Back in July of last year, ArtistData Founder and serial entrepreneur Brenden Mulligan brought his newest project, Onesheet, into beta. At the time, Alexia described Onesheet as the “About.me for bands”, which is an apt description considering Mulligan’s professed goal for his startup was to create a simple way for bands to build a real presence on the Web without having to religiously maintain that presence. That means that bands can use Onesheet to create aggregated, customizable profiles, verifying their identities through Facebook or Twitter to connect with third party services like Soundcloud, Bandcamp and ReverbNation. (And social media services like Posterous, Tumblr and YouTube.)
It’s great for artists, because they can tweak the look of their page, re-position widgets and so on without putting in a lot of effort because their pages update themselves through connectivity with those other third party platforms. In fact, this kind of functionality was enough in demand that, one month later, Onesheet came out of limited beta, whereupon we learned that over 10,000 artists had signed up to use the service. What’s more, Onesheet has been voted a finalist in the “Best Bootstrapped Startup” category for the 2011 Crunchie Awards.
With a decade of experience in the music industry managing bands and building music products, Mulligan’s goal from the beginning with Onesheet was to target bands and musicians. But he also smartly chose a name for his product that has broad entertainment industry implications, versus something like BandPage. (After all, in the industry, a “one-sheet” is a document that summarizes a product for publicity and sales.) Because, the fact of the matter is, there are a lot of people out there that represent themselves with media, rather than through a biography and dont want to spend a lot of time building a Web presence, nor do they want to pay a ton for that ability.
So, after spending six months understanding what the product needed to be for bands, today Onesheet is launching version 2.0 to bring its services to the entire entertainment industry. No longer just for bands, now filmmakers, actors, TV shows, movies, comedians, and more can get in on the action.
In doing so, Onesheet is launching a number of subtle changes based on feedback from its users, starting with increased flexibility in the type of Onesheets that can be created. This means that users can create as many Onesheets as they’d like, so that a musician can create a page for his or her band, as well as for a specific album or song, just as a director can create pages for themselves as well as their individual movies, for example.
Mulligan and team have also restructured the pages so that users can add content as widgets, allowing for further page customization, with support for audio powered by sites like Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Reverbnation, Broadjam, and for events through AristData, Songkick, and others, mailing list signup, Facebook wall posts and comments, pledging, Amazon MP3 and CD Baby store access, tweets, and video through Hulu YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
In turn, the team has also altered Onesheet’s “Premium Plan”, moving many of the service’s premium features into its free plan, along with reducing premium pricing to $5 a month. (You can read Mulligan’s blog post on the changes here.)
These changes reflect Onesheet’s user-centric approach, and as musicians happen to be some of the more cost-sensitive people out there, lower premium pricing will be music to their ears, just as it will be for other industry professionals. In creating an About.me for the entertainment industry, it’s essential that Onesheet allow its users to connect to the plethora of services bands and others are using to share their tunes, manage their operations, sell their content, connect with fans, and everything in between.
This is especially true considering the fact that artists are using Onesheet as a PR vehicle just as much as they are using it as their web presence, Mulligan says, citing the example of the band Paramore. With nearly 19 million Facebook “Likes”, Paramore has a big web presence, but they and other artists are using Onesheet to post their new single instead of emailing radio stations and other distribution sources. They can just upload their single to SoundCloud and allow users to access it via Onesheet, where fans can also see a multitude of other stuff, like their official videos, etc. With this kind of use case, Onesheet is becoming a suped-up, interactive allmusic. Or at least a great complement.
Now offering additional video content from Hulu and Vimeo, artist information from IMDB, audio from Rdio, and more, Onesheet is becoming a flexible resource for aggregating the Web services that make the entertainment industry tick and allow them to put their best face forward for public viewing and consumption.
If Onesheet is successful its users to make the site their primary web presence and PR vehicle (and with tens of thousands of users, it’s on its way), it will be around for a long time to come. It also helps that Mulligan has made custom domain names available to all Onesheet users, for free. Of course, to really go the distance, Onesheet will need a mobile presence. Though Mulligan says Onesheet apps are on the way.
For more, check out the announcement here and the video below. Let us know what you think.
Onesheet gives bands a simple, easy to set up, and automatically managed web presence that pulls in content from all of the band’s existing web profiles, including music, videos, photos, concert dates, blogs, social streams, mailing list signups, and online stores.
Brenden Mulligan is a designed focused, product oriented entrepreneur. Mulligan currently is working on Cluster, the best way to relive shared experiences with your friends and family by create collaborative photo albums of your favorite moments. Mulligan also created Onesheet, the best place for entertainment professionals to display their work, TipList, a simple way for people to share travel tips with friends, and several Instagram-based projects including Webbygram, MorningPics and PhotoPile. He previously founded ArtistData, which was acquired by Sonicbids...
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