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!

MeCanto: listen to your digital music collection online and on your mobile phone

Similar to music lockers provided by companies like Lala and MP3Tunes, installing MeCanto enables storing, organizing, searching and listening to your digital music collection between your laptop, desktop, iPhone, etc. while at home or on the road. Anyone tried MeCanto? Thoughts?

The Banded Coming Soon

Heard about The Banded, a music tech startup out of New York founded by Andy Volanakis? I received an email from them yesterday; unfortunately I don't have time to dig into it right now, but I'm intrigued after watching this video. They've got a lot planned. What are your thoughts?

ReverbNation Partners with Label 2.0

ReverbNation has teamed up with the Internet music marketing community, Label 2.0 to offer advanced music promotion training for their 450,000+ members called, “Advanced Tips." This free step-by-step training module located in ReverbNation's Control Room helps "users to learn how to fully utilize their ReverbNation memberships." Presently, there are 8 chapters, from the "basics of getting started" to more advance customization and features, but Label 2.0 will continually update and add to this module as new tools and enhancements from ReverbNation are added, as well as "how to build the ultimate website using Wordpress and ReverbNation." See what this module is all about below - looks really informative! Hats off to Greg and Eric for a job well done!

Inference is the Difference: Gaining Insight from Music Data Analytics

One of the goals of Band Metrics is to help artists and music industry professionals gain insight from the quantitative and qualitative data we collect, as identifying correlations can be the difference between increasing revenue for your band, or spinning your wheels guessing as to how your fans interact, share and listen to your music. Below are two recent screencasts that help demonstrate a couple of the areas we're working on to make meaning out of your music data (view more of our screencasts here).

The first screencast demonstrates how radio play data (soon social data) could help you build relationships with broadcast stations that are, or are not playing your music. The second one provides a suggested tour map based on the data we're collecting about your band. These are both experimental mapping features at this point, one of the reasons why we're still in private beta, but we thought you might like to see them if you don't have an account:

Two Quick Band Metrics Demos

Below are a couple of quick screencasts on using Band Metrics. The first one demonstrates how to view historical data for an artist. The second one shows how to add and manage multiple bands within one account. As we make enhancements to Band Metrics, we'll provide new screencasts. If you have any questions, let us know here.