Indaba Launches Social Contest Suite, Amplifies Marketing For Brands and Labels

Indaba Music, the well-known musician social network & collaboration platform, announced today that it has launched its Social Contest Suite, an end-to-end music-marketing platform that connects independent musicians with fans via a new socially integrated music discovery product. Geared towards both brands and labels, the Social Contest Suite syndicates musician activities (such as recording) and fan actions (such as voting) through Facebook and other web properties to amplify and instigate authentic user-generated conversations.

The three primary product features of Indaba’s Social Contest Suite are as follows:

• Facebook Integration: The integration leverages the sharing capabilities of the Open Graph to promote new music through the platform. Actions such as entering an opportunity, listening to a submission, commenting, and casting a vote can be completed with one click and syndicated to Facebook’s news and ticker feeds.

• “Portable” Contest Experience: Musicians and fans alike can participate in the same contest experience across a brand’s own Internet properties, extending the reach of its music-driven marketing campaigns. With a new design, the contest application has room for unique branding while also providing the technology to stream submissions, comment, and share from any site.

• Trending Tracks: Indaba developed an algorithm that curates contest submissions based on a social virality score. As fans listen, vote, and share their favorite music, the algorithm surfaces “Trending Tracks” to provide fans with a “lean-back” listening experience (leading up to today’s launch, the algorithm has reportedly lengthened the averaging listening time per fan from 10 to over 27 minutes per contest).

Indaba’s CEO, J.J. Rosen: “A common challenge that our music industry and brand clients face is how to connect with a larger audience via digital marketing campaigns,” he said. “Indaba Social Contest Suite provides marketers with a scalable solution by leveraging social networks and the traffic of their own, branded properties.”

Initial artist campaigns include Matisyahu, Usher, Jason Mraz and The Temper Trapa. For brands, this new offering appears to be useful for engaging the social communities they've been working to build with music content, and also allows them to embed the same app from Facebook across their owned media properties to offer the traffic to their own sites the same experience – boosting digital impressions.