Read all of the past Cohere Bandwidth updates here.

The survey is closed and we had a great response from the community. I’m going to channel my inner grad-student and go all scholarly on you. Hang on to your vintage hats.

ONE BILLION people were asked to complete a survey about their current conditions and preferences for potential shared rehearsal space in Fort Collins, Colorado. Responses were requested via email, Facebook and Twitter. We requested that respondents be “in a band” or “a musician” in Fort Collins, Colorado.

The goal of the survey was to find out the current reality for musicians and their rehearsal spaces including satisfaction and cost. We also wanted to gather preliminary data on importance of common rehearsal space amenities, location and to find people to participate in focus groups.

63 musicians completed the online survey. Click on any of the graphs to see larger images.

The average age of those who took the survey was 32 years. The youngest was 18, the oldest; 52.

Surprisingly, the majority of respondents are satisfied or very satisfied (32 total) with their current rehearsal space. Based on our initial talks with band members, we assumed that there would be FAR more unsatisfied rehearse-ers. 20 respondents were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their current space.

We also really need to know how much people are paying for their rehearsal space. The vast majority pay NOTHING. We assume that this means they are rehearsing at home. <—-this sounds familiar. Freelancers, anyone? A shortcoming of our research is that we can’t correlate satisfaction with how much they pay. Right now we assume that those who pay the most are the most satisfied but this is an excellent focus group topic to find out more.

We never want to assume that people want to share. Especially when thousands of dollars of band equipment is in the equation. So we asked. To our delight, 78% of the musicians we surveyed are willing to share. Sharing FTW.

It’s often not terribly important to get hung up on physical amenities this early in the process BUT with the recent thefts of band equipment we knew we needed to at least ask about security. We also heard that many people rehearse without a bathroom (yikes), heat (brrrr) or soundproofing (sorry neighbors). We researched a bunch of other shared rehearsal spaces online and tossed in some of their common amenities (vending machines) just to see what would happen.

Security, clean electrical, cost and locked storage won. Vending machines failed miserably as did discounts to business services and having an included PA in the space. We’ll dig more in to these things in the focus groups.

It was important to communicate how different the price of real estate is in different parts of our town. We indicated this in our survey by using dollar signs. The Mulberry/Industrial area is the most affordable and this got the majority of responses followed by the Old Town as the most expensive area. This leads me to believe that we might have two very different groups of musicians in our group. It will be important to delve further in to this topic at the focus groups.

Conclusion: we are stoked. The focus groups are set up and Ian is taking RSVPs from those survey respondents who expressed interest. BTW, 60% of people who took the survey gave us their email addresses which we think is very, very neat.

Read all of the Cohere Bandwidth updates here.

And another shout out to our awesome and generous focus group pizza sponsors. Visit their websites today. Did I mention that they are all Independent business owners in our town? Yeah. They’re cool like that. Oh, they are ALL either current or alumni members of Cohere. How fucking sweet is that?!

Amanda Miller, The Place Setting Company

Molly Hoff, The Freelance Bean Counter

Carson Block, Consultant and Edgewater Juke

image credits: Angel Kwiatkowski