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gogoyoko Introduces a Social Music Marketplace

by Miikka Kukkosuo, January 12, 2009 — Leave a Comment

gogoyoko logogogoyoko is a startup building a new social music marketplace, founded by a group of artists, who after years of selling music got tired of middlemen eating most of the sales revenues. The company is based in Reykjavik, Iceland. gogoyoko’s music service was launched in closed Alpha on November 15, and is said to be launched in March 2009.

gogoyoko offers a platform for artists and audience to interact around music. Most importantly, naturally, it is possible to buy music from the service. gogoyoko creates a direct channel between the end users and artists, letting artists price their own music and keep 100 % of the sales revenues (after transaction costs). The music files will be DRM free.

gogoyoko screenshotAn interesting feature is that via gogoyoko’s custom web player, users will be able to stream tracks and albums for free, which is apparently supported by ads (sounding similar to Spotify). gogoyoko states they pay artists and right holders 40% of the advertisement revenue made from the streaming of their music. Also, each artist can get an own customized store and music player, which can be embedded to the artist’s own blog and homepage, or any other site.

There is more than just a music store, however. Each artist can create a personal site, and allow the users to view latest news, blog entries, newsletters, discography, pictures, and videos while visiting the store. Artists will also be able to enter gigs, which will be placed on the service’s map. gogoyoko plans to provide also mobile access to the map in the future. The visitors and fans can also contribute to the community by rating and reviewing songs, blogging, and even getting their articles published in gogoyoko’s own online Music Magazine. gogoyoko will publish the Music Magazine announcing for example new releases, exclusive interviews, reviews, and special offers.

Similarly to Equal Dreams covered earlier, with gogoyoko an artist can also choose to automatically donate 10 % or more of their revenues to specific charity organizations, while the consumers can also choose to donate a sum of their choice. gogoyoko promises to donate 10% of its advertisement income to their partner international charity and environmental organizations.

gogoyoko’s introduction video:

Gogoyoko from Gogoyoko on Vimeo

gogoyoko boasts it offers artists the control of the sales, promotion and distribution of their music at single location without middlemen. This setup is becoming more and more used in different content services (online games, iPhone apps, etc. etc.), and of course offers the artists maximum the revenue, but on the other hand, it also hands them over all the work. Especially if you are not a professional artist and make music on your free time, the question is whether you’re able to devote enough time to market yourself to generate sales. Probably some lucky ones will get lots of fans by almost by accident, but the majority will probably would have to spend considerable amount of time marketing themselves to generate fan base and revenue. And that’s time away from creating new music, so the question is what will be the best trade-off these kinds of direct-to-consumer services can offer?

MoiPal To Implement New Virtual Goods- Store Widget

by Ville Vesterinen, January 5, 2009 — 2 Comments

moipalMoiPal, a Finland based social gaming virtual world by Ironstar Helsinki, has introduced widgets for music artists to sell MoiPal virtual goods to the virtual world users. MoiPal is not a localized virtual world like Habbo, which has started their community building from scratch in each new country. Instead MoiPal aims to create a common space where all nationalities mix and thus make the world seem more lively. MoiPal is also mainly intented to be played via mobile phones. According to MoiPal CEO, Joakim Achrén, focusing on mobile phones instead of the browser creates stickiness and users tend to come back much more often.

MoiPal has been working on virtual goods partnership all along 2008. These have mainly been with record labels and Finnish music artists, including Lovex, Hanoi Rocks and Lordi. What this means in practice is that the partnering artists have seen a MoiPal character creation widget appear on their website. If a MoiPal charater has been created through one of these websites, the character that has been created have been able to get virtual clothes and a look that resembles the one of the artist who’s website is in question.

Through the partnership the artists get visibility in MoiPal virtual world when characters walk around in t-shirts and clothes that carry the artist logo and name. Artists can also perform a virtual concerts in picture-14MoiPal City, which is the center of the MoiPal virtual world. Currently Lordi, a Finnish heavy artist, is actively present in MoiPal and interacting with the users.

The latest development is selling virtual goods via a widget that sits on an artist website. MoiPal has confirmed its first deal that was done with EMI and EMI’s up-and-coming new artist, Haloo Helsinki. With a Premium SMS message the users can buy their character a full blown Haloo Helsinki costume set. In addition to the 50/50 revenue share the record label can get visibility to their new acts.

MoiPal is currently in talks with all the major record labels for similar kind of deals. The virtual goods store -widget can also be placed on an artist MySpace profile page via OpenSocial that MySpace has implemented. This has also been experimented with two Finnish bands, namely Stigg Dogg and Notkea Rotta.

MoiPal has currently over 100,000 users. The service was launched in October 2007 and aim to hit over one million user mark by the end of 2009. The two biggest methods in building the virtual world for MoiPal are Facebook apps, of which they already have all together three, and getting visibility in artists’ websites. Currently most of the new users come from South-East Asia. The service grows with  approximately 600 new users a day.

If you feel a sudden urge to try out the service (here), by writing moilei or snoukka in the promotional code field ArcticStartup readers will get a free virtual t-shirt for their MoiPal character. Go play!