VentureBeat

OLX, a company competing with classifieds site Craigslist, but more popular outside of the U.S. than it is here, has raised $13 million in a second round of financing.

The company, based in New York and Buenos Aires, is like Craigslist in that it focuses on urban centers to ensure mass. To gain visibility, it partnered with social networking company Friendster — which has also has more traction outside of the U.S.

The two-year-old company was started by Fabrice Grinda and Alex Oxenford. Grinda blogs about the recent funding here, saying it will help the company expand but also tide it over during the economic downturn.

It operates in 40 countries in 15 languages.

The funding comes from General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Fund and DN Capital. This adds to the $10 million the company raised in September 2006 from the same VCs and various angels.

The company is trying to differentiate itself by offering more modern features than Craigslist does — Web 2.0 bells and whistles like letting you easily promote listings on other websites, like MySpace, Xanga, and Blogspot.

Some investors tell us there’s not enough opportunity in music-related innovation to merit their money. But apparently, others disagree. OurStage, one of many sites that tries to nurture budding artists, has raised $13 million from a consortium of angel investors through Signature Capital LLC. Another, mTraks, has raised $550,000 from an unnamed investor.

OurStage is in some sense trying to duplicate traditional music charts — but for unknown artists. First, bands upload their tracks and videos to the site, then they try to get fans to vote their works up OurStage’s chart of top acts. Winners get prizes, like performance slots at music festivals.

OurStage is making money by selling ads on the site, particularly branded channels for specific types of music, and for individual artists. It counts AOL Music as a partner, and it’s hoping to work with record labels, to offer professional channels for bands that rise through its ranks. To help show a label the rising-star status of an artist, it also offers metrics on traffic that an artist draws on the site.

Earlier this week, we covered a somewhat similar site, called SellaBand — where users actually help pay for the production of a budding artists’ album, and get free music in return.

MTraks, meanwhile offers a place for artists to create their own profiles (which is basically like MySpace and many other, larger sites), but focuses on independent acts. The San Diego, Calif.-based site lets you buy music by the song — free of digital rights management — or pay $9.99 per month to subscribe and listen to any song on the site.

Established competitors that are experimenting with new forms of giving music away for free including iLike (see its launch of R.E.M.’s latest album ), Imeem, Last.fm and others. Three months ago, Last.fm began letting users preview some entire songs before buying them. Today, it says these tracks have seen a 119 percent increase in CD sales and downloads through its partner, Amazon’s online music store — although CBS-owned Last.fm isn’t releasing figures for how many tracks and how much money that adds up to. More here.