Duncan Freeman, Founder and CEO of Band Metrics, announced today on his blog that his company raised an undisclosed amount from the Georgia Tech Edison Fund, an early-stage technology fund managed by the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC).
“We’re thrilled about the investment as it will assist us in completing our initial product offering for our public beta release later this year, and continued development in 2010. We could not have asked for a better investment partner, as the ATDC, one of the nation’s leading university-based technology accelerators is committed to Atlanta’s thriving technology community, and helping startups become successful companies.”
Band Metrics is a data analytics and decision support system for the music industry, helping its users define and learn about their target audiences. The system gathers pertinent data about artists and displays manageable statistics and assumptions for its users’ insight, application and marketing advantage. For instance, Band Metrics will provide feedback about an artist’s presence on a variety of social networks which, in turn, can be applied to target promotional campaigns and isolate the areas where the artist may more effectively invest his resources.
If content syndication and distribution is the hottest topic on this blog at the moment, then music metrics is a close second. Over the weekend, I played with a new service I read about on Hypebot called RockDex. More like Google Alerts than Google Analytics for measuring music buzz, the free point-and-shoot service leverages the API’s of several social networks to measure an artist’s volume of mentions on Twitter and Blip.fm, content on YouTube and Flickr, and fans and listens on Last.fm and iLike, producing a score out of one hundred for each category. Third-party ‘how-to’ recommendations are placed strategically next to each score in an effort to help the artist raise his social buzz and, in turn, score on RockDex. I am not quite sure how useful or even representative this service is. I am guessing that it is intended as a snapshot of a broader service to come or marketing collateral for Music Arsenal, the company’s paid web-based CRM solution for artists and record labels, reminiscent of ArtistForce.
Band Metrics is a data analytics and decision support system for the music industry, helping its users define and learn about their target audiences. The system gathers pertinent data about artists and displays manageable statistics and assumptions for its users’ insight, application and marketing advantage. For instance, Band Metrics will provide feedback about an artist’s presence on a variety of social networks which, in turn, can be applied to target promotional campaigns and isolate the areas where the artist may more effectively invest his resources. Currently in private Beta, interested parties can apply for an invitation to test the site. I’m waiting for mine.
P2P streaming music service, Grooveshark, has launched an artist promotion initiative – much like the track placement scheme Jango conceived of – as a means for artists and music promoters to purchase plays on its platform, a direct advertising approach that makes sense. The Gainesville, Florida, company of approximately 40 young entrepreneurs has created a music service that rivals that of Last.fm and Pandora, the two major players in legal music discovery and ‘free’ music streaming.
Grooveshark claims to have deployed a legal music discovery and consumption model, providing its users with a financial incentive to share music, compensating artist/labels for their respective share of ‘broadcasts’, and maximizing illegal file sharing by financing its original sources. Whether this service is actually legal or not is questionable and it appears that the company has created an expensive model to sustain on ad revenues alone. However, they’re coming through on some very interesting marketing features for small budget music marketing campaigns. At its core, Grooveshark Artists offers pay-for-play audio realestate matched to its existing track recommendations and provides analytics tools for track placement optimization.
In addition, it has partnered up with some of the most talked about music tech startups for music retail, licensing, funding, and more, including Bandcamp, Sellaband and TheNextBigSound, all under the Grooveshark banner which already includes a number of subsidiary services including Tinysong, a track link generating tool for viral distribution, and Twisten.fm, a Twitter crawler that finds music-related tweets and links them to playable tracks. All of this put together amounts to a powerful enterprise of do-it-yourself marketing and a 360 indie approach akin to ReverbNation.
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