Tag Archives: Music Startups

There’s more to Swedish online music scene than Spotify. While waiting for its big U.S. launch and trying to avoid being jeaulous of the French now signing up for free, there’s other cool stuff from Sweden to discover new music with. On the go. For free.

One of my absolute favourite services to discover new music and keep it fresh is CitySounds.fm. It was developed in only 15 hours by Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud at Music Hack Day London. CitySounds.fm lets one discover music produced in cities worldwide, metropolitan or small town, as well as it automatically locates ones current city. It’s based on SoundCloud API, using all the public geotagged music available. Swedish SoundCloud is an online collaboration tool for music professionals to share music and audio files. (Check out Robert Scoble’s interview with SoundCloud co-founder Alexander Ljung to get wowed). Each city is listed by different music genres and one can become a fan of a city by sharing it on both Facebook and Twitter, thus adding social music discovery element to it. To favourite a city helps it also to climb on the popular chart.

New music providers are to be announced, and an update is coming out this week on the web version with enhanced navigation and better tracking of Facebook sharings, also replacing the old board with new one showing the latest updated cities instead. Since December CitySounds.fm is also available on the iPhone at price of $3. It’s already had over 2 000 downloads. A major update on the iPhone app is also in the making, expect it within next two months.

CitySounds.fm attracts today 60 000 monthly visits counting for approx. 150 000 plays.

Music Hack Day Stockholm

Stockholm, Sweden, was also the place to accomodate the latest edition of Music Hack Day after Boston, Amsterdam, Berlin, and London. Together with Mattias Arrelid of Spotify, Henrik Berggren of CitySounds.fm threw a great hacking weekend with Spotify, SoundCloud, Last.fm and Echo Nest among attending companies. 30 cool new music projects were born and I was as impressed as David Noël of SoundCloud and Matthew Ogle of Last.fm. Rumors are circulating having the next hack day either in New York, Barcelona or London.

Few Nice Examples:

My City vs. Your City by Michael Schieben is a pretty neat music discovery app that uses Last.fm data to compare what people listen to in different cities. As one can see, Stockholm and San Francisco may be close when it comes to tech but appararently Lady GaGa is the only thing we seem to agree on when it comes to music.

Songkick On Tour connects ones Songkick and Dopplr accounts to find shows happening in ones city of destination. Never miss a great gig when travelling. Songkick On Tour was created by Matt Biddulph, CTO of Dopplr.

Holodeck by Winston Design is kind of what Mobile Roadie is to iPhone apps, except for websites: With Holodeck an artist can create its own website in no time by pulling data from Last.fm, Songkick, Tumblr and SoundCloud accounts. Very neat. Check out.

All this new music discovery is made possible due to availability of open APIs. Hence, the power of open APIs is substansial when it comes to online innovation, both within product development and business models.

And there doesn’t seem to be any stop to the ever increasing flow and demand of music online. SoundCloud is experiencing 30% monthly growth, having 10 000 hours of audio uploaded every day! Last.fm does 2 million scrobbles per hour, i.e. automatically adds the tracks you play to your Last.fm account, and gets more than 45% of its traffic via 3rd party APIs!

To quote Matthew Ogle, Last.fm: ”It’s pretty clear that 2010 is going to be an exciting year in music and tech.”

Online music scene community truly represents what’s great about the open and social web: The more you open up, the more you share – the more you receive and discover.

More bub.blicio.us reading on music.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Follow her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

On Wednesday night at one of San Francisco’s co-working spaces, two great startups presented their products to a pretty packed house at one of the city’s most popular co-working locations, Citizen Space. The two companies were Midomi and SonicLiving – both of which are in the business of helping people figure out what songs they’re listening to and where to get more information.

As I sat through and listened to Midomi give their presentation, it’s apparent that there was some real music ingenuity going on here. The premise behind Midomi is this: it’s a mobile platform so it can be used for the iPhone (yes, there’s even an app for that) and if you’re trying to figure out the name of a song that you’re listening to, you can sing/hum a verse & then it will pick it up and display the song (including any covers of the song). What’s even more impressive is that it can also be used for karaoke – and if you didn’t know, the tech scene is infamous for karaoke…so there you go…it’s karaoke on the go!

SonicLiving has also created a product centered around music, but not necessarily through the same way on mobile phones as with Midomi. The goal behind SonicLiving is to help music fans connect with the bands at a live concert or show. By connecting through music streaming programs like Pandora, Facebook, Last.FM and Lala, fans can keep track of when their favorite bands/artists are coming to a location near them and purchase tickets to the event – it’s an interesting way of keeping in touch with your bands. Just imagine as you’re listening to a song using Midomi that you love (and perhaps are belting out during karaoke?) and then get a ping from SonicLiving saying that the song’s band is set to perform at the nearby concert hall – wouldn’t you want to grab yourself some tickets to see how the pros sing the same song?

Here are some photos from the event:

You can view more photos from this event on my Flickr set here.