Local guys want to be player in online music

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: Local NewTunes wants to be player in online music : Jeff Richgels — 2/05/2009 4:42 pm | TCT : -------------------------------------------------- : : After several years of development, a Fitchburg-based online music search company has launched, hoping to gain a foothold in the crowded online music arena. : NewTunes, formerly Ohigo, officially opened for business in January at newtunes.com, although its technology is not quite out of the beta stage (where small glitches are discovered and fixed before an "official" launch). : Jon Friesch, the company's vice president of marketing, describes NewTunes as "Google meets Pandora." : Google, of course, is the world's dominant search engine. Pandora is an Internet radio service that plays music customized to meet users' tastes. Type in a favorite artist or song and Pandora will play that artist's music or similar artists' songs. Listeners provide feedback, which Pandora takes into account for future selections. : NewTunes takes that sort of automated technology and adds human auditing to the process. The company helps listeners find music in its catalog that fits their tastes; people then have the option to buy the tracks they like. While NewTunes features some popular artists (like Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Kanye West or Coldplay), Friesch said the company hopes its technology can connect unsigned and lesser-known acts with potential fans. : "We're really focusing on the unsigned, independent artists," Friesch said. "We look at ourselves as another tool for the grassroots music movement." : Here's how it works: An unsigned local band in Boise, Idaho, for instance, uploads its songs to the NewTunes site for free. The company's technology then categorizes the songs by "metadata" -- vocals, genres, moods, etc., and audio patterns. When a listener searches for a song and wants to hear similar music, the technology uses the metadata and audio patterns to pinpoint more music the person might like. : Listeners then help improve the system, by agreeing or disagreeing with whether the song is similar or not. That moves the song up and down in the NewTunes rankings, providing a human tweak to the technology. : "The target for our site is real music fanatics," said Friesch, who considers himself one. "The kind of people who when they get into a car with a group of people, the first thing they do is figure out what kind of music they're going to play. They're also the people who ... their group look(s) to to tell them what the next big band is." : NewTunes has about 5 million songs in its catalog, and more than half already are cataloged, with the rest taking just a matter of months, he added. : NewTunes also has a feature called MusicStreaker that enables users to help categorize songs while winning points that can be used for free downloads. Users hear 30-second clips of songs and answer questions about the metadata of the song. : "The answers get applied to what the machine is doing," Friesch said. "It's a way for our community of users to weigh in on the search and improve it. It makes it interactive." : NewTunes also features message boards that enable users to interact with each other and connect with performers. : "This is great for new bands to build their fan base," Friesch said. "It's part of the community we're trying to build -- a place where people can discuss and talk about fine music, because that's what the site's all about." : NewTunes, which has three employees in Friesch, CEO Joe Kletzel and developer Joe Amstadt, earns money on advertising and also gets a small amount when someone buys a song they found on the site, although Friesch says it's not enough to build a long-term business model on. : For bands that post their music directly on NewTunes, the artist and NewTunes get a cut. For music by popular signed performers, NewTunes has an affiliate agreement with Amazon.com. In that case, if a person wants to buy a song, the buyer is redirected to Amazon.com, and New Tunes, Amazon and the band get a cut from the purchase. : NewTunes still is working off of $500,000 in financing it received when it was Ohigo from Fitchburg-based Kegonsa Capital Partners. Ken Johnson, managing partner of Kegonsa, said the company's management team has done a great job in the face of many obstacles, including moving development of the technology from an internal team to outsourcing. : "I think the management and team has done a terrific job seeing barriers that typically aren't seen in a developing company, and they now have a product out there that works," Johnson said. : However, while he remains confident, "only the market can tell us" if the company will succeed. : "We had hoped to be the first company out there with this type of (search) algorithm," Johnson said. "And before, (the market) was wide open. We're still the only ones doing sound matching, but there's a number of other companies that are looking at ways for people to look for and find music. In new companies, you just can't underestimate the importance of being first to market and uniqueness." : One company is music information giant Gracenote, a subsidiary of Sony that supplies the information for the iTunes database and also has music recognition technology (for instance, a song can be played into a phone and the technology will identify it). : Gracenote also offers search technology, but Friesch said it relies on an editorial staff to make recommendations on associations, and the results are dependent on the music's popularity. : "We have no popularity filter, which makes the chance of a song someone just uploaded being discovered equal to that of a popular band," Friesch said. : In contrast, Madison-based Broadjam focuses on artists as its target market, charging them for seeking opportunities to get their music to a larger audience, like in movies and TV shows. The company has a rapidly growing social network, and bands can give songs away free to consumers to build popularity, CEO Roy Elkins said. : Broadjam sells songs to consumers, but Elkins said his company and NewTunes have "completely different business models" and are not really competitors. : "They're strictly about the consumer market, and that's just one small part of our business," he said. : Johnson said NewTunes has accomplished one of the two critical things a new company must do: get its product to market. : "Now the next step is to take their product and get it to break even" financially, he said.

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