On Monday, we announced that ArtistData had been acquired by Sonicbids. It marked a major milestone in my career as an entrepreneur and was day full of excitement, emotions, joy, exhaustion, and plenty of other feelings.
The deal was actually signed a few weeks ago, but we wanted to wait to announce it so we could get our ducks in a row. We needed to come up with a valuable offer for users of ArtistData as a welcome gift from Sonicbids, write FAQs, create graphics, and align our messaging. Truthfully, we also wanted to wait for some of the iPhone 4 buzz to die down.
Waiting was painful. Panos and I had been talking about this potential acquisition for over a year and recently had been consumed by getting the deal done. When we got it finalized, all we wanted to do was tell everyone we knew. But we decided to wait, which was the right move.
I'm going to do a series of blog posts about the whole process. It was a fascinating journey that led me to the most exciting day of my career. I'm thankful that i was given the opportunity to take that journey, and thrilled for whats ahead.
The folks at Bandzoogle reached out and asked if I'd share some insights on social networking for bands. Here's the interview I did with them.
Interview with Brenden Mulligan at Artistdata.com
Apr 5th, 2010 | By Matt Moran | Category: The PodcastThis 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.
I met Alexis Rodich from BandsInTown during CMJ last year. A few weeks ago, she reached out and said she'd started writing for the Washington Post and wanted to ask a few questions about success, moving from Chicago to San Francisco, and ArtistData. Here's the post.
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:
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:
On January 16, 2010, ArtistData introduced a completely new site with premium features and a new user interface. Some previously free features were now part of the premium set. It was a tricky thing to introduce, and this is the note I wrote to the ArtistData community about the transition. Overall, it went well. There was minimal backlash.
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?
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Tim Jahn last week and talking about ArtistData. Tim has been doing a series of interviews with Chicago-based companies called Beyond the Pedway and wanted to add ArtistData to the mix. We chatted for about 45 minutes, but so you're not bored, he only included about 6 minutes.
We chat about starting a company, how artists and startups are alike, and some things I've learned along the way. It was fun, and while I absolutely hate watching myself on video, it turned out well. Video is embedded below. Thanks Tim!Big thanks to Fred for mentioning ArtistData in an article about the growing Chicago tech scene!
Can Tech Rescue America's Big Cities?
Posted by: Michael Arndt on August 19, 2009
Many times being big and diverse with business is a good thing for a city. It buffers the local economy from industry-specific slowdowns, and it gives people more options for careers. Fred Hoch lives and works in big and diverse Chicago, but sometimes he wonders if the city would be better off if it were more like San Diego or Austin—smaller places defined by a growth industry like biotech or semiconductors.
(This isn’t just about Chicago, btw. Commodity cities across the U.S. might find a lesson here.)
★ 5 comments | Posted by Chris on April 07, 2010 ★
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.