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.

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

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.

Band Metrics to Present at SanFran MusicTech Summit

Just a reminder, we're presenting at the SanFran MusicTech Summit this coming Monday, May 18th at the Hotel Kabuki around 1pm. We're excited to finally showcase the initial version of our technology at this premier one-day music tech event. If you would like to meetup on Monday and learn more about Band Metrics, just send me an email. Go here, to purchase your tickets to the summit.

Masterbeat Bridges the Electronic Music Gap

The following is a guest post from Erik Cisler, a content writer for Wpromote. If you would like to write a guest post on IMT, simply fill out the news form above and we'll consider it.

Last year, a new music download service called, Masterbeat launched with little fanfare. Plenty of people ignored it, perhaps assuming that it was just another throwaway service where users were forced to wade through thousands of songs – both quality and mediocre – just to find what they wanted. It focused on electronic music, but so did dozens of other online services. Masterbeat even seemed to have a limited scope, when compared to the competition; rather than showcasing the considerable talents of numerous underground or independent electronic music artists, the new service opted to cater to mainstream consumers.

While this may not have earned them the respect they deserved from their peers, Masterbeat’s goals are noble: they hope to bridge the gap between the underground and mainstream dance music audiences by offering accessible electronic music that a large audience can enjoy. Their hope is that if enough mainstream music listeners are introduced to good dance music via Masterbeat’s techno remixes of their favorite artists, perhaps they can be brought into the “fold” and learn to get down with the more esoteric electronica music that deserves widespread support. Electronica purists might balk at the prospect of an influx of fans, but we think it can only be good for the music.

Gauging Artist Popularity

Traditional music rankings seem to display an antiquated way of determining popularity and gauging success. For example, companies like Billboard and CMJ posit to accurately rank/chart artists based on variables such as CD sales, digital downloads, radio plays and ticket sales. However, CD sales are diminishing, and digital downloads and ticket sales represent only a portion of how an artist's popularity can be measured, as music enthusiasts have changed the way in which they consume music. Not to mention, many artists are giving away some of their music, and tours are only temporary reflections of popularity.

Online music providers from Deezer to Rhapsody also fall short, as true popularity can not be determined from web silos that collect data solely from within their own community.

With that said, a more holistic approach must be developed - one that considers the dynamics and trends of plays, sharing, recommending, comments, blog posts, faves, et al. from scores of web apps, and this is part of the service that we at Band Metrics have been working on long before our announcement at TechCrunch50. Internally, we call it the Popularity Profiling System, a patent-pending technology that scores bands and musicians using algorithms and other approaches. At present, there are 10 ways in which we score bands and musicians, and many of these scores are now available on our system. Since only a limited group of bands and individuals have seen our service in action, I'm not going to tip our hat at this time as to what these scores are, but, thousands of bands and musicians will be able to see their scores over the next few days as we continue to expand our private beta, so I'm sure word will begin to travel, and we'd love to hear your feedback!

In sum, my hypothesis is not intended to be critical of music ranking companies, but rather, cursorily unpack how we understand and gauge popularity relative to bands and musicians, as it seems this can only be sufficiently achieved through a scoring system that examines online information about artists from across the Internet landscape.

Btw, our system is far from perfect, but it will continue to evolve and adapt so please be patient, and please let us know how we can improve our scoring and analytics.

Wildscreen.TV for Artists

There are scores of video communities aimed at helping artists promote their work like Vimeo, Blastro, AudioTube, Plugo.LA, Babelgum, and many others including newcomer, Wildscreen.TV, an online video portal for filmmakers, musicians, labels and an artistically-minded audience with a focus on high quality user-generated content from creative people. What video sites do you like besides YouTube for sharing your music on?

Below are the basics of wildscreen.TV:

Goal of wildscreen.TV:

Offer viewers an abundant pool of artistic, fresh and top-quality videos in 6 categories:

• Music videos and live music performances (gigs, interviews, studio out-takes, etc.)
• Short films
• Performing art
• Webisodes
• Video art & animation
• Fashion & design

Some of the Features of wildscreen.TV:

• free fully-customizable channel - use CSS to design it
• get 100% of ad revenue if you place advertising on your channel - use an affiliate ad program
• HD-quality player
• no upload-limit (either in terms of video length or size of data)
• create compilations as video mix-tapes. Make your own or get involved
• boost your creative output by connecting with other wild videologists
• fast support
  

How to build awareness of your music videos on wildscreen.TV:

• contact other users of wildscreen.TV and comment on their videos and compilations
• invite friends to watch your videos
• pimp your channel and make descriptions of your art, your videos and your compilations to make people talk about you AND with you.
• use the blog function in your channel to inform people about you and your stuff, and talk about things that thrill you.
• Encourage friends and interested people to embed your channel on their web page or blog
• Link to your channel on wildscreen.TV.

For any questions about wildscreen.TV, please contact Chris Wochagg or drop him an email at chris@wildscreen.tv

Band Metrics Named an OnHollywood Top 100 Private Company

I really wish I was announcing the expansion of our private beta in this post - I really do, especially considering how many people have been patiently waiting to use our service. All I can say is I truly appreciate your support and we're doing the best that we can. The good news is that the wait is almost over, and if you've registered for an account, you will get access later this month.

In the meantime, I would like to thank the folks over at AlwaysOn for naming Band Metrics as one of the 2009 OnHollywood Top 100 Private Companies. If you're curious as to what this award is all about, here's the press release from earlier today.

Music Licensing Landscape

Below is a brief list of some of the companies that can help bands and musicians place their music in film, television, commercials, games, etc. What companies did I miss?

Rumblefish (licensing for television, film, advertisements, websites, videos, games, podcasts, and sonic branding - e.g. your music inside your local Gap)
Gamecues (licensing for the gaming industry)
YouLicense (music licensing marketplace - essentially, their system enables artists and those seeking music to conduct business directly with each other)
Pump Audio (artists can license their music in television and advertising without giving up any ownership
BeatPick (music licensing provider)
Ricall (music licensing marketplace, connecting users wanting to license music directly with the relevant copyright owners)
SoundReef (private beta service exchanging music for promotion in television, film, advertising, etc.)

SoundCloud on Indie Music Tech

For several months now I've been meaning to add a SoundCloud DropBox for artists to share their music with the IMT community. Well, tonight I had some time, so if you'd like to have the opportunity to have your music highlighted on IMT, all you have to do is send one track to my DropBox in the right sidebar. About once a month, I'll pick a track and highlight it here on IMT. It won't be reviewed; rather, I'll just share it with the IMT community.

I'll start with a track called Damn Love by the Dirt Drifters, a song I mentioned on Twitter a few months ago. This band is doing a great job sharing their demos on SoundCloud. Check it out, you may get some ideas.

BTW, I think SoundCloud is one of the top music tech companies out there; not to mention Alex is a great guy!

Notes from the New Metrics Panel at the Leadership Music Digital Summit

A couple of days ago I was on a panel discussion with some old and new friends about artist analytics at the Leadership Music Digital Summit in Nashville. We had a great conversation and since Denis Barnabé asked if there was a summary, I am providing an overview of the comments I made:

• Band Metrics is a data analytics and decision support system for the music industry. What that means is that our system collects comprehensive information about musicians and bands from across the Internet landscape, providing insights about this data in an easy-to-use dashboard. For example, Band Metrics can provide insight into what social networks are the most effective for an artist, helping an artist make decisions as to where he/she should spend their time, energy and resources.
• By understanding how your fans are using your music, and what they're saying about your music, you are unveiling your fans' online behaviors and personalities - likes and dislikes - a level of view never before possible. This in turn creates endless ways for you to engage and collaborate with them in meaningful ways.
• For Band Metrics, analysis of artist data is not about finding new ways to sell music; rather, it's about finding ways to build meaningful relationships with your fans, connecting with them in deeper ways. As such, increased sales for artists becomes a byproduct of building a great fan relationship.
• Getting to the question of why an artist and/or song is popular, while difficult and a long-term future capability, is exciting. That is to say, Band Metrics hopes to eventually understand why ground swells form from particular social communities around particular bands, songs and/or genres.
• The comment from our moderator that sometimes we measure the wrong things and rely on data we later learn is inaccurate is a true statement, and it’s one of the reasons why we believe that measuring artist data is a process. That is to say, it's going to take time and it will be a collaborative effort with bands and musicians, as artist data is only as good as the analysis and visualization performed.
• Band Metrics is tracking large amounts of data. For example, if you take one song from one band on one day, you’re going to have data relative to playing, downloading, commenting, sharing, recommending, liking, etc., so there are multiple challenges to collecting and analyzing this kind of data, for example: retrieval from disparate music services, data associations, storage, indexing and searching the data, data visualizations, and understanding behavioral patters surrounding the data, among other challenges.
• It's an exciting time to be an artist. There are more opportunities than ever before, and Band Metrics is aimed at helping artists tease out what those opportunities are through analyzing and experimenting over and over.

Serving Your Fans: The Trent Reznor Case Study

You may have seen this before, but I just watched Techdirt founder Michael Masnick's keynote presentation at The Leadership Music Digital Summit, and I gotta say, it was fantastic, a must watch for anyone in the music industry. Here's the one he gave at Midem, but I missed due to meetings:

The difference between today's presentation and the one he gave at Midem is an additional 160 slides for a total of 440! Hopefully, the folks at LMDS will post the video soon.

Band Metrics to Present at SanFran MusicTech Summit

I'm a big fan of the SanFran MusicTech Summit, an intimate gathering of music technology developers, evangelists and companies. I attended the second summit, and wrote about the last one this past October. So I'm pretty excited to announce that we're presenting at the 4th summit this May. Because they're only having one Summit this year (last year they had three), it should be a really great event, so I'd make sure and follow their announcements, as well as buy your tickets early, as it always sells out.

Guest Post: Do Bands and Musicians Understand What is Happening Online Right Now?

The guest post below was written by my friend, Greg Rollett of Endagon Innovations. Greg writes regularly on Gen-Y Rock Stars, a Social Music Marketing Blog and Resource for indie musicians. To get a free copy of his Social Media Sites for Musicians and the Rock Star Tool Kit, go here. If you'd like to reach Greg directly, please send him an email (rollettmarketing [at] gmail [dot] com).

(confused music photo by Adam Schilling)

Do Bands and Musicians Understand What is Happening Online Right Now?
I ask myself this question everyday when I see all of the small companies, corporations, brands and innovators taking advantage of tools, resources and conversations that are happening every second of every day online. I get scared when I see musicians still parking their homepage on Myspace, blasting out self promotions with no regards to getting real fans to have conversations with and not accepting feedback from that promotion.

We can start with Twitter, since everyone from the president to late night newbie Jimmy Fallon to, even, Facebook is taking notice of what is happening on this platform. Every second, there are thousands of links being shared, videos being passed, questions being asked and answered and music being streamed directly because of Twitter. In the music world there has been uproar of music related services and platforms devoted to heighten the music experience of Twitter. Roll call please:

Twisten
TinySong
Blip.fm
Tweettj
Song.ly
playTwitter
Twiturm
TwittyTunes (FireFox Plugin)

Then there are the Music Marketing people providing resources for how musicians can leverage twitter:

• Bob Baker’s Music Twitter Resources
• Ariel’s Publicity Twitter Roadmap

And don’t forget the ridiculously long crowd-sourced list of musicians on Twitter

• Musicians On Twitter – (Google spreadsheet)

But did you know that? Do bands see what is going on here?
Technology shrank physical sales and transformed us into a digital world. If you are willing to accept that fact, and embrace the tools, tactics and hard work that it takes to make these things work, there is a great chance that your music can be in more iPods, more YouTube channels, more blogs, more playlists, more countries, more options that ever before.

The key to getting the word out to musicians is to prove that this stuff we are preaching actually works. The reason Myspace friend adders/blasters/spammers were extremely popular and ultimately helped to ruin the site was because they worked. It was a numbers game, reach enough people and a few become fans.

The reality is that numbers were inflated, play counts skyrocketed and bands felt like the king of the mountain. Then you booked a show off your Myspace stats, invited the local music industry players who were also impressed, and you played an unrehearsed live show to the bartenders, wait staff and your frat buddies.

The reality is that developing fan relationships is the key to all the tools and websites out there today. The name of the game has become, how many people can I connect with, on a personal level?

• Can you broadcast your show via UStream and connect with fans that may never get to see you live?
• Can you throw a Meebo widget on your blog and talk to fans every Monday night for an hour about life, music, hobbies and pet peeves?
• Can you take photos at your shows with real fans, post them on Flickr, Facebook and Myspace, tag them and get the fans excited to tell their friends about the night? Can you do it the next morning and not wait 3 weeks to get around to it?
• Can you write a blog post so inspiring that 20 of your fans retweet it, their friends see it and pass it on and all of a sudden you get new traffic from new fans?
• Can you remember to send your monthly newsletter out every month? Can you use Champion Sound or FanBridge to collect emails on your websites and at your shows to grow your fan base?
• Can you look at your band's analytics to see how popular your music is, with whom, in what social networks, gauge where your fans are coming from, etc.?
• Can you create products on demand? Special shirts for special shows? Audiolife can do this for you, instantly. What about a lyrics book or a tour journal? Can you publish that as an eBook or physical book that someone can print on demand (think Lulu)?

The idea that musicians can now create content, have their fans talk about it directly to the band, and then have the band comment back while measuring the process and results is something that is so inspiring, it’s hard to find a reason to argue against it. Yes, it takes time, it might take some money, but this is your life, your business and your future.

Do you understand what is happening? Bands, do you get it?