'Someone has to take a chance on you': Leitrim musician launches Ceol Connect app after €200k investment

A new gig booking app for bars, Ceol Connect, was launched last Thursday night at the Barrelstone in Carrick-on-Shannon by three business students from DCU, including Carrick musician Eoghan Matthews.

The app aims to solve the problem of booking gigs for bars and, hopefully, make it easier for young artists to get a start performing and for bookers to take the headache out of finding artists who can fill the bar.

The trio first got the idea when they had to put together a fake business for a college module.

Eoghan Matthews, who got his start in music in the bars around Carrick-on-Shannon, is well accustomed to the struggles of trying to get your start in music and getting booked as a live performer for the first time.

“When I first started gigging, the best way to describe it is someone has to take a chance on you,” he says.

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The app gives artists a place to market themselves to potential bookers.

“It's actually like your LinkedIn profile as a business person, that you can see where you've played before, you can have videos of you playing.”

“It's kind of like a portfolio and then for the bar, on the other flip side of it is the bar is not going in completely blind because the first time I played in a bar, the barman couldn't be sure whether I'd clear the bar or if I'd bring in more business because that's what music is for, a bar is to bring in more business.”

In the cities, like Cork, Galway, and Dublin, gigs are booked through agencies who will take their cut of the artists' booking fee.

When they began interviewing bar managers for their project, they realised that the old way of booking artists was causing problems both ways, with artists often cancelling last minute and bar managers needing to scramble to find someone.

Meanwhile, bar managers were also having to deal with booking artists months ahead to ensure they had good quality acts, and as an artist you would need to lock in your gigs nearly a year ahead of time.

“When I was 18, I didn't really know if I wanted to be around the following summer, a full year away, because I wanted to do J1, I wanted to do Interrail and stuff, but if you say no to the gigs and I didn't do any of that stuff, then I'd have no work for the summer, basically.”

There was weight behind the idea, and they applied to the Enterprise Ireland New Frontiers course, which provided them with a salary for six months and space to work on it.

They have raised €200,000 in investment for the start-up so far as they launch the product, starting in Carrick on Shannon this week.

“If there's anything that goes wrong or if there are any problems or bugs in the app, we trust the bars in Carrick and the musicians in Carrick to let us know, and we'll fix that.”

The goal is to expand quickly after they have trialled it in Carrick; they aim to expand across Ireland quickly, then into the UK within a year.