NoiseTrade finds a nice formula to connect bands with their fans

Doing my regular routine search on Killer Startups‘ video-music-photo section, I discovered this very interesting widget developer called NoiseTrade that focuses its efforts music promotion.  The start-up’s widget is apparently working wonders in terms of connecting bands with their fans with a single two-sided distribution model. After these two pretty vague sentences, let me explain:

An artists signs-up, uploads up to 20 songs to the widget, and places it wherever he/she desires. The widget enables fans to either a/pay a minimum of $1 to download the promoted album or b/recommend the album to five people of their choice and receive it for free.

This didn’t strike me as a particularly innovating idea before I actually clicked on one of their widget’s eye-soothing orange ‘Tell Five Friends’ button. By spending virtually no more than 2 minutes of your time, you get an entire album for free (192 kb/s mp3s) and you promote an artist’s music directly to five people. Very viral and very community-friendly.

Now on the business side of things, to enroll in the NoiseTrade ‘program’, artists are required to pay a flat fee of $250 to activate their widget giving them 20 000 downloads total (meaning their album can be downloaded 20 000 times for that fee). Once they reached that mark, bands are to pay $75 for every additional 5000 downloads. Added to that, NoiseTrade also scoops up a %10 margin on every ‘pay-what-you-want’ transaction.

This may seem expensive to some, but according to CEO Derek Webb, his bootstrapped company barely makes money with his Amazone S3 hosting eating up most of the profit. Besides, the virality of such a widget can easily make up for the $250 promotional cost.

Derek had released his album ‘Mockingbird’ back in 2006 and gave it away for free in exchange for the downloaders’ information. Within three months he had reached 80 000 downloads and immediately noticed an increase in show attendance and album sales. That experience originated his NoiseTrade concept.

For those of you skeptical about paying what seems to be a fortune in the p2p music world we now live in, taking a step back might help you realize that paying $250 for an immense list of emails and postal codes of fan, or potential-fans, isn’t that much, and NoiseTrade’s aim is to enroll bands who already have an established fan-base.

One thing I really loved about the website is the subtle-sober beauty of its design and navigation. You would expect the artist profile to take you through the usual mind numbing task of entering your band info and uploading songs, but here the process actually felt….not too boring. I barely knew what the service was about that it already made me feel at ease with it, as if the fact that I was uploading songs really meant something. Don’t ask me why, but that’s what came to mind at the time :)

Check it out:
Website: www.noisetrade.com
Blog: www.noisetrade.com/blog/index.php?bp=y

mruff!

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SoundCloud: the best way to send and share your projects audio tracks

SoundCloud is a new German start-up that is going to bring a smile on music producers’ faces :) It’s a site specialized in sending out audio tracks easily and in just a couple of clicks. The concept is nothing new really, we all used services like YouSendIt, music collaboration sites, p2p and FTP servers to get the job done, but SoundCloud is now here to fill in the gaps specifically missing for audio.

Incredibly user-friendly and comprehensible, the interface guides you through the process of sending, tagging and describing your tracks in a snap.

Including just the right amount of social features, SoundCloud makes it easy to collaborate and share music for your projects. In your profile you can include your artist description and preview your uploaded tracks. When you click on a track you are taken to its sub menu where you see the waveform on which you can post comments at specific cues, download or stream it, share it via an embeddable widget and so on. Unfortunately, WordPress.com does not support the widget but the image below is what it would normally look like:

gigdoggy medley.1 by GigDoggy (click this link to be taken to our profile)

When uploading a track you can can tag it, specify the bpm, indicate the genre, upload artwork etc. Everything is thought out to make sending music for the purpose of professional collaborations easy, even for the technologically challenged. Other interesting features like an audio drop-box make it easy for people to send you their files and create some collab opportunities. I encourage you to take a tour of the service here.

Oh and there are no limitations to the size and formats of the files you want to send, whether the recipient is a SoundCloud member or not (!)

TechCrunch has got 500 invites so hop on board asap.

roar.

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