Immitter is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.
Immitter, an online music service combining the power of Pandora and MySpace’s user-generated content to help independent artists boost get discovered by regular listeners, is launching today.
Unlike Pandora, Immitter — short for the Internet Transmitter — will be delivering music by unsigned, unrepresented musicians to general listeners. Until now, MySpace Music has been the most-used platform for this contingent of artists, but it was hard for people to find or be introduced to their tracks without seeking them out specifically.
As with many similar services, Immitter users will be able to define their music preferences based on genre, location, keywords and even beats per minute (for the DJs among us). Then, the service will serve up a shuffle of songs that meet these conditions. Artists contributing content to the site will tag their tracks themselves to fit neatly into these categories.
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“Our goal is to allow the average musician to have access to maximum distribution, comparable to the distribution of a major artist,” says chief executive Jermaine Kelly. “We’ve already begun brainstorming ways to help musicians get paid on the go.”
Immitter isn’t just betting on attention from indie artists and their listeners. It is also in talks with big record labels to help them discover the next big thing. It is partnering with some music publishing companies to make sure it gets enough impressive musicians loaded up on the system, as well.
The company is betting on a viral marketing strategy, with pleased listeners spreading the good word to their friends. It has also baked in some competition for artists, which will be ranked on the site based on how many users have added their songs to playlists, bought their albums, or recommended songs to their friends. The more popular selections will bubble to the top, Kelly says.
“Once users see that their actions can have a direct effect on an upcoming musician’s career, and that they can follow and interact with that musician from obscurity to stardom, it won’t be long before social radios are the go-to choice,” he says.
Immitter doesn’t just aspire to getting good contracts for good artists — it wants to be an alternative to the established music studio scene. With the do-it-yourself movement gaining momentum, tools like Immitter could redefine fame and success in the creative industries. They could also chip away at the dominance of MySpace Music — which incidentally, is one of the social network’s last successful business segments.
Based in Los Angeles, the company has raised some seed funding, but hopes to attract more capital in the next year, Kelly says. It also hopes to have a public beta test of the Immitter service ready to go in the next few months. Here’s a screenshot:
