I was fortunately to participate in two lake cruises with BAMM.tv during SXSW 2012. Each one featured two different bands and I will be covering these cruises in my following two posts. In this post I want to cover BAMM.tv itself as I think it is offering a great service to emerging bands. I spoke with Chris Hansen, their co-founder and CEO on the cruise. He is the middle below. They are trying to help bands get paid for their work as it appears online which is currently difficult for emerging bands.
BAMM.tv connects these emerging artists with global audiences in several ways. Through a global content distribution network, the company offers music video content from new artists to the web, mobile devices and television. BAMM.tv gives device makers and service providers a differentiated music offering without going through traditional music licensing, while giving artists free HD music video content creation, an instant global audience, and 50 percent of the net profits from the music video distribution agreements. This seems like a good deal for all sides.
Samsung, Chungwa Telecom, Taiwan’s largest telco provider, and Fuugo-TV, an integrated TV and mobile platform based in Finland are among the companies partnered with BAMM.tv at their launch in 2011. Samsung features BAMM.tv’s mobile and tablet application for discovering and sharing new music videos on its Android-based devices including the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Galaxy S2 smartphones. It already reaches 150 countries, and BAMM.tv will be on other mobile devices later this year. Other services already featuring BAMM.tv content include Select-TV, an IPTV provider servicing luxury hotels throughout Asia, and India’s MunduTV, a live TV app for PCs and mobile phones that has reached over four million downloads. BAMM.tv was also showing their new iOS app on the cruise. BAMM.tv will soon be in the Mozilla Marketplace where Mozilla is deploying HTML5 web apps.
It works like this. BAMM.tv curates top emerging artists across many genres including the four bands on the cruise, and produces high-quality HD performance videos in their San Francisco sound studios and at music festivals around the world, as well as interviews and behind-the-scenes video content. In return for the cost-free production and digital video editing, BAMM.tv receives a global license to distribute and monetize the content. The artist retains all of the copyrights, publishing and composition royalties associated with the underlying work. The video content is then fed into BAMM.tv’s growing content catalog which powers a suite of owned and partner applications (for mobile and tablet devices), TV services (pay-per-view content localized in many countries), ad-supported web streaming and more options.
This seems like a win-win and, if these four bands are representative, they have a great talent scout picking the artists. These bands are emerging candidates for the BAMM.tv: Soft Swells, Leah Siegal of Firehorse, Lee Kock, and Hollis Brown. Examples of current bands are Geographer, Wallpaper and The Soft White Sixties. My next two posts will cover the bands on the cruise.
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