MP3tunes Launches Personal Cloud Music Service

MP3tunes launched its personal cloud music service today called, "Buy Anywhere, Listen Everywhere." Essentially, their service makes it possible to buy music from a variety of digital music vendors and play them on a variety of devices. For example, a user can buy a song using their Android and listen to it within minutes on their iPod:


Conversely, songs purchased from iTunes on a PC can be played almost immediately on an Android:



Presently, MP3tunes' Buy Anywhere, Listen Everywhere service works with these digital music stores:

• iTunes
• AmazonMP3
• Napster
• Walmart
• Zune
• 7digital
• Rhapsody
• ShockHound

And their service is compatible with these devices:

• iPhone 4
• iPhone 3GS
• iPhone 3G
• iPod touch
• HTC Aria
• HTC Desire
• HTC Dream
• HTC Hero
• HTC Legend
• HTC Magic
• HTC Tattoo
• HTC Evo 4G
• Google Nexus One
• Motorola Droid
• Motorola Backflip
• Motorola CLIQ
• myTouch 3G Slide
• Droid Incredible
• Logitech Squeezebox
• RCA internet radios
• Reciva internet radios

MP3tunes has also updated their iPhone and Android applications.

ArtistData Opens Developer Environment, Approaches 4 Millionth Update

ArtistData announced earlier today that they just passed the 3.75 millionth update to their partner network (see below) on behalf of the 25K plus artists that use their service. Wow, congrats Brenden!

ArtistData also announced today 7 new partners to its platform, for a total of 28 (see above), including Bandzoogle, LiveMusicMachine, MobBase, MobileRoadie, Scout66, SeeJoeRock, and Songkick. They join existing partners, like Bandsintown, FanBridge, Jambase, and Sonicbids - there are now over 50 companies currently working to integrate with ArtistData (to be announced as they become available).

Additionally, ArtistData has opened its developer environment to all developers - all you need to do is sign-up and you'll receive a free developer key. For more information, please see: http://developers.artistdata.com.

The Echo Nest adds Music Library to Developer Platform with Play.me Partnership

Over the last year, Music Hack Day and other music developer events have been a sandbox for hundreds of new music apps built on The Echo Nest’s platform, from music video games to remix apps, playlisting tools to mobile apps and more; here are a few. But, most have never been commercialized, as content licensing constraints have been a roadblock, until now...

Beginning today, and just in time for Music Hack Day San Francisco, developers will have access to millions of songs powered by Play.me. The partnership gives developers both open access to The Echo Nest developer platform along with Play.me’s deep library of licensed music content, allowing anyone to potentially commercialize their hacks through affiliate revenue. Additionally, developers can earn money from cash incentives for the most popular applications.

Bandsintown is on the Move: Announces Partnerships and Expands Board of Advisers

My friends over at Bandsintown just announced significant API partnerships with EMI, Shazam and ReverbNation, as well as the appointment of Paul Vidich to their board of advisers. Paul is a former EVP with Warner Music and a former director at Ticketmaster UK.

These are key partnerships for Bandsintown, as it will expand their reach considerably. For example, Bandsintown will now deliver tour dates and ticket links to more than 60 million songs tagged each month on Shazam, Shazam Encore and (SHAZAM) RED apps. Additionally, Bandsintown will also provide concert information to over 20 million music fans throughout ReverbNation's network looking to purchase tickets, and a similar arrangement with EMI artists as well. Nice work guys, congrats!

If you haven't had a chance to explore Bandsintown, now's the time, and they have a great iPhone app too. Not to mention, they've made tremendous progress since their launch in 2007, just take a look at some of these stats:

• aggregate ticket information from more than 100 different ticketing companies in 160 countries
• expose concert data to more than 50 million people monthly through their partner network
• over 150,000 upcoming events
• an active developer community with more than 70 developers utilizing their data in various global music sites and applications - here's just a few of them

To read their full press release regarding these partnerships and the appointment of Paul Vidich to their board of advisers, please go here.

JELLI, a User Controlled Voting Service for Broadcast Radio Goes Nationwide

Earlier today, Jelli, a user controlled voting service for broadcast radio stations announced its expansion into the following 10 markets across the US:

• WBOS Boston, MA
• WPST Philadelphia, PA
• KXTE Las Vegas, NV
• WJBX Fort Myers, FL
• WJLK Jersey Shore, NJ
• WKRL Syracuse, NY
• WKLL Utica, NY
• KISN Bozeman, MT
• KBAZ Missoula, MT
• KTRS Casper, WY

I've been a fan of Jelli for quite sometime, and even interviewed Jelli about 6 months ago, as the idea of allowing listeners and music enthusiasts to control broadcast radio is the right direction for terrestrial radio. It could reduce a station's operating expenses by eliminating or reducing the need for traditional on-air personalities, so their expansion is not a surprise, nor is their recent press coverage in USAToday - it's just a matter of time before more radio stations adopt this kind of technology.

If you're not familiar with Jelli, the service allows users to control what's played on a local broadcast radio station via their web browser through simple acceptance voting. For example, "when a song is actually playing on the air, listeners can also vote whether it Rocks or Sucks. If enough players think it Sucks, the song is taken off the air instantly, even if it’s mid-song" (via Jelli's press release). According to Dave MacDonald, senior vice president and market manager at CBS Radio, “we were excited about the success of Jelli’s initial launch in San Francisco, and are now putting X107.5 Las Vegas in the hands of the listeners, allowing them to control the broadcast in real time.”

Below is a recent interview with InformationWeek:

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!

tunesBag Launches

In case you didn't see the news yesterday on TechCrunch, cloud-based music library provider tunesBag officially launched with a new interface, premium services, and more. Similar to MeCanto, which I wrote about last week, tunesBag enables users to store, search and play their entire personal music collection online anytime, anywhere via the cloud.

GrooveMaker Reggae Released

GrooveMaker Reggae "allows you to compose reggae, dub and dancehall tracks with walking bass, hypnotic chords and syncopated beats, and more... includes 3 songs, plus 1 FREE song by registering, and a total of 252 loops in 80-78-80-92 BPM ranges for 332 MB of samples." The app is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

GrooveMaker "allows for instantaneous control over 8 stereo loop tracks, making it possible to remix the included massive loop library of drums, bass, bass drums, lines, pads, percussion and effects. Loops made in GrooveMaker can be manipulated in real-time (pan, volume, mute, solo, group and tempo) and grooves can be arranged easily by dragging and dropping to create full-length tracks. These tracks can then be saved, previewed and recalled on the iPhone/iPod touch devices or exported as hi-quality .WAV files to any computer using a Wi-Fi network."

Blinkx Releases Music Video Search Jukebox

Earlier this morning, Blinkx, a video search engine released a music video jukebox that allows users to visually find and watch music videos through a single gateway (read their press release here). While I like their video wall, Google's video search seems more comprehensive with just as relevant results. Anyone using Blinkx, what are your thoughts?

MOG Announces Premium Digital Music Service

If you haven't heard yet, MOG announced yesterday that it will launch MOG All Access, a new digital music service for North America, by Thanksgiving 2009.

According to MOG Founder and CEO David Hyman, “Our goal with MOG All Access was to build the best service for listening to and discovering music, period. To accomplish this, we're providing access to millions of songs (just about everything), with a drop dead easy way to hear any song or album you like in an instant, from the convenience of your web browser. You'll get access to MOG radio, a revolutionary listening experience that will forever change how you discover music and truly redefines what radio is, and killer tools for discovery through other users of the service.  And you get it all monthly for the price of a beer ($5 USD per month)." Hyman explained, “For $5 a month, you can download five songs from iTunes or have access to millions of songs on demand, better radio, a world of relevant articles, reviews, news and lyrics, and a community of fellow fans and expert music sources with whom you can discover new artists, share playlists and explore music.”

According to their press release, they've partnered with all of the major labels including Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Warner Music Group and EMI Music, plus thousands of independents via IODA, Beggars Group and more, with unrestricted access to over 5 million tracks.

Sounds great; I can't wait to try it! Curious though as to when they'll offer this service globally.

Band Metrics Receives an Investment from the Georgia Tech Edison Fund

Happy to announce this morning that we've received an investment from the Georgia Tech Edison Fund. We're quite excited as this is a tough economy for raising capital, and we've got a ton of work to do like improving our visualizations, increasing the accuracy of our data collection, enhancing our UI, adding more data sources and features, moving into the cloud, releasing our public beta, and much more - all before the end of this year, not to mention 2010!

So, if things seem a little quiet at Band Metrics during the next 8 weeks it's because we're buried in code and building out our next release... stay tuned, as I think you'll like what we've got in the works.

You can read the press announcement here.

Mixcloud Releases Cloud Radio

The following is a quick press release from MixCloud. I'll post a follow-up if time allows, but this looks like a cool service:

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New London based online radio startup Mixcloud opened its doors to the public today at 12pm GMT. It's aim is to re-think radio.

The founders of the company – friends from Cambridge University – were frustrated with how hard it was discovering and promoting radio online. As radio presenters and DJs themselves, they were actively hunting down great shows every day and realised more could be done to help connect this content to listeners.

A year ago they quit their full time jobs and moved into a warehouse in West London to fix these problems. Their vision is to build the YouTube of radio – a definitive online platform for on-demand radio shows, from music to talk.

Mixcloud has an interesting view on the future of radio and are innovating to disrupt the traditional ways people discover and interact with the medium. They describe the concept as “Cloud Radio” and the content as “Cloudcasts”, which are stored in hard-drives in the sky – the “cloud” – and accessible on-demand, anywhere, where anyone can upload to the site and the listeners decide who get exposed.

The shows currently lean towards club music and DJs, given the founders’ background in organising clubnights and warehouse parties. However they are already working on expanding the breadth of content and are in discussions with big house-hold names, and they now have over 1,000 content partners and presenters, including: Diesel Radio, former BBC Radio 1 presenter, Chris Coco, leading music blogs such as, Curb Crawlers, great record labels like, Border Community and many more.

Band Metrics Partners with The Orchard

Are you looking for deep social, radio, and fan analytics that show geographical correlations to your digital and physical CD sales? Than our new partnership with The Orchard (NASDAQ: ORCD), which has a client base that represents 15% of all digital music may be what you're looking for, as that's what we aim to provide in the coming months.

Below is a clip from The Orchard's press release this morning:

The Orchard announced that it is launching a groundbreaking platform, using an API (Application Programming Interface) to provide clients access to third party business solutions from a marketplace within The Orchard’s proprietary client Workstation. For the launch, The Orchard has tapped many of the entertainment industry’s leading marketing, sales, and analytics application companies, including ArtistData, Band Metrics, TheBizmo, BMAT, FanBridge, Mediaguide, Mobile Roadie, New Reach Technologies, Peekok, Topspin, Trendrr, and uPlaya.

These launch partners will offer turn-key products geared to serve the needs of Orchard’s global client base, which represents 15% of all music available digitally. Within the Workstation’s marketplace, clients will be able to easily choose from this broad array of tools, each the best in its class. Over time, as the market continues to proliferate with innovative applications and services, Orchard will include additional qualified partners and continue to build out and manage the largest and most robust platform of third-party developers in the industry.

At launch, the applications, all selected with client needs in mind, will include various forms of sales and analytic tools, marketing vehicles, email and mobile services, widget creation, iPhone App creation, and data tracking. Orchard clients will receive a discounted rate for the services they choose, enabling these clients yet one more way of reducing their operating costs through their Orchard affiliation, without sacrificing sophistication or reach. Payment for use of the third party apps is secured through The Orchard and is reflected in client billing.

When clients opt in to a third party tool, the application will draw information (e.g. metadata, audio and video files, art work) from The Orchard’s secure interface to power customized marketing tools. To close the loop, clients can choose a data solution, which uses The Orchard’s metadata, to track their online exposure.

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 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.

Band Metrics Named a 2009 Top 40 Innovative Georgia Technology Company

We are excited and honored to announce that Band Metrics has been named as one of the 2009 Top 40 Innovative Technology Companies for Georgia. The award is given annually by The Technology Association of Georgia (one of the largest state technology associations in the nation) to Georgia based technology companies that demonstrate a significant degree of innovation, have a high likelihood of success, and will play a role in promoting Georgia’s innovative efforts nationally and internationally. As such, the competition was stiff, and the selection committee was composed of some of Georgia's most prominent technology leaders including, Sig Mosley, Stephen Fleming, Kathy Harris, Ben Dyer, Knox Massey and many others. Not to mention, we are among some fantastic tech companies. With that said, we are extremely grateful for our selection, and we sincerely thank TAG and the selection committee for their support of Band Metrics!

MixMatchMusic Acquires Mix2r

MixMatchMusic just announced it has acquired Mix2r, a web app that enables electronica artists to upload their music for remixing and for creating derivative works by other electronica artists, fans and music enthusiasts. Mix2r's community of musicians, DJs and fans features more than 6200 songs and music stems.

"MixMatchMusic's combination with Mix2r adds a lot of dynamic new music to our library and brings us closer to the critical mass of stems and community needed to fuel our next stage of growth," said Charles Feinn, MixMatchMusic co-founder and CEO.

Mix2r founders Duane Nickull and Matt MacKenzie will be joining MixMatchMusic's management team. Nickull, who is a well known senior technical evangelist for Adobe, said the Mix2r site uses Adobe® Flash® Platform technologies including Adobe Flash, Flex and Adobe® AIR™. These technologies will be used to create future versions of the combined site.

"Emerging and indie artists win as a result of this combination," said Nickull. "The breadth and depth of content and the number of people contributing to it adds energy and creativity to the community, and that in turn will attract more people and more great music."

This is big news for both Mix2r and MixMatchMusic and I look forward to seeing what the combined companies will provide. Congrats to both!

Editors note: It's fairly early in 2009 and we're already seeing acquisitions. Will this be the year of M&A for the music tech community?

Band Metrics Announces Advisory Board

Today marks a big milestone for Band Metrics with the announcement of its initial board of advisors (official press release), an all-star mix of music industry veterans with deep experience. The board includes former Warner Bros. music executive Barney Kilpatrick, Hypebot and Skyline Music founder, Bruce Houghton and Parag Chordia, Assistant Professor with Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology.

They're a fantastic group of individuals and I'm very excited, honored and grateful that they have all chosen to be a part of Band Metrics, as they most certainly will help contribute to building the analytical tools and applications that artists and music industry professionals need...

See you all in 2009, it's going to be a great year!

Thanksgiving from Band Metrics

As some of you already know, Band Metrics closed an angel round of funding on Monday, but I'm publicizing the news today - you can read the official announcement here. This is a huge milestone for Band Metrics, as it further validates the business model, especially in this economy. Not to mention, the investment was led by Atlanta-based entrepreneur Allen Graber, a well known technology angel, and I am deeply grateful for his trust, support and friendship.

As I spend time with my family tomorrow, I will also be giving thanks to all of our investors, friends and musicians that believe in Band Metrics - here's wishing you all, and my readers, music enthusiasts and fellow entrepreneurs a wonderful thanksgiving!

Introducing Band Metrics

After almost 2 years of work, 4 iterations, and a bunch of personal capital, I'm finally ready to announce the private beta of the stealth music tech startup I've been working on....

I introduce to you, my readers (the first ones to hear this story if you read this post before 8:00am EST) Band Metrics, a first-of-its-kind semantic web application for the music industry that collects, analyzes and displays dynamic popularity and trends about musicians and bands.

You ask, what in the world does that mean? Well, we've created a technology that will allow independent artists like yourself to understand the drivers of your music's popularity and your fans' sentiments, while helping you manage your digital identity as well.... Sound interesting? Then please signup for the private beta here. Once registered, we'll let you in as soon as possible.

Also, I'm presently in San Francisco as Band Metrics is a TechCrunch50 semi-finalist and DemoPit participant. This is a huge honor, as TechCrunch50 is highly selective, so please keep an eye out for any news about us over the coming days. If you see something interesting, please feel free to email it to me :-)

Many thanks for your support!