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 recently met with a journalist from Medill to discuss the startup eco-system in Chicago. She had talked to a bunch of entrepreneurs, VCs, and politicians (including good friend Eric Olson). The interview was just posted to the Medill blog. I think the article gives a good summary of the problems and opportunities the Illinois and Chicago startup community has. Enjoy!
Illinois, fretting over paucity of business startups, aims to assist tech entrepreneurs
by Melissa Aparicio
Feb 18, 2010
Melissa Aparicio/MEDILL
Brenden Mulligan, founder of Chicago startup ArtistData. The service is used by more than 20,000 musicians.
Melissa Aparicio/MEDILL
The amount of private investment in Illinois technology startups, according to the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association using data provided by Thomson Reuters.
Melissa Aparicio/MEDILL
The amount of private investment in Illinois startups, according to the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association using data provided by Thomson Reuters. Technology startups represent 6 percent of total investment.
★ 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.