JetLib News

So, one normally judges high growth in consumer apps by traction early on. Instagram, which is killing it lately, had 100,000 downloads in one week. Soundtracking has the same inside two weeks.

Adding to this roster is Songkick, which is telling us they’ve had 100,000 downloads of their new iPhone app – which lets you find gigs around you – in the first 2 weeks since we broke the launch of the app two weeks ago [iTune link].

The growth is being driven by word of mouth amongst music fans, and is so far fluctuating between a 5 star and a 4.5 star rating on the app store. It probably didn’t hurt that Apple made it app of the week in the UK store. Songkick competes with LiveNation/Ticketmaster which has put a lot of resources into their app, but Songkick is able to aggregate gigs from them and a wide variety of providers.

Crucial to music fans is hearing about gigs first, and the app delivers on this with push notifications. The simple personalisation based on your iTunes library is also helping. Now for the Android version, I daresay.

Although the strongest growth has been in the US, one feature they’ve seen spike is the ability to browse listings in other cities e.g. when people are on vacation.

The only downside to the app it seams is its effect on people’s wallets:

Meanwhile, Songkick has a new hire in tow – Mike Harkey joins as US General Manager from Imageshack/Yfrog the popular mobile photo sharing service, where he was GM, and prior to that ran music at eBay.

I have a confession to make. I’m a fan of live bands, but what with one thing or another, I just don’t get to see enough. I signed up to all the obvious sites to get emails about upcoming gigs. I don’t read their emails. I’ve scrobbled and playlisted and put in my preferences multiple times on numerous sites. Do I go back to visit? No. What I’ve been waiting for is an app which you can pull out in front of friends when they say “Yeah, let’s go and see [band name]…” on the spur of the moment. This would be the ‘last mile’ connection to bands and where you are.

But no apps on the iPhone have got substantial traction for concert discovery. Ticketmaster/LiveNations’ app is only in the US, only presents Ticketmaster concerts and iLike’s ‘local concerts’ app has been in life-support mode since they were acquired by MySpace. The odd thing is movie discover apps like Flixster have had 30 million downloads

So I’m excited that Songkick the social platform for live music is launching an iPhone app today.

This will allow users to track their favorite bands’ concerts, browse live music listings by location, and share concert plans. The Songkick Concerts app scan all the music on your device, auto-detects your location, and creates a personalised list of concerts for your favorite artists in your location.

“It feels like a big opportunity so we’re excited to see what people make of it today! It’s been by far and away our most demanded feature from users” Ian Hogarth, Songkick CEO and co-founder told me.

You get a concert calendar, get push notifications when a new concert is announced for your tracked artists,all the concert info and all ticket options, and sharing to Facebook, Twitter. You can add new locations etc.

Social ticketing company Ticketfly is announcing a $12 million in Series B round from Root Music investor Mohr Davidow Ventures, High Peaks Venture Partners, Contour Venture Partners and angels Roger Ehrenberg and Howard Lindzon. This Series B will bring the startup’s total funding to $15 million.

Ticketfly has an interesting origin story, the company’s co-founders sold their first startup, TicketWeb to industry leader TicketMaster for $35 million in 2000 and then left that company in 2008 to form Ticketfly.

Seeing an tremendous opportunity in social marketing that Ticketmaster was missing out on, and realizing that there was a market opportunity in catering to small venues that didn’t feel right with having a competitor sell tickets (after Tickmaster bought Live Nation), the TicketFly co-founders Andrew Dreskin and Dan Teree sought to provide people with an alternative, “We sort of got the band back together for round two here,” Dreskin tells me.

The company, which makes money off of supplemental fees, is now the number two concert ticketing platform, next to TicketMaster and is on track to sell 2.5 million tickets this year. Ticketmaster by comparison sold 141 million tickets in 2008, the last time I could find any concrete sales numbers.

What sets TicketFly apart from its main competitor is its emphasis on the social marketing  and analytics that currently drive ticket sales. It offers promoters a free website toolkit where they can create a Ticketfly Events page, integrated Concert site and Facebook Event in one fell swoop. Concert go-ers can buy tickets and share information about concerts directly from the Events page and Ticketfly integration. Promoters can also set up the event to post concert updates to Twitter and Facebook automatically, without having to manually update.

Ticketfly currently has over a 100 partnerships with venues including Austin City Limits and The Troubadour. In addition announcing funding, the company is releasing an artist database today with records for over 70,000 artists, which means that venues can have access to up to date content like photos and videos in order to populate their Events pages. It also just started offering Email newsletter integration, allowing venues to automatically populate their email newsletters with events data.

“The ticketing experience historically has been a abysmal, just not that fun for consumers, so we seek to remedy that as well,” Dreskin adds.

At the end of October 2009, my colleague Jason Kincaid traveled all the way to Hollywood, Los Angeles, for the official unveiling of Google’s new music search initiative by the Internet giant and its partners, Lala, Rhapsody, imeem and MySpace Music / iLike. He interviewed just about everyone involved about the news, and Mike Arrington followed up with a post basically calling out Facebook and Ticketmaster for not acquiring iLike instead of MySpace.

In a blog post, Google said that, going forward, a simple Google web search would enable users to “search and more easily discover millions of songs”. Queries for songs, artists or albums would return search results including links to an audio preview of those songs provided by its music search partners, at least in the United States – for starters.

People were invited to learn more about the exciting new feature on a special landing page.

Fast forward to today: the landing page linked above now redirects to a list of regular Google search features, Apple has acquired and killed Lala, MySpace acquired both imeem and iLike and already killed the former (and is pretty much on life support itself, too).

(On a sidenote, isn’t it sad that neither lala.com or imeem.com lead anywhere anymore?)

In addition, one of the key people behind Google Music Search, Director of Product Management R.J. Pittman, defected to Apple about a year ago.

From what I can gather, searches for popular artists, songs and albums no longer yield search results that come with audio previews even in the United States, as evidenced by a series of spot tests done by some TechCrunchers stateside. Here’s how it used to work:

A tipster pointed out the disappearance of the old Google Music Search landing page to us, which doesn’t necessarily mean it vanished recently, but I’ve searched everywhere for mentions of Google officially or unofficially retiring the service and have been unable to find any reports about it. I wonder if simply nobody noticed it was gone, or that my search skills or simply not what they used to be.

The last update I can find it when SearchEngineLand’s Danny Sullivan spoke with Google spokesperson Jason Freidenfelds about the future of the service and was told that it was firmly tied in with Google’s search group, and that people would continue to develop it even after Apple shut down Lala. That conversation dates back to April 2010, so obviously things have changed somewhere along the way.

One more reason I think things have changed rather recently is because Google linked to its own blog post announcing Music Search back in December 2010.

Now, as I’m sure you’re well aware, Google has bigger plans when it comes to digital music than mere search, so perhaps the Google.com/music link to the former Music Search product landing page was quietly removed to make way for another, more appropriate landing page? Or did someone just quietly pull the plug hoping no one would notice?

I’ve asked Google for comment and will update when I hear back.

Meanwhile, according to Cnet’s Greg Sandoval, Google has begun testing internally its much-anticipated music locker and subscription service , which will simply be named Google Music.

Google had hoped that the service would launch to the public in 2010, but it has failed to sign licensing agreements with copyright holders fast enough to launch a digital music download store and cloud-based locker service for that to happen.

Google may, however, unveil Google Music at its I/O conference in May. As for its loudly-trumpeted-upon-launch music search engine: rest in peace, I guess.

At the end of October 2009, my colleague Jason Kincaid traveled all the way to Hollywood, Los Angeles, for the official unveiling of Google’s new music search initiative by the Internet giant and its partners, Lala, Rhapsody, imeem and MySpace Music / iLike. He interviewed just about everyone involved about the news, and Mike Arrington followed up with a post basically calling out Facebook and Ticketmaster for not acquiring iLike instead of MySpace.

In a blog post, Google said that, going forward, a simple Google web search would enable users to “search and more easily discover millions of songs”. Queries for songs, artists or albums would return search results including links to an audio preview of those songs provided by its music search partners, at least in the United States – for starters.

People were invited to learn more about the exciting new feature on a special landing page.

Fast forward to today: the landing page linked above now redirects to a list of regular Google search features, Apple has acquired and killed Lala, MySpace acquired both imeem and iLike and already killed the former (and is pretty much on life support itself, too).

(On a sidenote, isn’t it sad that neither lala.com or imeem.com lead anywhere anymore?)

In addition, one of the key people behind Google Music Search, Director of Product Management R.J. Pittman, defected to Apple about a year ago.

From what I can gather, searches for popular artists, songs and albums no longer yield search results that come with audio previews even in the United States, as evidenced by a series of spot tests done by some TechCrunchers stateside. Here’s how it used to work:

A tipster pointed out the disappearance of the old Google Music Search landing page to us, which doesn’t necessarily mean it vanished recently, but I’ve searched everywhere for mentions of Google officially or unofficially retiring the service and have been unable to find any reports about it. I wonder if simply nobody noticed it was gone, or that my search skills or simply not what they used to be.

The last update I can find it when SearchEngineLand’s Danny Sullivan spoke with Google spokesperson Jason Freidenfelds about the future of the service and was told that it was firmly tied in with Google’s search group, and that people would continue to develop it even after Apple shut down Lala. That conversation dates back to April 2010, so obviously things have changed somewhere along the way.

One more reason I think things have changed rather recently is because Google linked to its own blog post announcing Music Search back in December 2010.

Now, as I’m sure you’re well aware, Google has bigger plans when it comes to digital music than mere search, so perhaps the Google.com/music link to the former Music Search product landing page was quietly removed to make way for another, more appropriate landing page? Or did someone just quietly pull the plug hoping no one would notice?

I’ve asked Google for comment and will update when I hear back.

Meanwhile, according to Cnet’s Greg Sandoval, Google has begun testing internally its much-anticipated music locker and subscription service , which will simply be named Google Music.

Google had hoped that the service would launch to the public in 2010, but it has failed to sign licensing agreements with copyright holders fast enough to launch a digital music download store and cloud-based locker service for that to happen.

Google may, however, unveil Google Music at its I/O conference in May. As for its loudly-trumpeted-upon-launch music search engine: rest in peace, I guess.

There aren’t many startup founders that have done what Garrett Camp has done. After selling content discovery service StumbleUpon to eBay for $75 million in 2007, Camp and investors decided to buy it back for a reported $29 million in 2009.

After the initial Series A that was folded back into the spinoff, Camp raised $17 million from August Capital, Accel, and others in a Series B just last week, making StumbleUpon the most rare of comeback success stories.

Thus far buying yourself back after an acquisition is a feat that’s only been accomplished on a large scale by Webshots (which bought itself back from Excite@Home and resold itself to Cnet) and TicketFly, formerly TicketWeb, which bought itself back from TicketMaster and proceeded to directly compete with its former owner.

I sat down with Camp during SXSW to talk about the process of reacquiring your company, what he plans on doing with the StumbleUpon’s rare second chance, and which startup he likes better, StumbleUpon or Uber (of which he is a co-founder).

Highlights:

On the motivation behind the acquisition: “A desire for flexibility. I think bigger companies require more approvals, it takes longer to get stuff done. So I thought we would grow a lot faster if we were a smaller company.”

On the advantages of being part of a larger company: “The great thing about eBay is that I could totally focus on product, totally focused on engineering, I didn’t have to deal with fundraising, I didn’t have to deal with all the operational issues you have at a company. Because I was focused on that we actually grew really well. We tripled in size during out time there. We were there times bigger when we left than when we came in.”

On whether he’s more excited about StumbleUpon or Uber (the company he co-founded with Travis Kalanick: “That’s like saying ‘which is your favorite kid?’ I mean that’s hard to pick. Uber was basically a side project …”

Advice to other founders that find themselves bored post acquisition: “The decision you want to make is ‘Do you want to keep working on what you’re working on?’”

Pulling a “phoenix from the ashes” is that simple, except when it’s not.