Music Tech Funding: Rowl, Ticketbis, Sensbeat
Today's music tech funding news focuses on three startups that aren't music-only but include music in the mix and are part of the competitive landscape for numerous music-related startups. Rowl, an event planning and discovery app, announced a $4 million Series A round. Secondary ticket marketplace Ticketbis raised €5.2 million. Sensbeat, which combines a photo, text and music to express an emotion, recently closed a $500k round.
Rowl: Event Discovery App
Rowl, based in Santa Monica, is an event discovery app that helps you filter and find events, including music concerts, and plan outings with your friends. They also have alerts when an act you want to see is in your area as well as exclusive opportunities such as meet-and-greets. Users can also create events which opens up a lot of possibilities.
Rowl is reported to have raised a $4 million Series A round bringing the total raise to date to $8 million. They've also made deals along the way with ticketing companies LiveNation/Ticketmaster and Wantickets.
Ticketbis: Secondary Ticketing
Ticketbis, headquartered in Madrid, is a secondary ticketin exchange where people can buy and sell tickets to music and sports events. They've added €5.2 million in fudning for an overall raise since 2009 of over €10 million.
Ticketbis says they're strongest in Southern Europe and Latin America and that revenue in Asia is growing though 90% of recent activity has been in Europe and Latin America. Funding will help them expand more deeply into other regions apparently with a big focus on Asia.
Sensbeat: Connecting People's Emotions
Sensbeat, based in Hong Kong, offers an iOS and Android app and describes itself as providing:
"a platform to share what we call a ‘beat’ (like a tweet in Twitter) on the app and social media. While Facebook builds social graph and LinkedIn builds economic graph respectively, Sensbeat esteems to build the emotion graph that surpasses the function of a music-sharing platform: it leverages the power of music and connects people through a universal language."
Given that self-description they may be more focused on music than I initially gave them credit. Even the screenshot in this funding article reveals the instruction to:
"Take a photo to capture the moment with music."
In a communicate with the public sense, at least in English, that seems confusing. Especially since you also add text and then choose the music. And even more especially since it's about an emotion. In fact you also pick an emotion because, according to their homepage, this is really about sharing your emotions.
Be that as it may, they've closed a funding round of $500k.
More:
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch) recently launched DanceLand. Send news about music tech startups and services, DIY music biz and music marketing to: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
It’s crazy how things are changing thanks to the internet. As a concertgoer, I use Ticketbis very now and then. Although tickets are a little overpriced, it is easy to use, reliable and another way to get tickets when they are not available in the offline platforms or sellers. Sensbeat looks a pretty interesting company as well.