Indie music discovery service OurStage decided to fill me in on how well they’re doing as a startup in the difficult online music business, and I was quite amazed to see how much they’ve progressed over the years. On a financial level, the company has fantastic prospects; they expect to hit profitability sometime next year if all goes well. That should sound like music to the ears of their investors: OurStage raised a healthy $17 million in Series A when they started out in 2007 and went on to raise an additional $3 million in Series B earlier this year.
OurStage says it intends to double the amount of financing for the Series B round, which would bring the total investment put into the company to $23 million by the end of 2009. → Read More
The bomb-shelter mentality among startups is now so severe that even companies raising money are announcing layoffs in response to diminished economic prospects. Boston-based Helium just closed a $17 million series A financing about ten days ago, and then cut 30 percent of the organization (18 people) last week. CEO Mark Ranalli tells me:
We expect a deterioration of overall ad rates, and a slowing of the economy in general. Our approach was to take a third of every group across engineering, customer service, and sales.
Ranalli has been raising the $17 million piecemeal over the past year from hedge funds, family trusts, and wealthy individuals. The last $2 million came in two weeks ago. Combined with the current cuts, Ranalli believes he has enough to make it to profitability. → Read More
Indie music and film site OurStage has announced a new content partnership with Joost that will see user picked content offered to Joost users. Under the deal, OurStage will offer four channels on Joost: Best of OurStage Shorts, Best of OurStage Comedy, OurStage Music Videos and OurStage Artist Access. The channels will give Joost users access to 10 OurStage Artists on each channel and exclusive content including music festival coverage & advice from established musicians & filmmakers. OurStage launched in March 2007 and lets users rank and buy Inide songs and video. Artists upload their content, which users then judge – two snippets are heard/ watched and the user votes for which one he or she likes the best. The result are constantly updated in to top lists of songs. The top songs overall or by category are then listed on the site, and prizes are given to the top artists each month. See our November 2007 review of their iPhone offering here. CrunchBase Information OurStage Joost Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
The signs are everywhere that a revolution is taking place in music. DRM is history, the price of music is falling towards zero (and sometimes even free isn’t enough to slow piracy), and even big music sites like Yahoo are beginning to break ranks with the RIAA and labels. But Amazon may be doing more than anyone else to change the way music is discovered, promoted and sold. Not only do they have a music store that only sells DRM-free music, but they are experimenting with startups who are trying to break the stranglehold that labels have on discovering, promoting and marketing new artists. These startups are giving artists a different path to find their fans. And Amazon is helping them. Today Amazon announced that it is partnering with a European startup called SellABand and will sell music from SellABand artists. We first covered SellABand in August 2006 – unknown artists upload music to the site and ask fans to chip in $10 if they like what they hear. Once the band gets to $50,000 they’ve proven themselves, and they get to record a CD in a professional studio. Each fan gets a limited edition CD. If the artist doesn’t reach $50,000, the fans can get their money back or give it to another artist. Earlier this year we noted that the model seems to work. Today, more than 6,000 artists have uploaded music to the site, and a lucky few have been picked by fans to record albums. The top artists will now have their music sold on Amazon UK as well, making the model even more attractive. See our coverage of Strayform, a different startup with a variation on the SellABand business model. Amazon also invested in a different startup in the music space – Amie Street. Amie Street is a company I have long admired – we first covered it in July 2006, and last year I added it to my list of “web 2.0 companies I couldn’t live without.” Amie Street has a model for selling non-DRM music that simultaneously earns artists money and ranks artists by popularity of downloads. All songs start at free. As users begin to download a song, the price rises steadily until it reaches $0.99. So the more a song costs, the more popular it is. Most of the muck is filtered out by $0.25 or so, and the site has → Read More
Mzinga isn’t the only new product launching tonight at the Boston TechCrunch Party. Massachusetts based OurStage is debuting a new iPhone site where anyone can listen to top ranked Indie songs as well. Ourstage, which launched in March 2007, is a site that lets users rank and buy Indie songs. Artists upload the songs, which users then judge – two song snippets are heard and the user votes for which one he or she likes the best. The result is are constantly updated top lists of songs. The top songs overall or by category are then listed on the site, and two $5,000 prizes are given to the top artists each month. Users can also purchase any song in unrestricted MP3 format for $.99. Currently the artists receive 100% of proceeds, but starting in 2008 OurStage will begin to take a 30% cut. Now iPhone users can visit the site and stream any of the top songs – just visit ourstage.com from your iPhone to access the custom user interface, which uses Quicktime to stream the music. OurStage is taking a different approach to ranking Indie music from other startups we’ve covered. Amie Street, by comparison, simply sets the price of every news song at zero and then begins raising the price as the number of downloads increases. Amie Street was recently funded by Amazon. Also see our coverage of Strayform and SellaBand. CrunchBase Information OurStage AmieStreet Strayform SellABand Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
