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

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:

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.

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!

2008/2009 Georgia Music Production Sourcebook

Are you an artist living in Georgia or thinking about moving here, than take a look at this in-depth publication about the Georgia Music industry. From audio engineers to venues, to Georgia music industry trends and more - it's covered in this free digital e-book. My only suggestion is they should consider adding a music technology section listing some of these companies and GTCMT.

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.

Connecting Music Enthusiasts With Glue

AdaptiveBlue, the developer of SmartLinks, among other semantic widgets, recently released their latest product, Glue, a free browser add-on for Firefox that connects you with friends around places you visit and subjects you're interested in, like music. It's non-intrusive and informative - you can think of it as a social heads-up display for topics that interest you. For example, let's say I view Muse on Last.fm... With Glue I can easily see which of my friends have also expressed an interest in Muse, regardless if that activity was on Last.fm, and also, what other Glue users are saying about the band, helping to facilitate connections with additional music enthusiasts with similar music interests.

Because Glue is an add-on integrated in your browser, the social experience happens while you're interacting with web sites and social media (e.g. Amazon, CD Baby, Hype Machine, etc.). This means that the social experience is following you wherever you go online, connecting you with your friends and other Glue users that share similar music interests relative to your music tastes. This a shift in the way we think about social media (e.g. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, et al.), and Glue has the potential to change the way we connect, share and engage with people that share similar interests. Sure, Glue is aggregating your online behavior, but they have built-in privacy settings which you have control over, and you can erase your history at any time. For an FAQ about Glue, go here, or for more information about how Glue works, go here.

To see Glue in action, take a moment to watch this intro video:

Glue 4.2 Overview from AdaptiveBlue.

Update: Glue now works with SmartLinks, which allows bloggers with SmartLinks installed to see Glue activity relative to a particular link.

Rapid Mobile App Development for Artists

Looking to quickly build a mobile app for your fans with an iPhone or Android? Then take a look at Widget Press. They've got a software solution called ModelBaker that enables users to develop web and mobile applications with ease incorporating an MVC methodology. The intuitive interface is a timesaver for both beginner and expert developers, and it's packed with advanced features. Take a look at this short demo to see it in action:

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

Interview with Creator of the Artists on Twitter Spreadsheet

I'm sure most of the IMT community is familiar with the crowdsourced spreadsheet that Gabriel Nijmeh created listing artists on Twitter. But, it's evolved a great deal since I first read about it. He now includes music bloggers, radio stations, music promoters, and much more. So, I thought I'd interview Gabriel via email and see what his plans are for this free and useful music industry list.

1) Why did you start the spreadsheet?

GN: I love music and the deeper I got into Twitter the more I realized there were many other passionate music fans.  People would post tweets saying so and so bands were on Twitter and so I thought I should quickly whip something up that helps keep track of bands using Twitter. This was at the end of January 2009 and within the last couple of months, there has been explosive growth on Twitter which has translated into a lot of new bands using Twitter.

2) What has surprised you about the spreadsheet?

GN:  Maybe it was naive of me but I never expected that people would embrace it and find it extremely valuable. I did Tweet about it a few times and not having that many followers at the time, I didn't think I had that much reach. Really it was only meant for a handful of my closet followers to use.

But if you have something that people believe is valuable and you are willing to open up and share, Twitter is an amazing communication and relationship building platform. So when various high profile blogs (Pitchfork, Stereogum, Guardian music UK) and high profile Twitterers (Mashable) picked up on it, the list took off, and it was obvious at that point that I was onto something.

3) You should turn the spreadsheet into a free web based directory where people can search, view, add, edit, etc. - thoughts?

GN: Absolutely! It's painfully obvious a spreadsheet will just not cut it! I'm working with a small team and are turning the spreadsheet into a web based directory. We have a few great ideas that once developed will make using the Artists on Twitter directory very easy to use and interactive. The plan is to keep it a crowdsourced/wiki-style directory. I have found that quite a few people have become protective of the directory.  I get many emails telling me about fake/questionable accounts or just general information that helps ensure that the list stays clean, timely and accurate.

4) What's the official name of the spreadsheet?

GN: Well, I started off calling it the Artists on Twitter list and that is what so many people know it by. So we will most probably keep referring to it that way.

5) Can you track how many times it's been viewed, if so, what are the numbers?

GN:  Yes, we have had close to 8,000 visits.

6) I see you've added several new tabs to capture other music properties, like music blogs, labels, music services and more. Those are all great additions, why did you decide to do that? What other sections are you going to add? I'd like to see venues added to the list.

GN: Well, we first started with the most obvious, artists and as people started submitting new entries, I started creating new sections like music bloggers, music labels. I've had people contacting me asking if we could add new sections and we are always open to new ideas and suggestions.  For example, I just got an email yesterday (Friday, April 3rd) from a guitar amp maker (@gabstero) and he asked if I could add a section for musical instrument manufacturers.   I also was recently asked to add a section for sheet music/guitar tabs. Both ideas I thought were brilliant. I know there are a lot of Twitter people who play instruments.

For the average music fan, the artists section will be more important than say the music promoters section.  But if you are a band and you are seeking specific band services (for example a band manager), you would focus on the music services section. A really good example is when an indie band out of Chicago posted a tweet saying they were looking for a new band manager. After seeing the tweet, I was able to help them get in touch with a couple of contacts that added themselves to the Artists on Twitter list.

7) It seems to have it's own life from an organic community effort. How are you trying to grow input?

GN: People just love music! From the casual to the most passionate music fan, music elicits a certain passion and response. You can't go anywhere without hearing music and just like food, music brings people together and is a great way to celebrate life! In the online world, Twitter is perfectly suited to bring together a lot of people from around the world together to discuss just about any topic or subject. We are seeing that with Stocktwits.com, which has become its own Twitter powered community for people interested in stocks, finance, business and economics.

So for us, we engage other music fans by sharing informative links and new music, and by having a vibrant discussion about anything related music. Anyone interested in music will naturally gravitate to the discussion and to the Artists on Twitter list. The key point is that we are an open community, and we take a bottom-up approach to building the list.

8) How many artists do you think you're missing from your list?

GN: I am continually amazed at how deep the list is. Whenever I come across a band and check the list to see if they are on it, I see that someone has already added it. So I would say we have pretty much all the big names covered because these were the first entries that people contributed. Now, I'm starting to see a lot of indie/emerging artists being added.

9) What are the present numbers (e.g. total number of bands, labels, etc.)?

GN: As of April 4th, we have 1557.  Arists make up 1200 of them. Record labels, music bloggers, music services, etc. make up the rest.

Good stuff Gabriel! I look forward to watching the list grow.

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!