SONG CONTEST BLOG

The Echo Nest is a music intelligence company developing a range of powerful open APIs for savvy developers to tap into in an effort to make their online music services analyze and convert data into meaningful musical discoveries for their users.  The Echo Nest’s approach to “understanding” musical attributes and matching this information to consumer-facing musical properties is as much an innovation in technology as it is in concept.  Fans of Pandora, Last.fm, Jango and other streaming playlist services will appreciate the game-changing experience such applications provide – the almost flawless and automated comprehension of musical characteristics such as tempo, key, and time signature is mind boggling – and the recent partnership with Spotify, the streaming music service making the most waves at the moment, is testament to The Echo Nest’s music acumen.

Now, the Somerville, MA, based operation has unveiled an inspiring new service affectionately dubbed Fanalytics.  The solution, in this case, addresses a very real pain in a manner that’s easy to stomach: musicians and music marketers need to reach the most likely music authors, bloggers, and journalists to publish something about them – Fanalytics will search for and identify the most relevant points of contact.  Why is this valuable?  Because sorting through 30 million bloggers or so on the net to find just a handful willing to promote you is an impossible task, even for the seasoned media pro.  Furthermore, while the 3 million plus musicians out there along with their managers, agents, and pluggers pursue placement in just a handful of high-profile media sources, Fanalytics digests a tail of smaller, more obscure sources that their aggregate coverage may serve more exposure than that of a single, prominent editorial in, say, Rolling Stone.  Whether that’s fact or fiction in practice is, in my opinion, over shadowed by the gallantry of attempting to build technologies that connect more music makers with more music writers with more music fans.

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Presumably in response to EMI’s recent formal complaint and Warner’s lawsuit last year, SeeqPod filed for Chapter 11  with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California two days ago.  The music search engine which rolled out an attractive pay-for-play advertising programme for artists is liquidating its assets by selling its source code to developers for $5000, perhaps encouraging many services just like SeeqPod to emerge in the future.  Yet another sorry day for the music industry…

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Music search engine, SeeqPod, that has already indexed (but not stored) 12 million songs, has been handed a formal complaint from EMI following a lawsuit from Warner last year.  Unlike Pandora and Imeem, the company has not pursued licenses to provide “playable search results” maintaining that they are not responsible for content sources and, therefore, free from any obligation to the copyright holder.  Legally questionable, Seeqpod has become very successful and the two major labels are probably going after it to settle on a mutual business model rather than to shut it down.  The news prompted me to play with the system a little and I enjoyed learning about their artist-centric advertising progamme that’s highly targeted and cost competitive.  Providing 5000 “exposures” (i.e. impressions) a month for $19.95, SeeqPod Echo is a nicely put together search-oriented advertising interface which may very well generate some relevant traffic for artists and music promoters who wish to tap into SeeqPod’s massive music listening community.  I’m curious to learn how the conversion rates stack up.