THE DREAM IN ACTION

I’ve been listening to a lot more music than normal since I’ve been working from home for the past few weeks. I’ve really enjoyed diving into the lesser known songs on some of my favorite albums.

I decided to see how some of my new found favorites racked and stacked against one another, luckily, there now exists a tool to execute that comparison very easily. I used NextBigSound.com, the TechStars company that just release their site a few weeks back at TechStars Investor day. The screenshot above, which looks extremely similar to the Compete.com interface, shows the popularity ratings of these bands measured by how much their music is being played across the social web. Using sites like Last.fm, MySpace, and others they’re able to measure how often songs are played and shared.

Taking Advantage of Trends

At one point there were 8-track tapes, then we moved to the “normal” tapes that I grew up on, then the CD craze occurred and we’re still trying to sell those ridiculous towers in garage sales, then it was the mp3. We loaded our iPods as full as we could get them, but what’s emerging now, and what I believe will continue, is that we don’t actually poses the music at all. We’ll stream music directly from the web from sites like LaLa.com, Last.fm, MySpace, HypeM.com and so many others.

What is exciting and what I love to see is when companies see trends like this emerging and immediately take advantage of those trends to create valuable businesses around them. That has definitely just occurred in the streaming music space. NextBigSound has launched a tool to measure a bands impact by using data from streaming sites and the social web.

If you’d like to see more about NextBigSound or other TechStars companies check out this short series on the program.

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A few other great TechStar companies are (write-up from Fred Wilson’s blog AVC.com):

Everlater actually used our recent trip to Stockholm and Slovenia as a demo for their service so I can’t help but like what they are doing. As a family that does a lot of travel blogging, I can attest to the fact that there isn’t anything that does a great job in this sector. I’m eager to use Everlater on our next trip this winter.

Take Comics is “iTunes for comics”. I confess that I am not a big comic fan and never have been. So this one is not in my sweet spot but I was very impressed by the product they have built. I think they will be successful.

Vanilla is open source forums software for the web. The team has been working on this project for quite a while before joining Techstars. So the value they got out of Techstars was not a product. They got mentoring and motivation to build something bigger. And they announced a hosted version yesterday which is the beginning of a revenue model and a business. That’s great to see.

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