The Music Teacher Map was conceived by Simon Hewitt Jones and Peter Tregear based on Simon's research at the Royal Academy of Music, London. It was designed by Shaun Dickie, and developed by Interberry. It's a division of Consonart.

'How do you find a music teacher?' This was the question that didn't seem to have an adequate answer. Whoever Simon asked, the answer was always the same: word of mouth. Sometimes people would ask at the local music shop, or look in the yellow pages. But neither really works. Sometimes you strike lucky; most of the time you don't. And anyway, how can you trust the yellow pages? Music Teaching is unregulated, so anyone can set up shop as a teacher. There are a lot of bad teachers out there.

So word of mouth is the one way you can be sure about who you're getting in touch with. But word of mouth also has one big problem: it's only as good as the people you know. If you're a musician working in a big city you can probably get a good answer about who the best music teachers are, but for most people, it's very difficult to know where to start looking.

Increasingly, people started searching online to find music teachers - Simon found this out first hand with his own violin teaching website, which produced a steady stream of enquiries. But the 'teacher directories' that kept popping up online just didn't do the job properly. Why not? They were just lists of names and phone numbers, without any indication that a teacher was really who they said they were, or whether they were any good.

Music Teacher Map solves the problem by putting word of mouth online, and making it better.