The Internet’s given musicians many new avenues for promoting their music. Maybe too many. Even with a dedicated person to market your band online, you’re bound to miss some, and who knows, that could be the one that helps you take off. That’s where ArtistData comes into play.
The information synchronization service, which launched a public beta in June, lets musicians and promoters more easily spread their information to the vast array of music-oriented and promotional sites out there. Right now, the service focuses primarily on syncing concert information across various sites, including obvious venues like MySpace, Eventful, Last.fm and Grooveshark (a new addition), but also less obvious ones like Twitter, PureVolume and AmieSt. ArtistData keeps all the information you put on one, up-to-date with the information on the others.
Some new features the service is launching today include a website widget that artists can put on their sites to easily keep all dates for things like tours in sync with other networks they’re on. iCal subscriptions and SCV Exports are also new for better desktop calendaring support and to import old data into calendars. And RSS feeds are now available to give more access to the artist information stored in their systems. All these features are free.
In terms of the service making money, ArtistData president Brenden Mulligan declined to talk about the specifics at this point, but says that they’ve come up with a “new and innovative revenue that involves helping the artists and music sites make incremental revenue.” That’s vague, but the service claims to be expanding quickly so we should know more soon if its strategy’s working or not.
It should get more interesting when it expands beyond just concert data and can do things such as sync blogs, news and perhaps even music eventually.
