Band Metrics Opens Up its Private Beta

About time, right? Yeah, we agree. Unfortunately we encountered some significant hurdles during the past 10 months that put us behind schedule, and while many of you have been waiting for several months (we truly appreciate your patience!), please know that we plowed through these hurdles as fast as we could. The good news is that they're behind us, so you should now see faster updates and features from us going forward.

What I can say is that data analytics for the music industry is all that we do, and we're working on delivering a sophisticated system, not just a web app. Additionally, we're doing some innovative development through our patent-pending band scoring system, and initiatives like the Music Data Exchange Format (mDef). So hang in there with us, because at the end of the day, I think you'll be glad you did. Moreover, we're not planning on charging for our service anytime soon, as understanding your needs and building the appropriate music metrics for you is a joint effort that we're committed to, and so you get to enjoy Band Metrics as we build it to meet your needs.

With that said, we're excited to announce that we let several thousand users in our system this morning. However, some of our features may not function correctly or fully, but we're working to fix and expand them as soon as possible, as well as rollout additional features. Because of this, we're going to remain in private beta a little while longer while we polish our service. So if you didn't receive a welcome email from us this morning, than please use the code indiemusictech to gain access, but it will only be good for the next 25 people that use it.

In case you're curious what you can do with Band Metrics today, here's a brief list:

• track plays, fans, profile views and comments across MySpace, Last.fm, iLike, SoundCloud and YouTube
• track radio plays from over 3,500 terrestrial radio stations 
• view real-time reviews about your music on Musebin  
• view real-time comments about your band on Twitter
• view 8 different types of scores relative to your music including hotnes, fandom, and brand strength, among others

And here's a screenshot of the inside of Band Metrics:

  
Curious about what's next for Band Metrics?

• daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly stats/reports
• enhanced charts and visualizations
• advanced data porting
• additional social media site monitoring and management
• automated actions
• manage multiple bands from one login
• view real-time comments about your band in Facebook and within the blogosphere
• API
• Sentiment Analysis

We also have a few tricks up our sleeve that we have not yet disclosed, so stay tuned for some exciting announcements.

Finally, if you tell us in the comments section of this post why you think your band should be displayed on our home page, we'll select the top five artists we believe gave the best reasons.

mDef Logo and Update

We've made a few updates to the Music Data Exchange Format (mDef) and created this logo for anyone to use. You can also grab it here. Again, we'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts on how the format can be improved.

Also, SoundCloud is planning to incorporate elements of mDef with the next release of their API. If you have any questions/comments about mDef, please post them here.

Wax MP3: A New Project from Lucas Gonze

Lucas Gonze, creator of Webjay and the XSPF open audio playlist format has released his latest project, Wax MP3, a super fast and minimalist browser-based radio station for music on the open web. Here's a screenshot:

Presently, it only pulls Creative Commons music from Magnatune, but I have a feeling other providers will follow. Here's what Lucas had to say from an email I sent him:

On your site, you say "We build web music players for business." What does that mean?

I work with companies that are hosting free streams in order to drive business goals. If there's a band that's all about their live show, they should be using streams to funnel listeners to ticket sales or the mailing list. Or if they're about pre-orders for the CD, that's what the stream should be pushing.

That's the business significance of Magnatune. They're very relaxed about free streams, but they also have clear business requirements that the listening experience is driving listeners towards.

And notice the similarity to Linux, which has parts that are free and parts that generate revenues; Wax MP3 helps you use free listens to get fans to accept a call to action.

The call to action doesn't have to be monetary. It might be friending the band on Myspace, joining the mailing list, or clicking through to a bio. The important thing is harnessing the listens you give away to drive your business goals, as it's standard to use Creative Commons as part of an overall digital strategy, yet bands and labels aren't reaping as much as they could from it. They could be getting more plays, more stickiness, longer sessions, and more click throughs from plays into the rest of what they offer.

Is the aim of Wax MP3 to be a browser based player?
That's right. It's a zero-install, zero-click, no-sign-in experience. It's not competing with iTunes, Windows Media Player, VLC, or Songbird. But it does have a lot in common with music blogs, podcasts, and webcasts.

What's next for Wax MP3?
I'm working on a series of semi-customized players for specific content providers. The codebase is becoming more pluggable as it matures, and I'm accumulating a set of plugins to use as the need arises.

To see/listen Wax MP3 in action, go here.

R.I.P. Michael Jackson

NECODO's Open Platform for Selling Digital Music

While the old digital music store is still around, NECODO is now focused on developing an open platform for record labels, digital distributors, online retailers and artists to sell their music. Essentially, they're building a customizable commerce platform for the music industry. Looks like it's a beta offering so I'm just going to provide a quick overview below. For more information, go here.

• catalog management via a simplified and easy-to-use CMS
• online wizard to quickly and easily create operational stores for single releases, your entire catalog, and/or one of your artists
• wholesale and custom pricing control
• retail offering  
• real-time sales reports
• Marketing tools such as widgets, buy buttons, and HTML links for websites, emails, social networks and blogs
• custom solutions
• an API 
• No start-up costs
• No monthly charges

Ian Rogers' Keynote Interview from NARM 2009

Ian Rogers of Topspin gave an insightful keynote interview on the music industry at NARM about two weeks ago that's not to be missed:

Techdirt Founder Mike Masnick's Presentation on the State of the Music Industry

Techdirt founder Mike Masnick's latest must see presentation on the state of the music industry, which he gave at NARM a couple of weeks ago is now available:

If you've never had a chance to see Mike's presentation on Serving your Fans, the Trent Reznor Case Study, you should take the time here as well.

Selling your Music via Smirp is so Simple it's Brilliant!

Last month I was contacted by Smirp, and I finally had time today to explore their service. I'm amazed at how easy it is to create an account, upload your music, and sell it with fan determined pricing - to the point of elegant brilliance!

Inspired by In Rainbows, Smirp provides you with the ability to create your own "name your price" page for your music, allowing your fans to pay whatever they desire, which could be more or less than you expect, but also allowing you to set a minimum price. After you receive payment, a link is sent to your customer's email address. After 12 hours, the link is no longer valid, helping to prevent your music from being illegally copied. Here's an example of the band, theWANDAS using Smirp.

Uploading your music files to Smirp is easy too. Essentially, you can upload almost any file of just about any size. Once uploaded, you provide the title, pricing options, give it a unique url, and can even set a release date for timed releases.

Presently, Smirp has two pricing options, a free plan where they take 20 percent of each sale and a professional account with a few more features for a flat rate of $6 per month.

Smirp is a great hassle free way to quickly sell your music with fan determined pricing. My only suggestion at this point is Smirp should create the ability to listen to each song before buying, but hats off to a great app. For more information, go here.

ZooZBeat: Gesture-Based Mobile Music Creation

Have you seen ZooZbeat? It's wicked cool, and if you've got an iPhone or iPod Touch, you've got to download this app. Essentially, it allows you to create music through physical interactions with your device, like shaking it, tilting it, tapping it, etc. You can then upload and share your music creations with your friends.

ZooZBeat is a product of ZooZMobile, an Atlanta-based music tech startup from Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology. Good luck guys!

Check out these videos of ZooZBeat in action:

Love this one and it has the ATL as a backdrop:

Band Metrics to Present at C/O Pop in Cologne

Band Metrics is excited to announce that we're presenting at this year's C/O Pop music festival and conference in Cologne, Germany. It's one of the leading international music events that brings together over 30,000 artists, publishers, labels, technology companies, music enthusiasts and investors, and we're honored we've been invited. In addition to presenting, I'm also speaking on the Creative Music Business panel and I'll provide more details as soon as I have them. We're also going to make an announcement during the conference, so please keep in touch, and let us know if you're going to be there too so we can meetup. In the meantime, you can learn more about the conference by downloading the C/O Pop press kit.

CD Baby to Unveil New Website and Single Sales in July

Its been a couple of years since CD Baby made significant changes to the design of their web site, but in about a month (July) they're going to unveil a new sleek design, while maintaining a minimalist UI (one of the design attributes which helped make CD Baby successful). Below is a screenshot that Brian Felsen posted about a week ago - note the cool new logo!

They're also rolling out some new features with the new website, such as the ability to sell singles at the price artists want to charge. These improvements should help increase revenue for artists, as more of their fans will opt to purchase music from CD Baby. Not to mention, artists should encourage their fans to purchase their music directly form CD Baby instead, as they will earn a larger percentage of the sales price for each song sold directly on cdbaby.com.

Band Metrics Announces Music Data Exchange Format (MDEF)

With the enormous amount of data being created online by artists of all sizes (e.g. digital music, photos, blog posts, videos, etc.), and by their fans each day (e.g. plays, downloads, likes, faves, sharing, recommending, commenting etc.), it seems there needs to be a way to organize and share this kind of data relative to musicians and bands effectively and efficiently. Unfortunately, we were unable to find a free, open and portable format for exchanging this kind of artist data, and RSS is not sufficient. Additionally, each music provider, from iLike to PureVolume is expressing artist data a bit differently, making the exchange process cumbersome.

With that said, Band Metrics decided to create the Music Data Exchange Format (MDEF), a free, open and portable XML based format for the purpose of sharing data relative to musicians and bands, and we're announcing it today at the SanFran MusicTech Summit.

We created this format for two reasons. First, measuring artist data is what we do, and we wanted to help other companies, developers and artists collaborate on this effort, as presently, there is no effective and efficient way to exchange artist data. (if you know of a format that already exists, please let us know, as we'd welcome the opportunity to utilize it)  Secondly, we wanted to standardize the way companies, developers and artists exchange data with our soon-to-be-released API.

To provide your feedback, comments and/or suggestions about the MDEF, please go here and tell us what you think.

Btw, the initial schema for the Music Data Exchange Format (MDEF), version 0.1, while operational, is in the very early stages, so we welcome your thoughts on how to improve it.

Monthly SoundCloud Artist: Jamie Lynn Noon

As mentioned back in April, I'm going to blog one artist per month that has uploaded their music to my SoundCloud DropBox. Again, I'm not going to review any of these songs; rather, I'm simply going to share them with the IMT community as part of a social experiment. If you're an artist, there is no criteria, other than uploading your song to SoundCloud and making it publicly available. This month's artist is Jamie Lynn Noon and her song is Second of a Spark.

Introducing RT2Buy for Musicians and Bands

Earlier today, fellow Atlanta entrepreneurs, Michael Ivey and Don Brown, the founders of Twitpay launched RT2Buy, their first product from their just announced Retweet Commerce Suite. According to their press release, "RT2Buy provides an interface for musicians, artists, authors, and other content creators to upload their digital content and quickly promote it on Twitter. Users who wish to purchase the content can do so directly on Twitter, using a "retweet", or a reply that includes the content of the original message. Twitpay handles confirmation of the payment with Amazon Payments, and delivery of the content to the buyer."

While I haven't yet had the time to try it out, RT2Buy seems like a promising tool for the music industry, and I'm excited to see these kinds of tools being developed for the indie community. Lynn Jeter, a music promoter had this to say about RT2Buy. "Independent artists and content producers desperately need simple solutions for distributing and monetizing content online. Our clients are very excited about RT2Buy as a simple way for them to get their content out there, without having to spend a lot of time, energy or money. It doesn't get much easier than tweeting a link to your content and getting paid on retweets."

Great stuff guys, and best wishes with RT2Buy!

Win Free Tickets to Tonight's Mashable Mixer

So you want to go to tonight's Mashable Mixer in Atlanta, but you don't have tickets, and the event is sold out (it's even oversold beyond sold out). Well, no worries, as Band Metrics is giving away a pair THREE pairs, so here's your chance to get access to Atlanta's hottest tech event this year. All you have to do is add your name to this post by making a comment, and you'll be eligible for the drawing. At 3PM EST, I'll randomly select the winner and I'll notify you via email if you've provided one. If not, I'll just announce it via my Twitter account. You'll then be added to the guest list - just bring your ID and your ticket will be waiting for you at the door.