Japan’s music scene opens its arms to foreign startup iFlyer

Like many web entrepreneurs, Malek Nasser’s business grew out of a personal need for something the internet wasn’t yet providing. Moving to Osaka from his native UK a decade ago to work for a web startup, he had recently relocated to Tokyo.

“Suddenly, from knowing everything happening in Osaka, I went to knowing nothing, so I decided to develop a club search engine in Tokyo,” he recalls over lunch near the iFlyer office in Shibuya. “It was kind of ironic because here I was living in the heart of Shibuya, and I didn’t even know I was right down the street from Womb.”

While there were plenty of websites about clubbing in Tokyo at the time, none of them provided an efficient way of finding out what was happening on a given Saturday night. “The way that people searched for events was to go to each club’s site, and the pages weren’t frequently updated,” Nasser says. “So the idea was to make an event search engine that would also be useful on mobile phones—the slogan was, ‘What’s going on?’”

Five years later, iFlyer is Japan’s largest clubbing site, with over 1,700 events listed at any given time, ranging from live concerts to after-hours parties. But it’s more than a simple database—the site is packed with artist profiles, audio and video content, and event reports, in both English and Japanese.

“When you look at a page, it’s actually a massive collaboration between the artist, club and promoter, each of which does the best they can on their own profile,” explains Nasser’s partner, Sach Jobb, an American who came onboard from Kyoto University soon after the company was founded. “We’re kind of a mashup site. We rely on YouTube for the videos, Ustream for live streaming, SoundCloud for music… so you’ve got this collaborative, almost Wiki-style effort to make it as best as possible [sic].”

But things were rough for a foreign startup in the early days. “When we launched iFlyer, marketing it to the clubs was tricky because we had no name value,” Nasser recalls. “It took a lot of persuading to get the clubs to use it, but as soon as they did, they were convinced, because they end up saving so much money.”

The key to getting Japanese clubs onboard was having them use iFlyer for their homepage—meaning they didn’t need to pay a web designer and also had an instant, targeted audience. “If you build a homepage for your club, unless you promote it well, no one is going to come and see it,” Nasser says. “With iFlyer, on any given month we have around 250,000 unique users. They’re coming for a very specific reason.”

“There was definitely a need for it,” chips in Jobb, noting that the firm has major clients like Shibuya’s Club Asia. “When we launched in Osaka, we were surprised by how quickly it grew. And every year we are surprised. We’re pretty proud of our numbers now.”

Like MySpace or Facebook, iFlyer depends on users to both generate content and decide which events are popular. “Without the artists and venues, iFlyer is just a technological shell,” says Nasser, who’s been programming since he was seven. “It’s the artists and promoters and venues who make it what it is. We don’t input any info ourselves—that’s our policy. We treat all events at the same level. The ranking system is all user-driven; it depends on how many users it gets. The formula is not secret, we’re pretty open about how to get ranked highly.”

With Japanese artists now listing their iFlyer sites along with their MySpace and Mixi pages, the company looks to be in a strong position for growth. But, as is always the case with the rapidly shifting hi-tech industry, success can never be taken for granted. For now, the iFlyer crew is just enjoying its run. “There was a lot of pain and suffering at the beginning—for many years it was a lot of hard work with no salary,” Nasser recalls. “But I’m very proud of where we stand. As we move more into the core music industry, it gets very interesting going to events and seeing amazing artists play—it’s both a business and a hobby.”

For more information, see http://iflyer.tv.

This story originally appeared in Metropolis magazine (www.metropolis.co.jp).

© Japan Today