While attending MIDEM last week, I met Constantine Roussos, founder of the ".music" top level domain name initiative. Essentially, he's attempting to generate enough public support to successfully petition ICANN to add .music to the existing list of Generic Top Level Domain Name extensions, such as .com, .net, .org, etc. Constantine has already received over 1 million signatures supporting the .music extension, but it has not yet been approved, even though extensions like .biz, .jobs, .mobi, .museum, .name, .travel and others already exist. While the majority of musicians, bands and music industry companies rely on .com and/or .net for their...
Its been a long time coming, but I'm happy to announce that we finally released the public beta of Band Metrics this morning from Midem. What took so long? Great question. We had to re-engineer the entire system, as the previous two versions were flawed. This was a difficult decision that consumed our time, but it's better to get the architecture right before releasing it to the public. We now feel confident we've built a system, which is entirely Ruby/Rails that will not only collect, store and analyze artist data accurately, but will be fast and scale rapidly, as we...
ArtistData just released some significant improvements this morning. Below is a little bit of what Brenden Mulligan had to say (go here to read his detailed announcement): "Today we released the single largest revision to the ArtistData platform. For the past few months we've been reworking and improving the user interface to develop a framework that will allow us to drastically expand our site's capabilities. We are thrilled to share it with everyone today.... There are many back-end upgrades, including time-zone support to make our timed notifications more relevant, full character support so users all over the world can use...
AudioTag is a free music recognition service that allows you to identify over 1 million songs by simply uploading a 15 second clip (almost any audio file format and bit-rate is accepted), or by submitting a YouTube URL. It's an interesting service, especially since it's free so I tested AudioTag several times with well known songs and with only two exceptions, AudioTag provided the correct results each time, displaying the track title, artist name and album title. So it's fairly accurate recognizing mainstream music, but not so much with independent music. AudioTag also has a difficult time recognizing cover songs,...
As briefly mentioned last week, I've been quietly working on another project for the past few months, separately from my work on Band Metrics. Needless to say, I'm pretty tired, but today I'm pleased to announce that the initial beta of Music Scout is live. While there's still a ton of work to do, and the design is rudimentary, we wanted to go ahead and get it out there so we could get some feedback, and incorporate your changes and feature requests, as we've got a significant product road-map for Music Scout in 2010. Essentially, Music Scout is location-aware mobile...
Apps for listening to the most popular emerging songs and artists like We are Hunted will soon have a new addition with awsm.fm (pre-release private beta). Thoughts?
Similar to last year, below is a list of music tech related investments and M&A deals for 2009, sorted from the most recent to the oldest. If I've left a deal out, please add it by commenting to this post. Fourth Quarter 2009 (over $50,900,000): Emo Labs raises $1.5 million of convertible debt financing (December 16, 2009) EMI acquires music merchandise provider, Loudclothing.com (terms not disclosed; December 16, 2009) MySpace completes acquisition of Imeem for $1 million (December 08, 2009) Apple acquires LaLa for $17 million (December 04, 2009) Rdio raises capital (terms not disclosed; November 07, 2009) Abu Dhabi...
If you record live, or need to easily record song ideas from anywhere you are, then you've got to look at MultiTrack for the iPhone and iPod touch (2nd Generation) from Harmonicdog, because you can record 16 stereo tracks of studio quality audio for just $14.99 - an impressive mobile recording app that takes inexpensive portability to a new level, and it has an intuitive UI to boot: No doubt this app has some power as you can see from some of its features below, just wish it was available when I was lugging around a Tascam DA-30: Stereo Recording...
DigitSongs enables users to create custom ringtones for their own iPhone number, or every number in their contact list. Simply use a 10 digit phone number, as each digit represents a musical note, and since every phone number is different, each phone number will have its own unique song. The ringtones can be customized from a variety of genres including, Hip Hop, Rock, Pop, R&B and many more. Here's a quick demo of the app:
a skunk works project I created and have been working on separately from Band Metrics, but that's all I'm going to say for now... stay tuned.
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