2016 was an incredible year for the Encore team and our musicians. 2017 is now well underway, but I’d like to quickly tell you about some of our biggest achievements and developments over the last twelve months.

Onwards and Upwards

The number of enquiries we’ve been receiving for Encore musicians to perform at events up and down the UK has been increasing by an average of 35% every month!

The final column is a prediction based on the number of enquiries we’ve received so far this month, but if we continue the way we’re going, we’ll be handling 17x more bookings this month than we were just six months ago. That’s a lot of gigs!

Top Quality Gigs

We’re having a hard time keeping track of the out-of-this-world gigs we’ve been booking Encore musicians for in recent months.

As well as recent bookings for our friends at Facebook, Google and John Lewis, we also fielded a number of international enquiries, with Encore musicians performing for events in Germany, France and Switzerland.

Here’s a few of our top picks from 2016:

Linking up with fellow music startup, Sofar Sounds, to present the Ayoub Sisters

June

Helping Anibal Hernandez get a six-month contract with the Carnival Breeze cruise liner

May – November

Ginny and the Tonic rocking the Guinness Tent at Murrayfield Stadium

November Scotland rugby matches

Atomic Brass cheering on the crowd at a Hull City vs Man City football match

December

Apps for all

After many hours of coding and intense discussion with musicians, we released our Encore apps! Our Android and iPhone apps give musicians the chance to get ahead of the game by managing their booking enquiries on the go (learn more about this by watching our incredibly serious and academic “History of Music” film above).

Together, the apps have been downloaded thousands of times, and we’ve received great feedback from musicians (keep it coming!). We’ve also already released our first app update so stay tuned for more features and functionality in the coming months!

New investment, new team members

In October, we announced via the tech press that we had successfully closed a £560k round of investment, which has enabled us to take Encore to new heights and grow our team.

We began as a motley crew of four in January, and there are now eight of us! In chronological order, we welcomed the following legends to our ranks:

• Paula Muldoon, Business Developer & Violinist
• Alexandra Fletcher, Bookings Manager & Cellist
• Sophie Rimington-Pounder, Developer & Singer
• Simon Meredith, Head of Design & DJ Festival Organiser
• Gustavo Pezzi, Developer & Jazz Organist

We’re on the hunt for a Head of Marketing to join our team. If you’d like to discuss this role with me, please get in touch: [email protected].

The largest musical community in Europe

We grew our community from 5,000 to over 20,000 musicians in the space of a year!

Encore is spreading like wildfire, and we’re thrilled to work with such a great variety of talented artists. We are now one of the largest networks of musicians in Europe, which means we can satisfy any and all musical requests for events around the UK. We’re looking forward to welcoming many more fantastic musicians to the network in 2017.

Encore goes to Hollywood

To explain how Encore works, we worked with our good friend Guillaume at BORKH to create a film explaining exactly how Encore’s unique technology helps musicians. The whole process – which involved brainstorming, storyboarding, auditioning, filming, editing, CGI and audio production! – lasted around six months, and we were really pleased with the final result.

We had an inkling it would go down well, but we were absolutely blown away by the response it received. To date, the video has been viewed over 115,000 times across Facebook and YouTube, and we haven’t stopped receiving positive feedback since its release.

Thank you to everyone who helped us put it together, and a HUGE thank you to Guillaume, who really is a god amongst video-producing men.

Resources Page – the best advice for musicians

As well as booking musicians for gigs, we want to help them develop their careers and answer any questions they may have about the industry. To achieve this, we launched our Resources page in November which is full of useful articles on topics such as:

• Public Liability Insurance
• Dealing with injury and stage anxiety
• Audition advice

& and much more.

Thank you!

Finally, we would like to thank our musicians for all your hard work and stellar performances throughout 2016. Encore would be nothing without our talented community of hardworking professionals.

We have some big announcements coming in 2017, so stay tuned to our blog for regular updates. Here’s to an even bigger year than the last!