Band Metrics Releases Public Beta

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 also moved our entire system into the cloud via Engine Yard. As an example, Band Metrics now pulls-in and displays initial artist data within seconds, not days or hours. Needless to say, I'm proud of our developers.

We also streamlined the site, and added a couple of new features, including Fan Segmentation and Influence Measurement. Essentially, this allows artists, managers, labels and the like to see a breakdown of fans (based initially on Twitter comments), and a fan's influence among their friends (below is a brief screencast).

We still have lots of work to do, including design enhancements and new features, as well as incorporate our existing analytical tools into the new site (we ran out of time as we wanted to release at Midem), so we greatly appreciate your ongoing support, as this is just the beginning!

ArtistData Releases Improved UI, New Features, Paid Options and more

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 their native characters and a ton of smaller bug fixes just to make the site work better.

The biggest and most visible user interface change is the way we organize our features. While previously the features were mashed together on one huge, confusing screen, now they are presented as separate installable applications. You can expect to see this application library grow this year as we introduce more apps that we build, as well as introduce 3rd party applications. This is a major step in our goal to provide artists with a central platform containing a robust set of apps built by a number of different developers...

We know going from a free service to a partially paid service is a tough transition, and we're expecting to hear frustration. But we're excited to make this transition because it will just make ArtistData stronger, smarter and more valuable not only for our users but for the music industry as a whole. Just as artists can buy better gear after their fans support them by buying albums and concert tickets, we will be able to build a stronger platform when our users support us. This is a major, exciting step towards providing the entire community with better resources."

Great work Brenden, congrats!!

AudioTag: identify music

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, but I can only assume that they will improve both as their database grows.

If you're wondering how AudioTag works, according to their FAQ, AudioTag is based on "sophisticated audio recognition algorithms combined with advanced audio fingerprinting technology, and a large song database. When you upload an audio file, it is being analyzed by an audio engine. During the analysis its audio fingerprint is extracted and identified by comparing it to the music database. At the completion of this recognition process, information about songs with their matching probabilities are displayed on screen."

Introducing Music Scout

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 music app for the Android and iPhone that enables music enthusiasts to express their thoughts and sentiments about the band they're watching in real-time directly from the venue. Not only can users rate and express their feelings about a band or musician, but Music Scout will begin to trace and identify the individuals that are actually scouting and discovering the next hot bands before they become known acts, providing of course, they're using the service, but to help encourage use we're building in a future reward system.

But it's not just a tool for music aficionados, critics and music lovers, just imagine the kind of feedback that this app could produce for a band, manager, A&R rep, etc. - from the live sound, to the songs selected for each show, to the venue, etc.

The Android app is available now for FREE, and the FREE iPhone app will be available once it's approved by Apple (should be in about 2 weeks). Again, this is just the initial release - we have miles to go before we sleep.

awsm.fm

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?

Music Tech Investments for 2009

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 Invests in Music Video Portal, Vevo (terms not disclosed; October 19, 2009)
• Shazam receives capital (terms not disclosed; October 14, 2009)
• Ecast Gets $17 Million for Net-Connected Digital Jukeboxes (October 13, 2009)
• Deezer raises $9.5 million (October 12, 2009)
• Sonoma Wire Works Acquires Paul Allen's Submersible Music (terms not disclosed; October 09, 2009)
• Amie Street Raises $3.9 Million (October 08, 2009)
• Next Big Sound raises $1 million (October 06, 2009)

Third Quarter 2009 (over $149,900,000 not including the EMI or Bertelsmann deals)

• Imeem raises $6 million (September 30, 2009)
• ATDC invests in Band Metrics (terms not disclosed; September 23, 2009)
• Loudcrowd receives $3 million in second round (September 16, 2009)
• Songbird secures additional financing (terms not disclosed; September 09, 2009)
• HMV buys 50 percent of 7Digital for €7.7 million Euros (about $11 million USD; September 3, 2009)
• MOG raises $5 million (August 27, 2009)  
• ShowClix secures series A (terms not disclosed; August 27, 2009)  
• RightsFlow raises $1.5 million (August 26, 2009)
• Audible Magic raises $1.3 million (August 21, 2009) 
• MySpace acquires iLike for $20 million (August 19, 2009)
• Thumbplay gets $2 million (August 19, 2009)  
• Qtrax announces investment from partners in Asia (terms not disclosed; August 18, 2009)   
• FanSnap raises $5 million (August 17, 2009)  
• OurStage raises $3 million (August 11, 2209)
• Ustream raises $2 million (August 11, 2009) 
• RadioTime raises $900K (August 7, 2009)  
• Bandsintown closes $200 thousand as a result of LaunchBox (August 05, 2009)  
• Spotify raises $50 million (August 04, 2009)
• Melodis developer of Midomi raises $4 million (August 04, 2009)
• EMI receives an infusion of $492 million (July 30, 2009)
• Pandora raises $35 million (July 10, 2009)
• Bertelsmann and KKR form music rights joint venture valued around $347 million (July 08, 2009)  
• Sony invests in IODA (terms not disclosed; July 02, 2009)

Second Quarter 2009 (over $84,700,000):

• The Pirate Bay acquired for $7.7 million (June 30, 2009)
• Terra Firma invests an additional $45 million in new financing for EMI (May 29, 2009)  
• MXP4 raises $2.7 million (May 15, 2009) 
• Slacker raises $10 million (May 14, 2009)  
• Imeem receives last minute funding (terms not disclosed; May 07, 2009)  
• Goom Radio receives a $16 million first round of funding (April 14, 2009)
• SoundCloud raises €2.5 million Euros (about $3.3 USD; April 14, 2009)

First Quarter 2009 (over $43,775,000 not including the Live Nation / Ticketmaster merger announcement):

• Radionomy raises $775K (March 25, 2009)  
• Buzz Media raises $12.5 million (March 20, 2009)  
• Nimbit raises $1 million (March 06, 2009)
• M3X Media raises $10.5 million (February 26, 2009)
• Slicethepie lands $1.4 million in additional capital (February 19, 2009)
• Ticketmaster and Live Nation agree to $2.5 Billion merger (February 10, 2009)
• Slacker raises $5 million (January 28, 2009)  
• Audium raises $8.5 million (January 19, 2009)
• MixMatchMusic Acquires Mix2r (terms not disclosed; January 13, 2009)  
• MyMajorCompany receives $4.1 million (January 08, 2009)

A Few Brief Observations:

• if these numbers are correct, than the above represents almost $4 billion in transactions, which is more than last year
• many of these deals did not disclose the amount, and the above list may be missing a deal or two
• even if you remove the EMI, Bertelsmann and Live Nation / Ticktemaster deals, it's still over $329,275,000 in transactions, which is also up from last year
• the second half of the year was stronger, with the third quarter being the strongest - the second half also led in terms of acquisitions as well, with most taking place in the fourth quarter, which may be an indicator of more acquisitions to come in 2010

2009 turned out to be an exciting and active year for the music industry, here's to wishing you much success in 2010 and beyond!