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Write up of MUSIC Tech Pitch 4.5
Last night I had the pleasure of being asked to sit on the judging panel for MUSIC Tech Pitch 4.5 held at EMI’s London office. This was the second music focused pitching event organised by 2Pears.
The evening was opened by Andria Vidler, CEO of EMI Music UK & Ireland. Andria linked hosting the event to EMI’s innovation history, citing unsung tech hero Alan Blumlein who invented stereo sound, and contributed to the development of radar and television, and all before he had turned 40, as he was tragically killed at 38 in a plane crash in 1942. Seeing a list of achievements like that makes you ponder what you have personally managed to achieve with your life!
Moving into the pitching section of the evening, we saw eight music related start ups present for 3 minutes, with an additional 2 – 3 minutes of questioning from the panel.
In alphabetical order:
Live concert streaming over the web. Heavy focus on in stream interactivity and monitisation of ticket and merchandise sales.
To me it felt that they had a significant business development challenge to build brand awareness of the service with labels and artists, as there are many more established video streaming services out there that can offer a ready made audience, and infrastructure at scale.
A really simple idea, but the best often are. Distribute a single song via text messaging. e.g. Text emi to 60444 – this returns a link to download an MP3 track. The track can be free or chargable. Simple, fast, and uses a ubicoictious technology. Perfect for fast response like promoting a track as people leave a gig.
By far the most intriguing demo of the night. Nu desine is a new electronic musical instrument. Seeing Adam playing the “thing” was pretty amazing, it was well described on Twitter as a techno powered disco ball!
There was some concern from the panel on the money needed to scale a hardware business, and compete head to head with companies like Yamaha and Roland. To me I think the biggest challenge is for Adam to pick a single market proposition and focus 100% on that. At the moment he seems torn between positioning it as a serious instrument targeted at artists, and as a consumer oriented gadget / you akin to Guitar Hero or DJ Hero. These are very different markets, and by trying to appeal to both simultaneously it may struggle. For example at the moment it may be dismissed by musicians as a novelty product, whilst at £250 - £500 per unit it is too expensive for the home entertainment market.
Its certainly one to watch though.
This is a gig social network on stay on top of events, and connect with friends. I think the panel struggled to see how this was any different or better than the mirrad of ways people can currently get this kind of information and social networking – Songkick, Facebook, Last.FM all spring to mind.
To compel the lack of product USP they were working on deals with music venues on a venue by venue basis, so it felt like it wouldn’t deliver on the promise of being THE live music social network as Pepper wouldn’t have 100% coverage of live music listing in the UK for some time, if at all.
The idea behind PSONAR is track sharing and play back for 1p / 1c per track. Targeted at the youth market. Tracks are streamed. The business model innovation was well received by the panel.
My feedback on PSONAR was if they are targeting a cash poor audience like teens with their cheap business model, would using mobile streaming to deliver the content be an issue? The cost of mobile streaming over 3G may be cost prohibitive, and when questioned it seemed the product did not force streaming over Wi-Fi.
This was a cloud solution to provide a DJs with a web radio station through a browser, removing all the complexity and cost associated with “traditional” radio station streaming.
This is an area I don’t have much experience with, but it seemed to be a noisy market with a lot of companies operating in the space, although Radiojar claim none of them are as feature rich as them. I guess it will boil down to their marketing plan to cut through the noise and win customers.
This was a well-presented idea, apparently first developed with the BBC. It produces alternative music charts based on social media buzz. The idea being that traditional unit sales charts are felt to be misrepresentative of what is actually hot.
It certainly ticks some big topical buttons like big data, and montitising analytical information. My only issue was a potential mismatch between the premise of the idea and the execution. If the problem that The Sound Index is trying to solve is that the traditional charts are not credible in the age of social media, it seems strange their business strategy is to partner with brands and TV broadcasters. These kinds of companies are always seeking mass market adoption, therefore will want to promote the acts that dominate the traditional charts, which seems at odds with the original idea.
Olly who was presenting did stress there were a ton of personalisation options which allow you to data mine until your heart is content, so all in all pretty impressive.
My way to describe this is a browser based music creation app, that aims to compete head to head with more established desktop software music creation.
Assuming it has all the features to compete head to head with shrink wrapped competitors (in 3 minutes its hard to get into the nitty gritty) then Soundation looks to have potential to disrupt the market by offering easy distribution and a freemuim business model.
Like a couple of the ideas, I think success will be predicated on the commercial and business developer execution.
Results
The winner of the audience vote was Sound Index, and the judges voted for Text2Music. Congratulations to all the pitching companies, and the winners.
For the record my top three were:
1. Text2Music
2. Sound Index
3. Psonar
Options to monetise Mobile Apps
On Thursday I participated in openMIC13, which was part of the awesome Bath Digital Festival. Congrats to Mike Ellis and the team for pulling together such a comprehensive and successful series of events.
A highlight from the morning session was a talk by Kieran Gutteridge of Intohand who provided a whole bunch of great tips and tricks on how to increase visibility and revenue for your mobile apps.
Kieran’s slides are embedded below, along with a few notes from me.
Kieran made a great point about doing your homework to ensure you are up to speed on the regulatory conditions around mobile subscription services (slide 4) PhonepayPlus is the best place to start for the UK market. You should avoid looking like a “shady” rip off service at all costs. No one wants another Crazy Frog. Check out Payforit as a potential solution.
App metrics were covered in detail (slide 9) AppAnnie is an awesome free service that aggregates all of your App Store data and your user reviews so you can stay on top of everything from one place. Flurry gives you deep statistical Google Analytics style reports.
A great tip is to ensure you localise your App Store catalogue meta data. Prospective international customers may be able to understand an English language App UI, but they typically search their App Store in their native language, even if they can understand English. You can get translation services from the companies listed on slide 10 of Kieran’s deck.
Advertising was covered, and a few alternatives to the “big boys” are provided on slide 11. The advice was integrate a few of them to ensure you boost your fill rates. Also keep an eye out for new entrants who offer higher pay outs to gain market share. Again the point was made – advertising only provides a viable revenue stream for high traffic apps, so don't expect to get rich off Ads.
The top seller lists in the various App Stores drive a disproportional amount of downloads. App Stores are becoming so congested, developers are coming up with increasingly sophisticated ways of getting into the recommended or top seller lists to drive eyeballs to their apps.
Kieran covers off a few of those tricks. Incentivised download services can boost your numbers to make those top seller charts. Look to have a cost of acquisition of around $1.50 per install. There are also a few services that offer a free app of the day. These are listed on slide 15.
Buddy up with friends and cross promote each others apps. You can also move your pricing up and down to “game” the system. Another tactic is to use in app purchase to buy big ticket items to game the top grossing charts. Kieran wisely advised to treat these tactics with caution, as there is a grey area around acceptable practice – you don't want to be delisted from the App Store in question.
All in all a really insightful talk, you can follow Kieran here.
Google to start monetising analytics, but good luck searching for a price #google #yam
Following on from Google recently announcing they will charge developers to use their translation API, Google announced yesterday that they are now introducing a premium version of Google Analytics. Interestingly I found it impossible to find any pricing information. In fact it seems you have to talk to someone to get it. A little off for a web company!
In a smart move they kept the masses sweet by improving the free version to include real time data, but this is another move that signals a swing away from their original position of never charging the end user for using their services.
Developer Economics 2011 Infographic #mobile #developers
The infographic below is a handy pictorial summary of the industry leading Developer Economics 2011 Report, available as a free download here, thanks to BlueVia's support.
Google Will Take Only 5% Of In-Game Sales
According to a Business Insider article yesterday Google will offer a 25% lower commission rate compared to Facebook for in game transactions. Whilst this sounds like great news for developers, in comes with a huge asterisk and slug of small print - the 5% rate is only a promotional offer, and at the moment there is no detail on the length of the promotion or the standard commission rate once the offer has ended.
You can read the Business Insider article here: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-will-take-only-5-of-in-game-sales-faceb...
