We reported yesterday on the launch of music discovery app Soundwave, armed with celebrity backers like Stephen Fry and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The Irish startup behind it has been talking about its plans to make money by offering analytics on the music its users are playing. “We essentially want to create a Google Analytics for music, to enable artists and the music industry to understand much better where their fans are and how they’re listening to their music,” says CEO Brendan O’Driscoll. The theory is good, in that Soundwave is tracking all the songs its users play on their phones and on streaming services like Spotify and Rdio, tagged with their location – valuable data for labels, although Soundwave also says its privacy settings have been designed to be as easy to use as possible, for people to opt out if they want. O’Driscoll says Soundwave also wants to help emerging artists. “We think it can help recorrect the market. Currently, someone like Justin Bieber can come along with a $10m marketing budget and rise to the top of the charts. We want to help democratise the setup again. And we’ve got a lot of bands coming in asking how they can use something like this to express themselves and reach out to their fans.”
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…