Aidan Nulman, “mysterious vagabond” to his friends, is a 22-year-old University of Toronto student from Montreal. Boasting an iTunes library of 28,000 songs and a high school career as drummer in his punk rock band, Misportrayed, Nulman sounds like every other music-loving young adult.
The difference: Nulman has ventured into the revolutionary trade of social networking.
Facebook and Twitter have a new counterpart, created specifically with musicians in mind— Youphonics.com.
After moving to Toronto for university in 2006, Nulman found himself without drums or a band.
“I had no time to go on Craigslist researching people,” he said. I was wishing for an easy way to find musicians wherever I would move [in the future] and continue playing with the musicians I would leave behind,” Nulman recalled.
This yearning brewed for four years, until August 2009.
That summer, Nulman’s friend, a band manager, proposed the idea of putting music up in cyberspace to make fans happy.
“If you pay, I will go out and build it,” Nulman said. He said the two started working on the page that night.
He said the site’s groundwork was laid out by December, and the site was up and running in January 2010, in partnership with two Toronto web firms.
“I had never done anything like this before,” Nulman said. “It was based on creative vision and letting [the team] go wild.”
“What surprised me most was how much blueprinting actually went into it,” he said.
The website itself has several different sections.
In the “sound room,” users can upload or record their music, from which point anyone can discover it, and create an additional “stem” based on that one core sound.
Users still have standard social networking features, such as personal profiles, private messaging, tagging, and liking, but all for the purpose of “getting people playing together and making more music than they were in the past,” Nulman explained.
Nulman cited an example of how the site could be used to make music across time zones.
Member Landon Braverman uploaded a professionally recorded trumpet piece and linked the piece to a piano recording.
Subsequently a user from Serbia, Max Tarkhov, decided to write new lyrics and sing over the piano portion.
These distant connections and musical metamorphoses are exactly the results Nulman had been hoping for, he said.
“Music is more or less constantly in a state of evolution,” Nulman said.
“When you create music . . . when you’re dealing with the imagination, you are never really looking at a finished product..”
“There is always something new that can be brought to the table,” he said.
The site had 800 users as of July 2010 and has since grown.
Membership is currently by invitation, but Nulman said it won’t stay that way.
Nulman said he is working on hiring full-time staff members, promoting via press kits, and sorting out the bugs. He said he plans to release a public version of the site in December.