Last year I did a video interview for Beyond the Pedway in Chicago. After the ArtistData acquisition, they reached out to chat some more. He's 10 minutes from that interview about selling ArtistData, challenges of an entrepreneur, my new role, and celebrating the little victories.

How Celebrating The Little Victories Led To Brenden Mulligan Selling His Company To Sonicbids

by Tim Jahn on August 27, 2010

Almost a year ago, I interviewed Brenden Mulligan to learn about ArtistData, the website he founded to help bands and musicians update all their various sites and profiles across the web.  I was impressed, because it was just him and a small team creating this amazing tool being used by tens of thousands of musicians.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one that was impressed.  This past June, ArtistData was acquired by Sonicbids, a leading website for connecting bands and promoters.

I think that’s pretty freakin’ cool, so I asked Brenden to chat again to learn what the past year has been like for him and his company.

How did Brenden create a tool used by so many musicians that one of the top companies in the industry needed to acquire it?  Watch my video interview with Brenden above to find out!  If you can’t see the video interview, please click here.  Below is a transcript of the interview.

Transcript

Social networking tips from Brenden @ ArtistData.com

★ 5 comments | Posted by Chris on April 07, 2010 ★

Brenden Mulligan founded ArtistData in 2006, to help bands save time by updating all their online profiles (including Bandzoogle) in a single place. Since then, over 20,000 artists have joined the service. We asked Brenden for his take on social networking and growing your fanbase.

Can you share your background, and how ArtistData got started?

Before ArtistData I worked for a record label and management company in Chicago called Aware. We had a joint venture with Columbia Records, so we'd handle a lot of the grassroots marketing and direct-to-fan interaction, and then run the artists through the Columbia/Sony machine for their album releases. When I was there our big releases were John Mayer, The Fray, Five For Fighting, Motion City Soundtrack, and Mat Kearney.

When I was at Aware, part of my day was exploring the growing digital marketing landscape. Part of that "exploring" was keeping a lot of our artists' profiles up-to-date across a variety of websites. It was instantly a nightmare and a pain point I knew needed to be fixed. So I left to star ArtistData to solve the pain point of data management across a network of sites.

Matt Moran, a longtime ArtistData user, reached out to ask me some questions about the past, present, and future of ArtistData, as well as entrepreneurship, living in different cities, and music in general. Check it out ..

Interview with Brenden Mulligan at Artistdata.com

Apr 5th, 2010 | By Matt Moran | Category: The Podcast

This is episode 2 of The Songwriter Online Podcast. Brenden Mulligan took some time to discuss Artistdata’s origins, the challenges with adding features, and where they are going.

Artistdata may be one of the most useful sites to help the hurried musician in a long time. They provide a way to enter data once (your schedule most notably) and update multiple sites with the information.

The environment of success

ArtistData is an information syndication platform for bands that allows them to enter information once and have it sent out to numerous social networking sites and other relevant platforms.  I know several artists who use the service and consider it very helpful. I first met Brenden Mulligan, founder and CEO of ArtistData, at the CMJ Music Marathon last October.  At the time, he was debating whether to remain in Chicago and grow his company there or move elsewhere.  

Around the time that I moved to San Diego, I saw that Brenden decided to move to the Bay Area. Interested in how he came to this decision, how he handled the logistics of moving while running a company and the impact he thought it would have on his success, I asked if he would answer a few questions for this blog:  

ArtistData's Mulligan: Chicago vs. San Fran as a tech town Posted by Ann D. at 3/23/2010 8:30 AM CDT on Chicago Business

Chicago’s fitness as a city friendly to tech startups got a big boost this month as Groupon founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell announced plans to establish a seed funding investment firm called Lightbank, and another group of entrepreneurs launched Excelerate, a startup bootcamp modeled after TechStars.

But Chicago’s tech community also suffered a loss in March, as Brenden Mulligan moved to San Francisco. Mr. Mulligan, 29, is founder and CEO of ArtistData, a Web site that allows musicians to sync data such as concert information across multiple Web sites including Twitter and MySpace. The site has more than 20,000 users, and the company was a Chicago Innovation Awards finalist in 2009.

Mr. Mulligan explains his reasons for leaving Chicago, as well as his thoughts on Chicago’s startup community, to Crain’s contributor Steve Hendershot:

The New ArtistData

Today we released the single largest revision to the ArtistData platform. For the past few months we've been reworking and improving the user interface to develop a framework that will allow us to drastically expand our site's capabilities. We are thrilled to share it with everyone today.

Our old user interface was suitable when we initially launched in 2008, but we quickly outgrew it. Today's release is an interface that has a stronger foundation to support future growth, and we believe it is an easier site to use based on your valuable, ongoing feedback. 

So, what's new at ArtistData.com?