We kicked off the last morning session with 4 companies in the music business. Music is one the poster-children for discovery and community driven businesses. People are very particular about their tastes and somewhat distrustful of recommendations that don’t come from like-minded music lovers. The business models for these companies are obvious in some ways — advertising music products or peddling tickets.
*Moderator
Rafe Needleman – Webware, CNET

*Judges
Sean Crawford – Orange FT Group
Peter Daley – Rutberg & Co.
Steven Horowitz – Yahoo!    

iLike
Discover music via your friends – core audience is iTunes and Facebook users. Learn tastes by scanning your music or filling out a questionnaire. They were running for 6 months and saw Facebook as a potential paradigm shift. In 4 weeks – they built a microsite within Facebook – one of the largest paradigm shifts in the history of computing – it took their users from 2M to 7M in two months. Monetize via advertising, ticket sales for concerts, music sales, initially, but since they were able to turn on a dime before, we’re not worried that they’ll figure it out.

MOG
Uses cutting-edge technology to analyze your digital music collection and make personalized music recommendations – a platform to exchange their tastes and develop trusted sources. They are a last.fm competitor – and they have pretty solid artist pages. They stay away from recommendations – algorithms more set up to have you find people. Had to shut off Facebook spigot as it drove their traffic beyond what they could handle. Monetize via brand advertising. Not filtering and fingerprinting.

ReverbNation
Marketing solutions for musicians for marketing and promotion across the Internet as a whole – be it via social networks, blogs, or the artist’s homepage. Real-time stats then provide a 360-degree view of how the music is spreading, who is listening, and which fans are actually passing it on to their friends and posting it on their pages. They tell people which songs people like, where the music is being served. Money can come from transactions and data/demographic aggregation.

Splicemusic.com
The only pro-quality web-based music creation and remixing site with a community. Its for the casual creator who wants to make music and share with it other musicians. Business model is via membership and monetization content.