Music Tech Hopefuls Demo @ 500 Startups: Console.fm & SingBoard Evade Music Licensing

Multiple startups being "accelerated" by 500 Startups demoed this week and at least two were focused on music. Console.fm and SingBoard both have a lot of potential and have found interesting ways to evade music licensing issues while providing music.

500 Startups is one of the more well known tech incubators in Silicon Valley. They help a lot of folks get their act together and launch, if they haven't already.  This week they held a Demo Day featuring 31 startups.

Console.fm – The Easy Button for Awesome Music

Console.fm is an electronic music streaming service organized into genres. They launched 4 weeks ago and now have 10,000 users, I assume they mean people who've created accounts, and seem to be off to a good start with some solid media attention.

Betabeat recently reviewed Console.fm and says they use an algorithm to identify popular electronic tracks online and then use SoundCloud to stream those tracks.

SingBoard – Where YouTube Meets Karaoke

SingBoard is a pretty cool idea. It's a web karaoke system that uses official music videos with subtitled lyrics, strips out the voice so you can sing and then streams you singing along using your webcam video in a box on the screen.

According to AllThingsD, the different elements are layered and are unlicensed but it's a bit unclear if these are actual YouTube videos or come from multiple services.

You can check out more of the startups that demoed via Alexia Tsotsis' post on TechCrunch which is a lot easier to sort out than 500 Startups' site. I guess when you're a tech media darling you can leave some of the promotional details to the media's ravenous interest in such things!

Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. He is currently relaunching Flux Research to pursue his long-standing obsession with web business models. To suggest music services and related topics for review at Hypebot, please contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.