Social music recommendation service MyStrands has completed the second half of their B round, raising an additional $24 million from Spanish Bank BBVA on top of the $25 million we reported earlier. BBVA is a financial services group with more than $782 billion in total assets, 42 million customers in 40 countries and a market capitalization of approximately $95 billion. This brings total financing for the Corvallis, OR based startup to $55 million, significantly more than $5 million raised by London-based Last.fm which started around the same time (later sold for $280 million). MyStands core products are a music recommendation engine for discovering songs you love while on your computer, mobile, and even playing them in bars you frequent. They recently launched a music video product that puts a more pleasant face on YouTube’s music video archives. They’ve made over $12 million in sales from these products during 2007. Even with revenues pacing nicely, $24 million is a lot of capital and its not clear they really need it. The company says the money will go towards expanding their recommendation engine beyond music, although they’re not saying how quite yet. The most MyStrand’s VP of Communications Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria will say is that “…the general idea is to keep building technologies that will help people discover different products and services.” Well, now they have quite a war chest to pursue that goal. CrunchBase Information Strands Slacker Last.fm Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
MyStrands, provider of a music recommendation service, has launched a slick new website at MyStrands.tv for finding music videos hosted on YouTube. Users can browse music videos by artist or genre and play them in a large player. The system also recommends videos based on your viewing habits and input. A social network of sorts is integrated into the service. You can view friends’ favorite videos and artists and set up your own personalized channels. There is also a stumbling feature in which you can view another video based on the artist of the video you are currently watching. Similar music video discovery services include Middio, MOG, and iLike. Of course, you can always just browse music videos on YouTube itself, many of them legal. It certainly makes sense to build services that exploit the music videos hosted on YouTube, as the majority of the top 10 videos on YouTube are music-related. MyStrands recently raised $25 million in Series B funding. → Read More
Music discovery platform MyStrands has closed a Series B round of $25million led by Antonio Asensio, CEO of Grupo Zeta, Spain’s third largest media group, along with existing investors Debaeque and Sequal. MyStrands delivers a product that although sharing similarities to Last.fm, also extends to the desktop with the inclusion of locally stored music in its recommendation equation. CEO Francisco Martin said that the company was committed to remaining independent and that the funding will help the company continue in developing its product. MyStrands has struggled against competitors such as Last.fm, iLike and Pandora. It’s a difficult market to crack that hasn’t been helped by a name change from MusicStrands along the way. Having said that, MyStrands is a decent offering; the platform hooks nicely into iTunes and recommends music as you’re playing songs in a seamless fashion. $25million isn’t a small figure, I’m sure the company will put it to good use. Check out MyStrands’ profile. → Read More
Hot on the tail of Slacker comes another social music service, MyStrands Mobile. This S60 application offers music discovery as well as music sharing and builds on a library of 6 million tracks. You and your friends can share your current playlists and collects your playback history on your own MyStrands page. Read the rest on MobileCrunch… → Read More
Keeping with the theme of Mike’s Online Photo Editing Overview, I wanted to cover some of the entrants into social music. Music was probably the first type of rich media to really go “Web 2.0″ and it’s become a pretty popular place for startups. As a result, there are some great Rich Internet Applications built around social music. Anyone who makes music a part of their daily lives has no shortage of options when it comes to finding new music and sharing with friends. FineTune Finetune is a relatively new application written in Flash. It’s my favorite out of the bunch and I covered it on my ZDNet blog. What makes Finetune stand out is that in addition to the standard “artist radio”, it allows users to build playlists of specific songs. The minimum playlist is 45 songs and you can have up to three songs per artist. With custom playlists, you can make sure you’re only listening to songs you want. Finetune also gets points because in addition to the web version, it runs on the Wii and there is an Apollo-based desktop client. Pandora Pandora is the granddaddy of the bunch and it’s one of the Web 2.0 applications that Mike can’t live without. It is built using OpenLaszlo and provides the cleanest experience out of all the applications on the list. Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to generate a stream of songs that you’ll like based on how you rate previous tracks. You create stations around artists, songs or albums and you can provide feedback (thumbs up or thumbs down) on the songs Pandora chooses. Tech Crunch’s coverage of Pandora is here. Last.Fm last.fm is another Web 2.0 veteran and is more socially-slanted than the others. Tagging is a big part of the last.fm experience and you can tag any song that comes along in addition to being able to listen to “user tag radio” which is based on tracks that users have tagged with a specific genera. last.fm has a separate desktop application that “scrobbles” the songs you listen to and generates a music profile that you can share with friends. See Tech Crunch’s coverage of last.fm here. MOG MOG is all about a music community. It’s very blog-centric and revolves around user pages, or “Mogs”. You build your Mog around songs you’re listening too and artists you like. That builds something like a profile → Read More
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