By Brian Kecskemety
Last night saw the first NY Music Tech Meetup of 2013, the fifth year of the meetup’s history. Seth Hillinger kicked things off at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory with a 2013 State of the Music Tech Union of sorts, emphasizing that “funding should not be the goal [of start-ups]. The goal should be fun!” He further encouraged the entrepreneurs and developers in the standing-roomy only crowd to “create apps that are meaningful and break the rules.”
For a collection of tweets and photos from the meetup, check out the #NYMusicTech Twubs page.
Five companies were on hand to demo their services:
Creative Allies is a social e-commerce platform for band and brand merchandise. They have an extensive client list that includes The Shins, Rascal Flatts, Counting Crows, Slipknot, and many others.
Through the platform, artists can run contests soliciting crowdsourced designs and artwork for album covers, tour posters, shirts, or just about anything else. The platform ties into Facebook, so fans can vote on their favorites and artists can strengthen their relationship with fans.
Eventful is an event listings aggregator that aims to be “the Google of events.” The service uses a custom recommendation engine to present specific events in which different users might be interested. The site is growing fast and currently registers 1.5 million mobile monthly uniques.
They recently ran a contest in partnership with State Farm, where users got the opportunity to vote for openers for a Mayer Hawthorne concert at Los Angeles’s famed The Roxy and attend for free.
We covered TheFuture.fm last month when they announced their DJ loyalty program. TheFuture.fm specializes in the monetization of long form content (DJ mixes, podcasts, etc.) They do this through their own proprietary MixSCAN technology, which has the capability of fingerprinting samples as short as three seconds. When users listen to a DJ mix, each original creator is able to be compensated for their work.
COO Bob Barbiere hinted at plans for TheFuture.fm to rollout a live streaming feature, so fans could listen to their favorite DJs’ sets live from clubs all around the world.
Larry Miller, EVP & GM of Rights Administration at MediaNet, was on hand to discuss their service, which provides blanket license agreements to budding music app developers and entrepreneurs. One of the most difficult parts of creating a music services is getting clearances with publishers, and MediaNet has spent years creating a robust network of thousands of HFA and non-HFA publishers. Some of MediaNet’s clients include MOG, Google, ebay, Songza, and turntable.fm.
Cortney Harding of Soundrop had the final demo of the evening. We’ve covered Soundrop a lot on SoundCtrl, with their Kendrick Lamar listening room back in October. Last night’s demo focused on their newly announced Facebook integration.
Cortney also hinted at a mobile app being in development.
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