Music Ally

Last year, our 200 Digital Music Startups of 2008 blog post went down a storm, so naturally we thought we’d repeat it for 2009. We’ve changed the format though: it’s in alphabetic order this time.

Some caveats to cover our backs. The list is based on startups we’ve covered for the first time in the Music Ally Daily Bulletin this year. It’s not a list of the best or most successful companies/services/sites – it’s a snapshot of what people were launching this year, or talking about launching (a few, like Rdio and Kik, won’t go live till the new year). Some are already defunct.

We think it highlights some interesting trends. Like all the sites springing up to do music stuff with Twitter. Or the huge interest in building communities around live music. Or more user-friendly torrent sites. Innovative mobile apps, legal music search engines, web games… As we said, it’s a snapshot.

What’s that? You launched a music-related startup or service this year and it isn’t on here? Please post a comment and tell us about it – this post will be updated regularly over the coming weeks with people we’ve missed. If you’re on the list but have changed tack or added major new features, please also let us know in a comment, and we’ll reflect that too.

Obligatory plug: we wrote about all these firms in our Daily Bulletin, alongside news about industry trends, digital marketing campaigns, legal/licensing developments and all things digital music. You can sign up for a free two-week trial to see how it works.

Anyway, enough preamble: read on for the startups! And for sharing purposes, we’ve turned it into a Scribd document, which is embedded at the foot of the post. And yes, we do know a more accurate title would be ‘The 9 to Z…’

THE STARTUPS

99 Dollar Music Videos was a site launched by Next New Networks and Verizon FiOS, matching film-makers with emerging bands to create videos with budgets of, yep, $99. (www.99dollarmusicvideos.com)

♬.ws – yes, that really was its name – was a music search engine that let users see what other people were tweeting about bands – while also linking to parent company Musebin’s reviews. (www.musebin.ws)

33centmp3s.com was a store selling covers of popular songs for 33 cents apiece, created by music blogger Marc Cohen. It was due to launch in November, but hasn’t gone live yet. (www.33centmp3s.com)

8bit FM was a streaming radio station focused entirely on ‘chiptune’ music – tunes made with retro games computers and handhelds. However, it eventually shut down citing licensing costs. (www.8bitfm.com)

a2f2a was a site spawned by discussions between P2PNet blogger Jon Newton and artist Billy Bragg – designed for artists and fans to thrash out the filesharing debate and dream up new music models. (www.a2f2a.com)

AbbeyRoad Live was a new service from EMI that mixes, masters and distributes recordings of live gigs to fans soon after they finish – delivered as CDs, DVDs or USB sticks, as well as via download and/or streams.

AppsFire was one of the first startups to try to help iPhone and iPod touch owners discover new apps on Apple’s App Store – in its case by scanning their library and sharing details of their favourites with friends on social networks. (www.appsfire.com)

ArtistRise was a social network that aimed to bring together artists, promoters, venues and fans – focused around live gigs. The idea was to provide bands with another way to book gigs, including at off-the-beaten-track venues. (www.artistrise.com)

Audiolife was one of a crop of startups helping bands to create their own storefronts to sell music and merchandise. In this case, artists could set their own prices and track sales through Audiolife’s site. (www.audiolife.com)

Bandcamp was another one of that crop of startups, and exited beta in March this year with four embeddable music players, and the ability for bands to generate individual download codes for music giveaways then print them onto business cards to give out at gigs. (www.bandcamp.com)

BandCentral was an online band management service for unsigned and self-managed artists, offering an online hub for everything from gigs and promotion to finances and social networking updates. (www.bandcentral.com) – added 17-Dec-09

Bandize was a b2b service for artists and managers, gathering workflow stuff like gigging, accounts, merch inventory tracking and contacts into a swizzy online interface. (www.bandize.com)

BigChampagne has been around for a long time, but this August it launched its new analytics dashboard service, letting music biz clients track consumer behaviour on digital stores, subscription services, streaming sites and P2P networks (www.bigchampagne.com)

Blazetrak was a site that claimed to put unsigned artists in touch with music biz professionals – while fulfilling a similar role for the film, TV, sports and fashion industries. Hopefuls pay to get direct feedback from the likes of Rodney ‘Darkchild’ Jenkins, Big Boi from Outkast and, er, Paris Hilton. (www.blazetrak.com)

Bluebeat was the US music store that gave the industry a hearty laugh (well, maybe not EMI) in November by selling Beatles downloads without a licence, and then claiming that its “psycho acoustic simulation” technology made it all okay. For some reason, a court disagreed. (www.bluebeat.com)

Chorus was another iPhone app recommendation service, which got users to sign up their friends and then rate/review apps – being served up a list of recommendations in return based on those friends and previous likes. (www.chorusapps.com)

Coda.fm was one of the slickest and most user-friendly torrent sites we’d seen, looking pretty similar to a legal online music store, and being just as easy to use. It showed how torrent sites were evolving into entities that were far less confusing for the average non-geek. (www.coda.fm)

CompareDownload was a UK-based price comparison site for digital music stores, ferreting out the lowest prices from iTunes, Amazon MP3, 7digital, Play.com, Tesco Digital and we7. It launched in August with a catalogue of 10 million tracks. (www.comparedownload.com)

CTRL was a music blog with branding offshoots launched by UK retailer Topman. The idea was that every month, a different artist would curate the blog, and choose their favourite acts to play a gig. Metronomy and Ladyhawke kicked it off. (www.topman.com)

CXCR6 was an independent label set up as a non-profit operation to distribute indie artists’ music over BitTorrent, targeting sites like The Pirate Bay, Demonoid and What.cd.  PayPal buttons on the main CXCR6 site offered (in theory) a business model. (www.cxcr6.com)

Death Of Auto-Tune wasn’t a startup – it was a blog campaigning vociferously for musicians to ditch the Auto-Tune technology, citing a big list of reasons including “So Rappers Can Stop Singing” and “Jay-Z Told Us So”. It ran out of steam pretty quickly though. (www.deathofauto-tune.com)

DigABand was a company targeting bands with less than 1,000 fans, helping them to launch their own websites and link them up to Facebook and Twitter – while also bringing artists together for purposes like fan-sharing and gig support slots. (www.digaband.com)

DonkDJ.com is probably the silliest site on this list, but nevertheless captured our hearts in April by letting us put a ‘donk’ on any MP3 track we liked, following in the footsteps of 2008’s MoreCowbell.dj. (www.donkdj.com)

Don’t Quit Music was a site launched by fitness firm Body By Jake in partnership with UMG. The idea was to sell workout compilations for specific fitness regimes – everything from yoga to mountain biking – and sell the mixes through its site and the usual digital stores. (www.dontquitmusic.com)

Dora was an intriguing mash-up of Pandora, Twitter and Bit.ly, letting people sign into the Pandora online radio service to listen to music, then tweet about tracks complete with shortened links to the songs. (www.dora.fm)

Droidify was an application for Android smartphones that let users access Spotify – this was before Spotify’s official app came out. However, it was quickly squished when Spotify pointed out that the app wasn’t allowed under its licensing terms with labels. (Defunct link)

Dropplay was another mash-up which let users search for songs and play them as YouTube videos, while also creating playlists to share on Facebook. Oh, and there were Pandora/Last.fm style recommendation features too. The site now redirects people to Facebook app Friendradio. (www.dropplay.com)

Echodio let iTunes users sync their libraries up across all their Macs, with 5GB of free cloudspace for users, allowing them to stream their music wherever they were. We sense it may head to iPhone and other platforms in 2010… (www.echodio.com)

Fanalytics was a ‘targeted music promotion system’ developed by The Echo Nest, which aimed to help artists and labels track and analyse online buzz about their artists, whether on music blogs, social networks or traditional media. (http://the.echonest.com/fanalytics)

Farkie was an industry-baiting tool that let people strip multimedia content from websites, including videos from YouTube and MP3s from MySpace. It’s since changed name to Gazzump, and appears to be focusing much more on YouTube. (www.farkie.com)

FATdrop Anti-Piracy was a new service from UK music promotions firm FATdrop, which aimed to help indie labels detect illegal sharing of their tracks online, and file takedown requests. It also tied into watermarking tech allowing labels to see who originally shared a promo. (www.fatdrop.co.uk)

Filesharer.org launched with the slogan ‘This is what a criminal looks like’, and asked out-and-proud P2P users to upload mugshots of themselves to support its claim that file-sharing is a force for cultural good. (www.filesharer.org)

FileTwt was one of the many music/Twitter mash-ups, in this case allowing any Twitter user to share files of up to 20MB with their followers or individual contacts. Perfect for artists wanting to quickly share a new track, but also for fans to share copyrighted material… (www.filetwt.com)

Flypt was an iPhone application that let fans remix songs by their favourite artists (well, if their favourite artists were Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Rihanna and Soulja Boy, among others). Once reswizzled, tracks could be shared online – although each song was bought separately in-app. (www.iflypt.com)

Foursquare wasn’t really music at all – it was a social-location game that involved checking into locations and earning points for being a social gadfly. However, those locations could include music venues – a potential source of revenues if it takes off. (www.foursquare.com)

Free Music Archive was the work of US radio station WFMU, working with various partners. The aim? To give away free music under Creative Commons licensing, kicking off with 5,000 songs. “It’s not just free music, it’s good music,” they promised. (www.freemusicarchive.org)

FreeAllMusic was also riding the free music wave, announcing plans to offer free downloads to users if they watched one 15-30 second video before downloading. The model certainly didn’t work well, though, for SpiralFrog, which croaked its last this year. (www.freeallmusic.com)

Fuzztopia was a social network launched by Steven Van Zandt (of E Street Band and Sopranos fame) with a more arty take on MySpace, complete with ‘city secrets’ to help fans scope out the places recommended by their musical heroes. Still in beta. (www.fuzztopia.com)

Genero.tv was a startup that aimed to make it easier for artists to run user-generated contests for their fans, letting them solicit and accept fan-created videos, awarding prizes for the best. It kicked off in September with UNKLE on board. (www.genero.tv)

Gigulate aggregated a stream of news stories and blog posts from a range of sources, and matched them with upcoming gigs in the user’s area – with the aim of making money from affiliate ticketing and advertising. (www.gigulate.com)

Google spent much of the year as the music industry’s favourite villain, but in March it launched a free and fully licensed music downloads service in China, working with local site Top100.cn to fight piracy with ad-supported music. (www.google.cn/music/homepage)

Google also launched new music search features on its main search engine in October, providing preview clips and click-to-buy links (via Lala and iLike) when users searched for artists. Shortly after, both those partners were acquired by bigger entities, co-incidentally (or not). (www.google.com)

Goom Radio raised $16 million of funding this year for its “evolution of radio”, letting users create their own radio stations, scheduling in news, weather and horoscope elements, and then find an audience of listeners. (www.goomradio.us)

GreetBeatz was one of the first finalists in Facebook’s fbFund 2009 contest, and let people choose individual Facebook friends, provide a few lyrical suggestions, and get a customised song produced in their honour, to post on their wall. (www.greetbeatz.com)

Guvera started gathering buzz towards the end of this year – the company plans to launch next February by offering music, film and TV downloads for free, but paid for by brands who’ll sign up to target its userbase. UMG and EMI have already signed up. (www.guveralimited.com)

Hexagon.cc was a service from BitTorrent tracker firm IsoHunt that turned its focus more towards social features. Users could sign up to groups to share files among friends, family or people with similar tastes – with direct donations to theoretically compensate artists. (http://hexagon.cc)

Hit Machine was a web music game launched by social games firm OMGPOP, which has been compared to console game Rock Band. It lets people play virtual instruments via their computer keyboards, with fully licensed tracks from he likes of Epitaph, Vice Records and Nettwerk. (www.omgpop.com/games/hit-machine)

Hitlab had its official launch in March with R&B star Akon. The site lets unsigned acts upload their songs, then predicts whether they’ll be hits using its proprietary Dynamic Hit Scoring algorithms. Akon even signed one of the acts from the site. (www.hitlab.com)

Hunch was a ‘decision engine’ launched by Flickr founder Caterina Fake, which promised to help users make decisions. On the music side, that meant clicking on ‘which electronic music group would I like?’ and then answering some simple questions to arrive at a recommendation. (www.hunch.com)

Imoosi was a music search engine, but not of the unlicensed kind that regularly popped up last year. Instead, it aggregates biographies, images, videos, tour dates and Twitter feeds from other sites, serving them up in a single page for every artist. (www.imoosi.com)

IPREDator was a virtual private networking (VPN) service launched by The Pirate Bay. It promised to provide true piracy to internet users so their details couldn’t be tracked by law enforcement agencies. It costs 5 Euros a month, and was a response to the Swedish IPRED law, which came into force earlier this year. (www.ipredator.se)

ItsHidden was another way for BitTorrent users to carry out their P2P anonymously, although this one was free, unlike IPREDator. The company behind it claimed it wanted to “put some rights back in favour of the user”. (www.itshidden.com)

JamBuzzer was a startup with a nifty-sounding idea called AdJams, which invited artists (’Jammers’) to submit songs, and then got users (er, ‘Buzzers’) to rate them. Doing this earned the users ‘JamDollars’ to buy downloads from artists on the site. (www.jambuzzer.com)

JamLegend was another ‘Guitar Hero goes web’ game – see also Hit Machine – which involved playing a virtual guitar using your QWERTY keyboard. More controversial was its business model based on charging players to upload their own MP3 collections to play along with. (www.jamlegend.com)

Jelli was a startup that wanted to help music fans ‘take over’ traditional radio stations, by voting online in real-time for what songs should be played – and even pulling songs off-air in mid-play. Its business model is to sign deals with radio stations for branded shows run using its technology. (www.jelli.net)

Just Hear It launched early this year, and was a mixture of music search engine and playlist creation service – Seeqpod meets Project Playlist, sort of. Created by two college students, it claimed to be paying royalties to all the big performing rights organisations: “Any song. Legal. Free.” Indeed. (www.justhearit.com)

Kazaa was… well, you know what Kazaa was. But this year it relaunched as a $20-a-month subscription service with one million tracks and ringtones from all four major labels. The fact that DRM was included only added to the irony. (www.kazaa.com)

Kik is another startup that hasn’t launched its service yet, but it appeared as a finalist in RIM’s BlackBerry Developer Challenge in November. It’ll be a streaming mobile app that encourages users to upgrade to paid MP3 downloads or a $9.99-a-month subscription service, and is due to launch early in 2010. (www.kik.com)

Kind of Bloop founder Andy Baio explained it best: “What would the jazz masters sound like on a Nintendo Entertainment System? Coltrane on a C64? Mingus on Amiga?” The project involved a chiptune (see 8bit FM for definition) remake of Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue album. (www.kindofbloop.com)

Kweech claimed to be a ‘fast music commenting site’ – essentially Twitter but focused on short snappy reviews and posts about albums, bands and songs. Competitors included Musebin and Blip.fm, but also Twitter itself – we can’t access the site now, so perhaps that competition proved too tough. (www.kweech.com)

LaDiDa was a ‘reverse karaoke’ iPhone app which auto-generated a soundtrack based on what you were singing into the mic. A bit like a mobile version of Microsoft’s legendary Songsmith. Genres included E Piano Pop, Rhythm Synth Pop and Dub Tone, with Facebook and Twitter sharing options to boot. (www.khu.sh)

Layar was an augmented reality browser for smartphones, including Android and iPhone. It let designers create ‘layers’ of data to be overlaid onto the live feed from a user’s camera phone. Examples include Wikipedia entries for tourist hotspots, a gig finder, and more recently animated Beatles on Abbey Road. (www.layar.com)

Livekick was a site focused on helping music fans discover gigs near them, tracking more than 75,000 concerts at 45,000 US venues. It involves importing people’s iTunes libraries and music site profiles, and then crawling ticket sites to see when bands they like are playing – notifying them via Twitter. (www.livekick.com)

Loudcrowd was a virtual world that blended social gaming with music. People could sign up and create music playlists using the 250+ (at launch) licensed tracks from labels like Beggars Group, DFA, Domino and Modular. It also features various music-based Flash games, and connectivity with Facebook. (www.loudcrowd.com)

Mewbox was a DRM-free music store for Android handsets, which launched earlier this month (December) touting a catalogue of more than four million MP3 tracks. It’s going head to head with the Amazon MP3 store, which has been preloaded on Android handsets since Google’s smartphone OS first launched. (www.mewbox.com)

Mikojo came from some of the people who launched one of 2008’s most talked-about startups, Seeqpod. It’s not fully public yet, but it’s aiming to provide a legal music search engine, aggregating links to songs, lyrics, tickets and merchandise online. (www.mikojo.com)

Mixcloud was a hotly-tipped streaming music site that aimed to ‘re-think radio’, offering DJ mixes, podcasts and radio shows on-demand, sorted by genre and with recommendation features to find the good stuff. Launching with a skew towards dance music, its stripped-down interface won plenty of admirers. (www.mixcloud.com)

Mixm8 was another virtual world, which let users create virtual apartments, meet friends and attend virtual gigs, with shops for labels including Ninja Tune and Xpressbeats, as well as War Child and Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip. It was due to launch in the second half of the year, but appears not to have quite managed it yet. (www.mixm8.com)

Mixtape.me was described as ‘Muxtape on steroids’ when it launched in March. It let users search for songs, then build and share playlists in an iTunes-esque interface – while pulling in artist bios from Last.fm, videos from YouTube, and lyrics from LyricWiki. (www.mixtape.me)

Mobile Roadie was one of the first companies to offer a self-service, er, service for bands wanting to create their own iPhone apps. It was aimed at independent labels and artists, and offered the ability to update the apps with music, photos, videos, news and tourdates. (www.mobileroadie.com)

MOG All Access was the long-awaited subscription-based streaming music service from social site MOG. It launched earlier this month (December) and costs $5 a month, eschewing the freemium models of rivals Pandora and Spotify. It won plaudits for its slick interface and personalised radio mode. (www.mog.com)

Monkey was a new service from UK mobile operator Orange, offering music playlists for teenagers to be listened to over voice calls rather than the mobile data network (although there was a website too). It only launched with one label partner – UMG – but in its favour felt like a free service to its pay-as-you-go target market. (www.orange.co.uk/monkey)

Moof was the latest in a long line of streaming music sites that used YouTube as their audio source. It offered an iTunes-esque interface – de rigeur for music sites in 2009, as you can tell from this list – although the downside of using YouTube was the high chance of getting live versions, remixes and fan karaoke vids. (www.moof.com)

Moogis tried to capitalise online on the offline popularity of jam bands including the Allman Brothers Band, whose drummer Butch Trucks was involved in creating it. A full-price subscription is expensive at $150, but this was targeted towards hardcore fans – who certainly wouldn’t be disappointed with the quality and quantity of content. (www.moogis.com)

Mooso is a web-based music game launched by the BBC’s Radio Labs team, which gets people to listen to a stream of its 6 Music station and tag tracks as they play, scoring points if their tags match those of other listeners. We sense that the resulting metadata will be hugely valuable. (www.mooso.fm)

MSN Mobile Music launched in January, and came in for plenty of criticism thanks to its relatively small catalogue (1m tracks), its £1.5o price point for full-tracks, and most of all for its DRM – which wouldn’t even let buyers transfer their music to a PC to play.

Mugasha first came to our attention in January as a site that chopped up recordings of DJ sets and included tracklistings, artist info and links to buy individual songs. Then in August it launched properly as a streaming music service offering DJ sets and podcasts. (www.mugasha.com)

MusicMetric launched a real-time analytics service, crawling the web to find mentions of an artist, and then compiling and archiving what fans (or non-fans) are saying about them. It tapped into the Silicon Valley buzz around real-time data mining, fuelled by Twitter and other sites. (www.musicmetric.com)

Musicslu was another entrant in the crowded fan-funding market, although with a twist (at the time) of not requiring fans to stump up any cashh until the full amount had been pledged. The music was then released for free under a Creative Commons licence – still a unique approach as far as we’re aware. (www.musicslu.com)

Muxtape was the revamped version of playlisting service Muxtape, which was squashed by pressure from labels last year. The new version was more of a promotion tool for artists, letting them create and share online mixtapes of their own songs. It started invite-only, with Little Boots the most high-profile user so far. (www.muxtape.com)

Muziic was a downloadable PC application for streaming music, modelled on (yes, you can see this coming) iTunes. It used YouTube as its audio source, and let users build playlists. Impressively, it was the work of 15-year-old developer David Nelson. Well, his father chipped in too… (www.muziic.com)

NewBandDaily was a daily email newsletter spotlighting a single emerging artist every day, recommended by one of 17 correspondents around the world. However, its natural environment is surely more Twitter – a medium where it’s now also available. (www.newbanddaily.com)

Next Big Sound is an analytics firm that harvests data from sites including MySpace, Last.fm, Twitter and iLike to provide labels with better insight into ‘fan interactions’. Earlier this month it raised $1 million of seed funding for the service, and has tracked more than 500 million interactions since August. (www.nextbigsound.com)

Next Music was an innovative-sounding streaming music service for PC and mobile from Italian mobile operator TIM. The only problem? Many of its tracks hadn’t been licensed. After complaints from Italian labels, the service was swiftly taken down.

Nimbit MyStore was a platform helping artists sell their music direct to fans on Facebook – the equivalent of the numerous sales widgets that used to exist on MySpace. It tapped into the viral nature of Facebook so people could see what their friends were buying, and quickly signed up more than 300 artists. (www.nimbit.com/mystore)

Nudge was a bit of fun really, but make that a lot of fun. It was an electronic music creation widget made by Hobnox, which was like a web-based Tenori-On instrument. You draw a pattern on the grid of squares to make music, then embed your creation on a blog or site to share with the world. (www.inudge.net)

One Page Artist joined Imoosi as an attempt to aggregate information on artists from around the web – including biographies, tourdates, merchandise links, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds and audio clips. As the name implies, all this content was presented neatly on a single page per band. (www.onepageartist.com)

Onseeker Music was an iPhone app that let users search for gigs within a 200-mile radius of their current location and buy tickets there and then. However, it also let them sign up as ‘fans’ of individual venues and bands, to get alerts on interesting concerts. It’s heading to other mobile platforms too. (www.onseekermusic.com)

People’s Music Store was a UK startup that aimed to turn music fans into (online) record shop owners, choosing from a launch catalogue of more than 250,000 independent tracks – although majors followed later in the year. Storekeepers get to keep 10% of their sales – an incentive for committed curation. (www.peoplesmusicstore.com)

Piracy Payback targeted P2P users who were feeling a bit guilty about their illegal downloads habit. It takes donations from PayPal which it then claims to distribute to royalty collection bodies – albeit while keeping a 12% share for itself. Even as it launched, its owner admitted interest from internet users wasn’t “especially high”. (www.piracypayback.org)

Pirates Prisons Project was far more fun, being a spoof site launched by media futurist Gerd Leonhard. Its point, which got the satirical sledgehammer treatment, was that if the music industry had its way, “billions of internet users” would be thrown into prison. (www.piratesprisons.com)

Play.fm was a streaming music service focused on DJ sets, live recordings and radio sessions, uploaded mainly by the artists responsible. It launched with a catalogue of more than 12,000 of them, and allowed listeners to identify (and if possible buy) individual tracks. (www.play.fm) – added 17-Dec

Playdar was the post-Last.fm project of Richard Jones, who smartly identified a need for streaming music services to be able to tell when a user owned specific songs on their hard drive, and use those when needed rather than pay licensing costs. That’s exactly what Playdar’s technology does. (www.playdar.org)

PlaylistNow was the playlist site for lazy music fans, generating playlists for them based on the question ‘what are you doing right now?’. Bored at the office? It threw up the likes of Bic Runga, Coldplay, Feist and, er, The Beatles. Yep, another music service offering unsanctioned Fab Four audio. We liked the themed-playlists idea though. (www.playlistnow.fm)

Pledge Music was another startup to help bands raise money from their fans, allowing them to set their own targets, and offer incentives including downloads, CDs and gig tickets. It took no money until the targets were met, and let artists retain all their rights. (www.pledgemusic.com)

Polyphonic was nothing to do with mobile phones – it was a new label launched by Radiohead co-manager Brian Message, with backing from MAMA Group and Nettwerk Music Group. It has a budget of $20 million for its first year, with the aim of signing a bunch of artists and making maximum use of new digital models.

Popmorphic was a Scottish firm that uses a 25-camera matrix to shoot live performances of bands, and then lets people watching the resulting videos use equaliser-style sliders to change what they’re seeing. It sounded fiddly, but the company’s demos were certainly intriguing. (www.popmorphic.com)

Psonar is another startup that’s talked publicly this year, but is set to make its splash in 2010. It’s a cloud-based music service that lets people upload their collections, then listen to them on every device. Playlist sharing is built in, as are Amazon MP3 store links. 12 hours streaming a week is free, before users are invited to upgrade to the £4-a-month premium version. (www.psonar.com)

Radioplayer was a UK partnership between the BBC and commercial radio stations to create a web service offering 400+ radio stations, complete with a search engine to find shows by subject, music style and song title. It’s launching first for computers, with mobile and possibly set-top box versions coming later.

RadioWeave was another personalised radio startup that let people create their own online stations – complete with news and podcasts as well as music. It even let them import Twitter feeds to be read out using its text-to-speech feature. (www.radioweave.com)

Rdio will be one of the companies to watch in the digital music space next year – it’s the brainchild of Skype/Kazaa founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, who are promising a subscription-based streaming music service where the economics actually add up. (www.rdio.com)

RE<ORDS is a Japanese independent label that releases all its music exclusively as iPhone apps. Better still, they take the form of virtual turntables, with records that can be played or scratched. (www.delaware.gr.jp/app/index.html)

Real-Time Top 40 was a chart launched by mobile operator Vodafone, which tracked music-related tweets to gauge what was hot on the micro-blogging service. It relied on its own hash tag, though. (www.realtimetop40.com)

Republic Project was a site that aimed to help bands not only sell music direct to fans, but also to build their communities around it. Artists can sell their songs in a variety of formats, while being encouraged to upload videos, write blog posts and host chat sessions. Its embeddable widget allows presales too. (www.republicproject.com)

RiffSpot sounded like it was about guitars, but was in fact a digital promotion service for the dance music sector. It lets radio and club DJs, A&Rs, reviewers, journalists and labels sign up to get access to new promo tracks, providing instant feedback to the labels who supply them. Its launch is now set for 1st January. (www.riffspot.co.uk)

Rock Band Sim was our favourite web game of the year, being a Flash title that involves forming a cartoon band and taking them to the top – via skill upgrades, virtual record releases and Guitar Hero-style rhythm action. Absolutely addictive. (www.mousebreaker.com/games/rockbandsim/playgame)

RockDex was another in the parade of sites aiming to tell bands how popular they were online. It pulled in data from social networks, blogs, music sites and Twitter and turned it into a score out of 100 – with artists invited to sign up to receive alerts on how their score is changing. The idea was to upsell to a more serious Pro version. (www.rockdex.com)

Rockfree was another web-based attempt to ‘do a Guitar Hero’ – this one from console firm Acclaim. The Flash game was free to play, offering licensed songs from the likes of White Zombie, Motorhead and Judas Priest – with its USP the ability for up to eight players to play along with each other at once. (http://rockfree.acclaim.com)

SeatGeek was a launch in the secondary ticketing space which used historical data to predict when prices for a new gig would be at their lowest, sending users an alert at that point to (in theory) save them money. It tracked price movements on hundreds of secondary ticketing sites to generate the data. (www.seatgeek.com)

SeatKarma was also a secondary ticketing site, but its twist was that it pulls in data from 200 brokers and then matches it to maps of around 1,600 venues, to help people find out where exactly they’ll be sitting if they buy a certain ticket. The site was the work of a couple of Texas MBA students. (www.seatkarma.com)

Setlist.fm was, as the name implies, related to gigging. Specifically, it let fans upload and share details of setlists from gigs, with the info being collated Wikipedia-style to provide an archive of who played what, when. Setlists could then be embedded elsewhere on the web. (www.setlist.fm)

Sidebar was another mobile app discovery service – a downloadable app initially for Android phones, which asks users about themselves, then recommends daily apps, videos, games, music, ringtones, podcasts and even news articles that they might like. (www.sidebar.com)

Skifta is a startup being hatched within telecoms giant Qualcomm, and offers a private network designed for the sharing of media. A bit like Orb or Simplify Media, it lets owners of Macs, PCs or Linux devices to broadcast music from their home machine to other devices over the internet – including consoles and mobiles. (www.skifta.com)

Skout OUT was a kiosk-cum-jukebox designed to be installed in bars and clubs, which lets people find other singletons in the same venue and send flirty messages to them. Or they could dedicate songs – hence our interest. (www.skout.com)

Songkick wasn’t a new company in 2009, but it did launch its gig-focused community site, letting people share photos, videos, setlists and reviews of gigs they’d attended in the past. Artist pages then aggregated that data, with the company claiming a million-strong concert database at launch. (www.songkick.com)

SongTwit was, as the name implies, another music-meets-Twitter service (see also FileTwt). It focused purely on music, letting people tweet links to music from its own library, other websites or – ahem – upload it themselves to share. (www.songtwt.com)

Soundtrckr is a social music app for iPhone which mashes up internet radio, social networking and geolocation features. Users can create their own stations, and associate songs with specific places in the real world – with those tags then picked up by other users when they pass through. (www.soundtrckr.com)

SpotifiTunes was a nifty service designed to help people migrate from iTunes to Spotify. How? By getting them to upload the metadata from their iTunes library, and get back a big list of links to the albums and tracks that are available on Spotify. (www.spotifitunes.com)

Super Chirp was an intriguing startup that tried to get celebrities – including bands – to charge for their tweets. The idea was that fans would pay a monthly subscription fee to get exclusive direct messages from their favourites – with Super Chirp bagging 30% of the revenues. (www.superchirp.com)

SuperGlued was another community based on live music, letting people share their photos, videos and anecdotes from gigs they’ve attended. It pulls in content from YouTube and Flickr, and pumps stuff out to Facebook. (www.superglued.com)

Swift.fm was another Twitter-focused music discovery service. Users could search for a song on the Swift.fm site and tweet its link, but it can also scan your friend’s feeds and create a personalised radio station of the songs they’ve been mentioning. (www.swift.fm)

TaffyBox was a BitTorrent site that aimed to make life easier for filesharers by providing a browser-based downloader. Soon after launching, it ran into trouble when rival torrent site BTjunkie accused it of leeching on its back-end. So to speak. (www.taffybox.com)

The Banded was a social music site not entirely dissimilar to MySpace, which lets artists create profiles and fans stream their music. The twist: it only shares its ad revenues with the two most popular bands every month. (www.thebanded.com)

The In Sound From Way Out was a music and MP3 blog with a difference – it was launched by a major label. EMI Australia to be precise – it offered news and videos of the label’s acts, while soliciting demos via an A&R Dropbox. (www.theinsoundfromwayout.com)

The Karaoke Channel was an online store for karaoke music launched by US firm The Singing Machine Co. It offered song downloads with singalonga lyrics for $1.49 a pop, or $0.99 without the words. They could be then played on PCs, iPods or the company’s own karaoke machines. (www.thekaraokechannel.com)

Thounds was a social music site focused on the exchange of musical ideas and the creation of original pieces of music through online collaboration. A musical notepad, sort of, where users could upload their latest work and let others experiment with it. (www.thounds.com) added 17-Dec-09

Ticket Bot was a UK-based service designed to help Twitter users find tickets for gigs. It looks for people talking about bands on the micro-blogging service, and tweets them a relevant link based on date and location. Currently defunct. (www.twitter.com/ticketbot)

ToneStac was a marketing and promotion service for independent artists and labels, with the aim of helping them get radio play, and providing the tools to track those plays. (www.tonestac.com) – added 17-Dec-09

ToonsTunes is a musical virtual world for kids – it was described as ‘Garageband meets Club Penguin’. It lets its users create their own tracks by mixing loops and adding vocals, then perform them in avatar-packed concert halls. (www.toonstunes.com)

Tracksandfields was a site that aimed to let musicians collaborate on new songs, share samples and let other users remix their tracks. It was funded by money from the German government and the European Social Fund. (www.tracksandfields.com)

TuneChecker was another UK-based digital music comparison site, following in the footsteps of CompareDownload. Like that site, it aggregated prices from iTunes, Amazon, Play, 7digital, HMV and other retailers to find the cheapest prices. (www.tunechecker.com)

TunePost was a mysterious service that never actually launched – it was the work of label-backed startup TotalMusic, and promised to let people “discover, listen, create playlists and post them across the web”. TotalMusic’s assets were sold later in the year to Project Playlist.

Tunesbag was another cloudstreaming service – a PC desktop application that let users upload their music collections then stream them from any other computer. It also included buy links to Amazon MP3 and the iTunes Store. (www.tunesbag.com)

TunesPro was a digital music store offering a catalogue of more than 5.5 million tracks for sale as MP3s. For $0.19 a song. The company behind it claimed to be fully legit, but the presence of Beatles and AC/DC titles suggested otherwise. (www.tunespro.com)

TuneWiki was an innovative mobile app for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry, which let people stream music while bundling in lyrics and YouTube videos. (www.tunewiki.com)

Tweet For A Track was a promotional tool for artists, allowing them to offer free tracks for download in return for fans tweeting a set text. Several artists have done this on their own, but this service automates it for others. (www.tweetforatrack.com)

Twisten.fm was another service mixing Twitter and music – this one crawled Twitter looking for music tweets and turned them into a playlist. (www.twisten.fm)

Twitterpartners was a UK startup launched to help bands and brands make the most of Twitter – signing up Gorillaz and WMG as initial clients. Contrary to reports, though, it had nothing to do with Twitter the company – as made clear swiftly by the latter. (www.twitterpartners.com)

Unleash The Bats had nothing to do with goth, and everything to do with The Pirate Bay. It was Belfast PR man Stephen Anderson’s attempt to fight back against the piracy site by selling t-shirts with slogans like ‘F*** the Pirate Bay’ and ‘Home pirating is killing pirates’. (www.unleashthebats.co.uk)

uPlaya was a service designed to tell artists and labels just how much hit potential their songs have. They upload the tracks and get back feedback based on mathematical algorithms (yes, as opposed to non-mathematical algorithms…). (www.uplaya.com)

Valentone was a UK-based ringtone creation service which got people to record themselves singing along with a romantic song – fully licensed versions of Eternal Flame, Let’s Get It On etc – and then get the vocals tuned up and turned into a ringtone. (www.valentone.com)

Vevo was… well, you probably know about Vevo. It’s the music industry equivalent of online TV site Hulu, designed to show music videos and secure premier advertising around them. Big things are expected of it in 2010. (www.vevo.com)

Vye Music can be filed alongside Muziic in the ‘precocious’ category – it was a music search engine developed by 16-year-old Charles Allatt. It pulls in songs from other music sites so users can build playlists or download the tracks. Yeah, that last part may get industry lawyers’ interest. (www.vyemusic.com)

W+K Radio was an online radio station launched by ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, which played a mixture of music and band interviews, with guest slots from the company’s clients – including Nike and Electronic Arts. (http://radio.wk.com)

We Are Hunted was one of the companies getting to grips with analysing the masses of real-time data about people’s musical tastes. Its chart tracked plays on streaming music services, tweets, blog posts and news for a daily chart of the 99 buzz songs and artists. (www.wearehunted.com)

WhoSampled was a site that helps music fans identify where samples in their favourite tracks come from. It lets them search by track and then listen to the original songs, as well as contributing their own knowledge and watching YouTube videos. (www.whosampled.com)

Woofer wasn’t really musical, but we loved the idea. It was essentially Twitter, but with 1,400 character limits per post instead of 140. Ideal for long-winded artists… (www.woofertime.com)

WorldSings was a high-profile online  talent contest with a claimed prize fund of $1 million. Bands had to upload their videos to the site to be judged by other users, with the top 20 progressing to a final gig in Las Vegas next March. (www.worldsings.com)

Your Digital Record offered a way for everyone – unsigned and indie bands too – to create iTunes LP-style digital album bundles with liner notes, artwork, photos and videos. It also provided a PayPal donation module to help artists then sell them. (www.yourdigitalrecord.com)

Your Soundcheck was a new part of EMI’s D2C website, which invited fans to register to hear pre-release content and give their feedback on it – “advise us on our music-making decisions”. Journalists and music biz people weren’t allowed in, sadly. Now defunct.

ZookZ was an unlimited MP3-download subscription service that was completely unlicensed, but claimed that being based in Antigua allowed it to ignore US copyright restrictions. Even the Antiguan government begged to differ. (www.zookz.com)

ZumoDrive was a cloud-based service allowing people to upload and then stream their music, photo and document collections. Music features include the ability to sync playlists between different devices. (www.zumodrive.com)

Phew! That’s our list. Please comment with your additions and recommendations. The Scribd version for sharing is embedded below.

A to Z of Digital Music Startups in 2009

Tags: digital music, music ally, startups

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Digital Music Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.