Creating a new Space for Music Promotion

MLOVE & Reeperbahn Festival present a brand new event format:

Mobile x Music, September 20, 2012, Hamburg

Paul Nelligan, CTO & Founder Audiofu

Creating a new Space for Music Promotion

“In the past, MySpace was the means by which a large population of artists represented themselves. As MySpace died a slow and painful death, a void appeared, which needed to be filled. There is a requirement today for every career Musician to have a good representative website. The tools for building this are still unsatisfactory,” explains Paul.

Paul Nelligan, CTO/Founder of Audiofu discusses the need to help musicians build high quality websites by providing a framework of best practices for a music website, by integrating all their existing feeds in one place, and having access to a design interface that is easily customizable. The idea is to ensure the music continues uninterrupted while browsing the artists’s material while remaining ad free.

Every artist needs a calling card – a way of showing all of their material online.

I’m providing an easy way for them to represent themselves, so that they can promote themselves better by customizing all of their online content in one place. I haven’t yet focused on promotional tools (in terms of reaching an audience) – although it’s a problem I will tackle as Audiofu grows, for now, I’m more giving them a representational tool – whether that’s showing their online content to labels or to fans – having a high quality (customized) page / website is an essential ingredient.

Although presently I’m focused on the web – I’m definitely interested in going mobile as Audiofu grows. One interesting use case I was thinking of is location based – e.g. If you go to a artists’s show, you download the artist’s app, and ‘check-in’ to the show – when you check in, you get bonus material – e.g. free downloads, discounts, etc. which benefits the artist in being able to reach their fan base… another use case I’ve considered is getting bonus material for tweeting about the artist – this is something which could apply to web or mobile – really, the possibilities are endless.

As for music apps that I admire: Soundcloud is the obvious one. I’m also interested in new funding mechanisms for bands. There’s one in Berlin called Sellaband – where you crowdsource album recordings through presales – it’s an interesting concept, and one which I will definitely be keeping an eye on. There are also many mobile apps for the music industry – MobBase, Reverbnation (which I’m not really a fan of because they don’t have an open API), etc. But when it comes to mobile, I’d rather look at a specific use case for artists and build something a bit more interesting than just showing their content. Although I will be focusing on making Audiofu mobile browser friendly.