida-based duo, one a music business veteran and one an experienced developer, BandPay provides a simple solution for the complicated problem of work-for-hire and handshake contracts.

BandPay, the payment platform designed to help creative collaborators come to and stick to agreements, is announcing $2 mil investment in its iOS and Android app launch. 

“We’re honored to receive this investment from an angel investor, who sees the potential and value of BandPay and our related platform PAYMNT,” says BandPay co-founder and co-CEO Gleb Teper. “This is a crucial investment at an important time for our company.” 

BandPay will use this investment to build its user base, starting with artists, producers, and other music professionals, as well as to continue building out features to serve them. At launch, BandPay will already offer creatives a broad set of customizable tools to let them establish agreements that lock payment to agreed-upon milestones. As these milestones are met, guaranteed funds are paid out. The platform is designed to eliminate the potential for misunderstanding, scope bloat, and fraud, while empowering artists to reduce costs and losses for creative projects.

“We see so much potential to relieve the stress artists and managers face constantly,” notes BandPay co-founder, co-CEO, and music business veteran DeCarlos Garrison. “Financial tools make a huge difference for artists, who often have really narrow margins and limited resources to pull off ambitious projects. We’re hoping to remove one layer of uncertainty and distrust from their work and let them do more of what they really love doing.”

About BandPay

BandPay is redefining how musicians get paid. The app helps creative collaborators set milestones, release guaranteed funds when those milestones are reached, and keep focused on what really matters: making music. Founded by a Florida-based duo, one a music business veteran and one an experienced developer, BandPay provides a simple solution for the complicated problem of work-for-hire and handshake contracts.

Website: bandpay.me/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/bandpay.me/

Fintech, if you build it right, can reach people unreachable by traditional banks. It has the flexibility to meet people where they are, on their phones, on a bus, say, and give them what they need. It can fill major gaps in financial services and support, not just by shaking up established players but by rolling out targeted, specialized services.

The music business is the perfect example of an underserved community ready to embrace the right kind of fintech innovation. Musicians are notoriously unbanked, poorly served by traditional financial institutions. My own career involved way too many cash transactions, and by that I mean sticking huge quantities of cash in a box and overnighting it. The cash-only nature of the business--from what musicians get “from the door” at a club to what they pay each other for work in the studio--leads to serious problems. Musicians get stiffed regularly and sadly stiff each other regularly. The cash they carry can put them and their teams in harm’s way, leading to misunderstandings, physical disputes, and legal troubles.

The reliance on cash isn’t by choice. Musicians and other music-related professionals want financial services; they just need something that fits how their business works. Any business that runs this way has clearly been let down by more traditional banking establishments. Musicians’ struggles can show where innovation can happen, and how unbanked communities see better results when given the right tech tools to manage their financial lives.

The gap between what musicians need and what traditional financial institutions have provided opens up the moment you decide to go pro as an artist. If you want to start a business, you can go to a bank and often get a loan to help you set up an office or buy essential equipment. Unless you have a massive recording catalog or proof of revenue as an already established musician, you can’t leverage your music-related business plans. For artists or other entrepreneurs who need funds or a loan, it’s all based on your personal credit. Music isn’t seen as something that makes money.

We can’t blame it all on banks, of course. Artists have struggled to focus on the business side of what they do. That makes perfect sense; as an artist, you just focus on art, on creativity. With all the changes in the music business, however, it can’t be that way anymore, and no one should do it “for the love.” Musicians are creating content, and there’s value there. 

This value lets us put a price on music and begin to bring musicians into the financial fold. Ideally, we’d have one central toolkit or system to help artists with what they want to accomplish, something that would bring in elements of payroll, analytics, inventory for band merchandise, and non-predatory microloans based on predicted future revenues from recordings and publishing. This one-stop tool has to do all this, all while working seamlessly on a smartphone.

To build this, and to build trust with what has long been a cash-centric community, we need to start simply, with transactions. The most common transactions happen between collaborators, meaning artists and other artists--like when Gucci Mane rolls into the studio to drop a few verses for a feature--or creatives, be they mastering engineers or social media gurus. Musicians, like a lot of other communities operating outside traditional banking, are using payment apps for these transactions, but there’s more tech could offer to bring more artists into the financial fold. Sending virtual payments is fine, but creating a framework for payment connected to specific project milestones, for example, is better tailored to the community’s needs and helps inspire more trust to the wary, cash-reliant musicians out there. When you can see your collaborator has the funds to pay you, and you know exactly when and how these funds will be unlocked as the project evolves, you have more bandwidth to be creative and you are likely to see your financial relationships in a new light. You also have more ability to work through the inevitable tensions that can come with creative projects. The expectations are there in black and white--and so are the incentives. 

Trust is a major factor in connecting with the unbanked, and musicians are no exception. Products that reflect their real concerns, that support their activities in meaningful ways yet remain simple, transparent, and mobile, can encourage this trust. New financial approaches powered by tech check all these boxes, and promise to offer new financial security and support to those sick of carrying around stacks of bills.

A singer with a vision for a new single is looking for a producer. She asks around, finds a guy who’s a friend of a friend and sounds promising. They come to terms, she pays him--only to get ghosted. She’s got no track, and now she has to raise money from scratch, doubling the cost of the single.

This story and its like happen regularly to artists, managers, and other music professionals. “A shared scene or network implies trust, but that trust is too often broken, either explicitly or due to misunderstandings,” says DeCarlos Garrison, a music business veteran and serial tech entrepreneur. “I’ve experienced this problem first hand. We knew there was a way to solve it.” 

The solution is Bandpay, a fully customizable payment platform that allows two parties to establish milestones in a project, assign payments to each milestone, and guarantee that funds are available to complete a transaction. The easy-to-use app (for Android and iOS) also incorporates mediation, helping parties come to an understanding if a project goes sideways, shifts scope, or remains incomplete. 

“Artists hear and think a lot about the revenue side of their business,” Garrison notes. “There are a lot of tools and apps to help maximize revenue, everything from marketing automation to data analysis. But there are a lot fewer tools available for controlling the cost side of the business equation and preventing unnecessary losses. In this age of lean margins and fast-paced creation, we thought that needed to change.”

“We built an app that is as simple as possible, while providing an easy solution to a key problem, how to make sure everyone sticks to their side of the agreement when a service is being provided,” adds developer Gleb Teper, who with Garrison co-founded Bandpay. 

Garrison and Teper originally bonded over an ambitious plan to create a suite of educational and business tools for musicians and their teams. As they worked on their ideas, they realized something far simpler was desperately needed by artists, producers, and other music professionals: a payment platform tailor made for business arrangements once made on the fly and sealed with a handshake (at best). 

Bandpay replaces the handshake or verbal “heck yeah” with a clear, concise roadmap for project completion, as well as complete clarity surrounding the availability of funds. As an artist or manager, you know what’s been promised, the timeline, and the ultimate cost of the project. As a creative service provider, you know your collaborator can pay you, what’s expected and when. Bandpay is designed not just for work-for-hire-type creative jobs, but for any service that’s being provided to an artist, such as social media management or marketing projects, or by an artist, such as influencer deals or branded appearances.

“Artists can get so excited about their music, their dream, that they don’t realize that they are making an investment decision. If someone doesn’t make good on that investment, they are taking away from your ability to create in the long run,” Garrison muses. “This issue really resonates with people in the industry, who really crave the peace of mind of knowing that you will get what you pay for, or that you will be paid in a timely and appropriate matter if you do the work you promise.”

In addition to a detailed set of deadline-based milestones both parties agree to and that unlock payment, Bandpay offers tools to help parties work things out when delays, errors, and other misfortunes strike, as they often do in creative work.

“It’s all based on the milestones at the end of the day,” explains Teper. “If the terms of a milestone aren’t met, and both sides aren’t satisfied, Bandpay tries to guide them to work together and come up with a solution among themselves. The seller couldn’t deliver the product, say, and offers refund. Or some work was done, but not all and everyone agrees on a smaller payment for that milestone. Perhaps work needs to be revised before all agree a milestone has been reached.” Should these options not feel adequate, Bandpay refers the dispute to the bank where funds are held for the project, for further mediation and review. “There are ways to pay people quickly, but nothing of this kind, that really embraces the whole process of completing a project. We’ve filled a big void for musicians and creators,” adds Teper.

Garrison and Teper hope this will usher in a new era of reduced friction and increased trust between people making music and undertaking other projects together. “So many transactions go wrong. Widely available payment apps don’t protect against this, and we all know instances when things turned out badly,” Garrison reflects. “Artists and creative people just can’t afford to lose money this way, not to mention friends and connections. They need to be paid. They need to get the product. We want them to have a trusted partner to bridge that gap between hopes and delivered tracks.”

Bandpay will be available in app stores mid-March 2020.