Wanduta: Giving Musicians the Things That Really Matter

The new music industry is rife with tools to help independent musicians deliver their content, facilitate communications with fans, and monetize the music they’ve worked so painstakingly hard to create. From digital distribution brokers (Tunecore, CD Baby) to band micro-financing sites (Sellaband) to artist analytics engines (Artist Data, Band Metrics), it seems like every day a new music technology start-up comes onto the scene, offering musicians a nuanced digital service.

Independent musicians now have a bevy of tools at their disposal which enable them to carve out, maintain, and optimize a web presence, as well as control of their marketing, PR, and distribution. This is democratizing, artist-empowering, and major-label emasculating. Choose any new music industry buzz-phrase you wish. But is this truly the golden age for independent musicians?

The day-to-day realities of being a musician, as most of us know, are less glamorous than the romanticized images. There’s the constant cycle of subsistence living, working temp gigs and one-off jobs just to make rent (healthcare coverage? Not with day labor…). There’s the disenchantment that comes with investing your heart and soul in your craft and not seeing results, and the nagging feeling that this music thing might not work out after all.

And the aforementioned digital tools, grand as they are, do little to address these day-to-day realities. What’s disturbing is that society has accepted these narratives as the status quo of being a musician- the poverty, the down-and-outness, the overall precarious existence.

Enter Wanduta, a start-up music industry company I work at that actually gives musicians the fundamental tools they need to build sustainable careers. We offer affordable healthcare coverage, a discount program tailored to musicians, and a whole bunch of other career-advancing services to their members. Taken directly from our mission statement:

If success [in music] is not met early and in abundance, the pressure to throw in the towel becomes more and more stifling…At Wanduta, musicians are first and foremost, and we believe they should be given the same window for development, maturity, and reward that is granted to other professions.

Wanduta offers benefits reminiscent of a union or trade organization, but is free to join and doesn’t have any stringent membership requirements, besides that applicants be independent musicians.

With all the talk of an emerging middle class of musicians, it’s good to see someone addressing these fundamental lifestyle necessities.

Golden age? Not quite yet, but if Wanduta has any say in things, we’re getting there.

James Bertuzzi is the Director of Marketing at Wanduta. He worked previously as a Marketing Rep for Warner Music Group, and is an active independent musician.