Amidst the cacophony of music start-ups, ReverbNation echoes

October 8, 2008 | Dan Kaplan | Comments | |

While grinning investment bankers, safe pension funds and good returns from tech stocks may be hard to come by for the foreseeable future, the world does not lack start-ups promising to help indie musicians. Among them, ReverbNation, which has just raised $3 million, looks like a serious contender.

Companies like Topspin Media, an early-stage music marketing platform, and Tunecore, which offers a relatively easy way to distribute albums across multiple online stores, have partial answers to the problem of self-promotion. ReverbNation feels more thoroughly conceived.

The Durham, NC, company offers musicians a substantial array of tools and services to help them manage their street teams, promote themselves across the web, find ideal venues for gigs and track the strength (or weakness) of their personal brands. After signing up on the site, musicians can manage and analyze email marketing campaigns, rapidly create widgets and Facebook apps and even automatically aggregate everything that’s being said about them around the blogosphere. The just-launched LP33.tv, an innovative but incomplete site for indie music promotion, could take a few cues from here.

Like many a Web 2.0 company, ReverbNation gives away all of these things for free. It does offer premium services, including a media kit maker and a multi-store distribution channel similar to Tunecore. But one wonders if the company, which relies mostly on ads, could get away with a low-cost subscription model. For example, its FanReach Email service, which is free, offers many of the same features as email marketing company ClearContext, which is not.

As the economy tanks, we’ll have to wait and see what ReverbNation’s new investors, Novak Biddle Venture Partners and Southern Capitol Ventures, say about its somewhat loose revenue strategy.

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About the Author, Dan Kaplan

Once upon a time, Dan considered himself a magazine journalist with dreams of "The New Yorker" and a couple of well-reviewed but only mildly successful books. Then one day, life, as it is known to do, decided it was time for rebirth. Like so many things before it, this rebirth was conceived on a mostly-empty plane to Reno. Now, instead of magazine writing, Dan would plunge into the world of New Media and write for Matt Marshall's blog.

It's funny how it goes.

  • A lot of my artists at acousticvids use ReverbNation extensively, and they love it!
  • I was fairly amazed when they announced they had registered 200K bands... according to several analyses there are not that many actively performing bands in the world!
    RNation is a nice, useful site. One problem with these services, though, is they try to be a one-stop destination. This leaves artists in the unfortunate position of having to enter their basic data into multiple services, beginning with myspace (sine qua non for live music promotion). I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of consolidation going on with this new funding where RN could buy up some of the smaller sites that already integrate and build on existing gig data, like tourfilter, gruvr, gigblastr, tourb.us, etc...