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.
