Popkomm Nominates 8 Innovative Music 2.0 Companies

Popkomm has chosen eight of the most innovative music business 2.0 companies as nominees for it’s 2007 Popkomm IMEA award.

• 
  BMAT (Spain) – a music recommendation system
• GD Worldwide’s Usync Backstage (Australia) – an audience relationship management application
• Kazzong (Germany) – a decentralised Web 2.0 music distribution system
• MOG.com (USA) – a music recommendation community
• mSpot/Remix (USA), a music streaming service on mobile phones
• Playtime’s MusicMakesFriends (Luxembourg) – a complex, multilingual music community platform
• Trivid’s Clipgenerator (Germany) – a do-it-yourself video creation application
• YouLicense (Israel) – an international B2B music licensing
          platform

Full company descriptions and links after the jump.

The panel of judges for this award is made up of industry experts, investors and venture capitalists as well as music industry journalists from all over the world. The winner of this year’s Popkomm-IMEA will be chosen on September 19th and will receive 5,000 euros and a free stand at Popkomm 2008.   

How the IMEA finalists describe their projects:

BMAT – Barcelona, Spain

BMAT is a digital music dreams factory, enabling computers and devices to understand music like humans do. In this way BMAT provides services like a music search that organises music from around the world, smart playlists that fit your current mood or activity, or a virtual partner that recommends new music or like-minded people. BMAT technologies combine typical collaborative filtering solutions with a unique recommendation component, based on the automatic analysis of the raw waveform. The “sound extractor” is capable of automatically detecting within a few seconds music attributes such as tempo, instrumentation, key, chord progress, mood, genre and hundreds of other perceptual descriptors.

Kazzong – Munich, Germany

KAZZONG has been designed to facilitate the digital sale of music everywhere on the internet over a decentralised distribution architecture, and is the next step up the evolutionary ladder of digital sales. KAZZONG is a music player with an integrated buy option. Every content owner is able to create a multiplicity of players with his tracks/albums, easily embed them on the busiest places on the internet (e.g. community-pages like MySpace, youmix, own website etc.) and sell his content to users all over the world. Furthermore content owners are able to decide whether or not they want to sell their content via distribution partners, who can create individual players with enabled KAZZONG content, place them on their own websites and profit from the sales through their players. For distribution partners it is also possible to place players with dynamically generated content on their page.

MOG – Berkeley, CA, USA

MOG is a web-based music platform that is being constantly expanded by a community of music lovers. It is powered by cutting edge filters that make it easy to find the music, videos, news and reviews that match one’s own musical taste. MOG was started by David Hyman, former CEO of Gracenote, former SVP-Marketing at MTV Interactive, and self-proclaimed music freak. MOG launched its web platform in July 2006 and is based in Berkeley, CA. MOG’s mission is to be the ultimate destination for finding, sharing, and talking about what’s compelling in music, from Abba to Zappa.

mSpot / Remix – San Mateo, USA

mSpot, a pioneer in digital mobile music, is leading the way in a rapidly expanding industry by leveraging a new media platform that will bring music to the more than two billion mobile phone users around the world. Founded in 2004, mSpot’s mission is to bring premium audio and video entertainment to mobile phones. Through innovative ideas and prudent business practices, mSpot is uniquely positioned to produce the mobile content, services and applications that will drive mobile data adoption. mSpot currently has more than one million paying subscribers for mobile entertainment services.

Playtime: MusicMakesFriends – Luxembourg

MusicMakesFriends (MMF) is a special kind of music community, where MySpace meets Rhapsody in Europe. MMF offers all music lovers free access to a fully-licensed catalogue of radio stations created by its users, in English, French, German and Spanish. It provides paid access to fully on-demand streaming music and other premium features. Each user is offered a 2GB private online locker free of charge where he/she can store tracks, videos and pictures. Listen to complete songs, create your own radio and meet other people with the same musical tastes, all at MusicMakesFriends!.

Trivid / Clipgenerator – Tübingen-Dettenhausen, Germany

Trivid GmbH, an international company, develops and distributes innovative software and applications in the online and mobile communication market. It also provides users in businesses around the world with an easy-to-integrate solution for custom multimedia services for IT, telecommunications and e-commerce. Clipgenerator technology standardises complex technical and creative processes and enables all consumers to rapidly produce music videos with professional video/TV effects from their own content. Its open-format approach, which is the only legal solution to protect all music rights and assets, combined with cost-minimisation and facilities for integrating advertising with intelligent control, open up new earnings possibilities for all participants.

GD Worldwide / Usync – Go Backstage – Sydney, Australia

Usync provides a complete (one-stop-shop) suite of industry friendly online/mobile marketing and e-commerce tools all backed by an innovative Audience Relationship Management application which effortlessly provides real time information, reports and analysis about the audiences’ activities.

Usync will assist any label, manager or artist to directly transact and interact with their growing audience from one centralised online environment that they design, control and manage themselves. Usync enables you to identify your audience and integrate your marketing and commercial activities to build a direct artist-audience relationship.

YouLicense.com – Tel Aviv, Israel

YouLicense.com is an online music licensing market place. This platform enables artists and those seeking musical content to conduct business directly with one another in a safe and secure environment. A unique search engine and standardised contracts make this a quick and easy process. At YouLicense.com music artists, publishers, labels and other content owners can conduct business directly with music buyers from film, TV, advertising, mobile, gaming, and the recording industry. YouLicense.com is non-exclusive and welcomes anyone with content to upload music and offer licenses for sale, charging a 9% commission from the seller only after the transaction is secured.