Behringer’s free online music gear marketplace launches… then crashes

Shortly before Christmas, Behringer announced that, under the auspices of its Music Tribe parent brand, it would soon be launching a free online gear marketplace to compete with the likes of eBay and Reverb. Well, now it’s arrived, though it hasn’t got off to the smoothest of starts.

Free Music Tribe landed on Monday and, to be fair, Behringer noted at the time that it was in beta and needed improvement. And sure enough, this morning there’s been a follow-up Facebook post explaining that the platform is “so overloaded with sign ups that the server has crashed and we now need to increase its capacity by ten times.”

Not ideal, then, but these are early days, and Behringer says that it’s “committed to making this the most amazing place for you to buy and sell gear”. To get involved, you need to create a free account, while selling requires that you create a shop, too. There’s no mention of having to pay a commission, so it looks like this is a genuinely free solution.

We’re told that Free Music Tribe is “a community built with trust as the foundation,” but Behringer also says: “As a next step, we’re planning to implement buyer and seller protection systems, as well as improvements on the customer experience”. These are important considerations, clearly, particularly if you’re planning on buying and selling a lot of high-ticket items.

You can sign up and have a nose around on the Free Music Tribe website. It remains to be seen if this will become the go-to online marketplace that Behringer says it wants it to be, but we don’t doubt that the scale of its ambition.