Switchcam Pivots To Provide Analytics And Gallery Curation Tools For Musicians And Their Agents

Once upon a time, Switchcam was built to find, curate, and stitch together all the best moments from live, public performances that were posted on YouTube. Now it’s looking to provide a way for artists to determine which moments at live events most resonated with their fans, and to curate galleries of images from those events.

With its proprietary technology, Switchcam could scan YouTube videos posted by users and piece them together based on a mix of audio recognition and timestamps. Once Switchcam had accomplished that, users could watch a stream of videos that event goers had shot, using algorithms to try and isolate the best quality video and audio from all of its sources.

Somewhere along the line, the Switchcam team realized that the data it was collecting would be valuable for another reason — it could give artists, promoters, and agents analytics about their live performances. Moreover, it could help them pinpoint the most interesting moments, and to create image galleries out of them.

Switchcam takes data that it was already collecting from videos on YouTube and photos on Instagram, and, based on what users are sharing, figure out the highlights from those events. It also help artists and their managers to figure out who their biggest fans and biggest influencers are.

Curation

Considering many artists are making most of their money from touring nowadays rather than record sales or royalties, determining the relevance of when and who is sharing can be valuable when trying to connect with fans and grow an audience.

Pricing for Switchcam’s new analytics platform is based on how popular an artist is on Facebook, which basically correlates to how much data needs to be tracked:

  • Analytics for artists with less than 100,000 “likes” on Facebook is $9 per month
  • Analytics for artists with less than 1 million “likes” is $39 per month
  • Analytics for artists with more than 1 million “likes” is $79 per month

Switchcam believes its technology can also be used by brands. But hey, let’s see what happens with artists first. The company had raised raising $1.2 million from Mark Cuban, 500 Startups, Turner MediaCamp, Vikas Gupta, David Beyer, Jeffrey Schox, Niket Desai, and Reed Morse.