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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
Tag Cloud of my last 4 years of listening on Last.FM
Found a cool set of tools using the Last.FM API to create
visualisations from your track play data. Here is my tag cloud for tracks played 2008 - 2012:
Friend me on Last.FM here.
Bad news for Turntable.FM as Facebook launch collaborative music listening
Long time readers will remember that I raved about Turntable.FM last summer. It truly changed my music consumption habits within a week.
Of course the music industry quickly identified it as a threat, rather than a solution to solve their fucked business model, and forced Turntable.FM to block all traffic from the US. As I wrote at the time, these actions are pointless as it is easy to spoof a US IP address. Still the hassle eroded the group I was regularly DJ'ing with and my usage dropped off to near zero.
What a huge missed opportunity.
I've been keeping tabs on Turntable.FM's attempts to secure the licensing they need to re-open to non US customers, but so far silence.
Then the news I'm sure they were dreading. Facebook announced on Thursday that they were launching "Listen with" which basically does exactly what Turntable.FM does, except of course you are locked into the Facebook platform.
The blog post says it is rolling out now, and I assume that Facebook have enough lawyers, muscle and money to make the music labels play nice. Its amusing reading the comments on the blog post praising Facebook for coming up with such a cool idea.
Whilst writing this post I checked in on Turntable.FM for any news and the site was down. I'm not sure if that was scheduled maintenance, or coincidence, but their Twitter account hasn't posted for 48 hours either. There is no mention of the Facebook announcement in their stream.
I can hear the biting of lips in New York from here.
Turntable.FM blocked outside USA
OMG I'm in love with Turntable.FM
- The labelling of tracks is a little misleading - you think you have picked a killer track to impress your room with, but it turns out to be a remix or live version which can piss you off a little.
- It doesn't scrobble to Last.FM - this would be awesome to log what you are listening to for future reference
- It seems pretty intensive on your browser - I've seen a few people crash out, and a couple of times my Mac has become unresponsive for a moment
- You don't get to see the play list of any of the other DJ's in the room. I'm not sure if this is good or bad. It does mean you listen without predicuce to up coming songs, as @creativegeek pointed out to me last night
Drum Tracks
Bad Dream, Keane
30 Top Albums
Construction Time Again - Depeche Mode
Songs From The Big Chair - Tears For Fears
The 12" Album - Howard Jones
Under A Blood Red Sky - U2
October - U2
The Doors - The Doors
First And Last And Always - Sisters Of Mercy
Talk About The Weather - Red Lorry Yellow Lorry
Never Another Sunset - The Rose Of Avalanche
Gods Own Medicine - The Mission
First Chapter - The Mission
Pornography - The Cure
The Real Thing - Faith No More
Attack Of The Grey Lantern - Mansun
Friends - The Bolshoi
Badmotorfinger - Soundgarden
Disraeli Gears - Cream
Dirt - Alice In Chains
Exit Planet Dust - Chemical Brothers
Twice As Nice - Fantazia
Diamonds Are Forever - Salvation
II - Orbital
Let Love Rule - Lenny Kravitz
Rage Against The Machine - Rage Against The Machine
Screamadelica - Primal Scream
Ten - Pearl Jam
Tinderbox - Siouxsie
Through The Veil - Claytown Troupe
Vivid - Living Colour
