New Product Demos at SFMusicTech September 2011
Tracks.by 
“The most viral way for artists to promote their music on Facebook”
Part of the founding team also manages Little Wayne’s digital presence and decided to build a product that they can use themselves when managing his Facebook page.
They are attempting to solve three issues:
1. How to identify hardcore fans- They have created an in app “love button” that notifies fans about new content releases.
2. How to drive traffic back to Facebook and control that experience- They give all songs and videos their very own page.
3. How to make this experience more social and viral- They keep a history of songs users like on Tracks.by in a library for you and your Facebook friends to explore. *Note- this is also a potentially great music discovery tool built into Facebook.
In a nutshell, their product allows you to leverage Facebook fans so content goes viral. And unlike many of their competitors, they don’t just give the user a pretty tab to gawk at, but tons of other cool features like the opportunity to explore friend’s music selections and the ability to get emails when an artist they like release a new single.
If you’re an artist with a fan page or a digital manager we would highly suggest signing up for the beta at Tracks.by
Best of all, it’s free!
Thinglink
“Images are a platform for engagement”
Thinglink is turning images into a platform where the images are shareable and embeddable. You can add sounds (such as music), links, video and social to your images. They feel this new method of utilizing photos will remove another barrier between the musician and the fan.
We were very happy to hear that the images also work on Facebook via iframe and that they’re getting great click through rates. They quoted seeing CTR results between 10-50% which are almost unheard of nowadays with a typical campaign being deemed a success if it gets to 1%.
They announced the launch of their eCommerce tags at SFMusicTech which allow you to embed buy links into images from TopSpin, iTunes and third-party links for SoundCloud users.
Here’s a cool instructional video of how to use Thinglink:
NARM (The National Association of Recording Merchandisers)
“Drive, Grow and Inform”
NARM has been in business for 50 years helping to build the music commerce business and has officially announced the launch of digitalmusic.org at SFMusicTech as “the virtual home of NARM’s digital initiatives.”
The three value propositions of NARM and digitalmusic.org are:
1. To drive the business- through collaboration with other professionals in the industry.
2. To grow your network- through the networking provided by NARM’s events.
3. To inform and stay informed-members are provided access to members-only information, such as databases and research as well as seminars and classes.
If you’re interested in NARM and digitalmusic.org you can fill out a member application here.
The Orchard is the largest digital distribution company in the world. Their client base is about 20% of all music available on iTunes (about 30,000 clients) and is composed of top indie labels and musicians.
They distribute music across almost 100 different services and 200 countries.
While building this behemoth of a company they ran into a challenge- how can they connect their unique clients with apps that help them with their unique problems?
The app store they launched at SFMusicTech is the answer to this challenging question.
Check out the video about their new app store dubbed “The Marketplace” below:
The Orchard’s Marketplace from The Orchard on Vimeo.
Pretty cool, right? They’re launching with a total of 20 partners including BandRX and FanBridge.
“The funnest way to learn guitar. Ever.”
Rock prodigy is a music education platform and probably one of the coolest iOS apps we’ve seen all week. For serious.
Their mission is to bring people who love music closer to the music by letting them learning in a fun way. It’s almost like having a personal instructor with you all the time, including the live instantaneous feedback!
The app has lessons for beginners (i.e. how to hold your guitar) as well as for more advanced players.
The thing we loved about this app the most isn’t just that it makes learning guitar pretty fun and simple, but you get to listen to all your favorite music as well. Rock on!
Check out this video:
You can find it in the App Store here. Now go play!
“The easiest way to get and share content via mobile”
Get It enables the discovery of apps and content from everywhere and gives you a simple and safe user experience. They consider themselves a “mass mobile socialization platform” and they support all platforms, devices and storefronts. Their products include buttons and widgets for your site, Facebook applications, QR codes (we’re kind of over them, but still cool) and SMS (Text Satch to 42777 to get Joe Satriani’s music now).
Watch their video below:
They’ve recently launched their Get It Free program where you can promote your mobile apps for free and will soon be launching Get IT Music.
MusicAlly Pro is a cloud-based music production and archiving tool that works with production tools such as Finale and Pro Tools.
It allows you to have a single workspace for all of your projects- your projects are stored securely, can be logged into by multiple users and different versions are saved in your history log so you can rest easy knowing you’re checking out the latest and greatest.
This is a great way to collaborate and keep track of your projects sans the confusion.
