After graduating from Berklee College of Music in the mid 1990s, Panos Panay started working at a music talent agency in Boston’s Allston neighborhood, and was eager to book his first tours. So eager that he mailed bands’ press kits across the globe and incurred an Airborne Express shipping bill in excess of $4,000 one month.

“As early as then I started thinking there could be a better way,” Panay, a Cyprus native, says of the early inspiration for his startup Sonicbids, an online platform for booking band gigs. He wanted to find a way to sell bands to gig promoters using the then-young consumer Internet.

A few years later, Panay got fired up by the 90s hit flick “Jerry Maguire,” and wrote his boss a memo resembling Tom Cruise’s character’s manifesto, which called for sports agents to demonstrate more compassion and care for the humans underneath the team uniforms and endorsement deals. Panay’s message was a bit different: he was mainly calling for his agency to modernize and accept the digital world, or else go out of business.

His boss didn’t follow the suggestions, though, and much like Maguire’s superiors and coworkers remained uninspired by his impassioned document. So Panay worked on a business plan during nights and weekends for the next year, paid for a prototype of his site, raised about $50,000 from family friends, and left his job in late 2000.

“The vision was: what if I create a marketplace that enables any band regardless of who they are, to come and connect with anyone out there looking to book music,” he says.

Sonicbids has grown from a one-person company run out of Panay’s apartment into a trendily decorated suite in Boston’s equally trendy South End neighborhood, housing about 50 employees. But its vision has remained much the same, Panay says. (In his original memo, he proposed the revamped company would make money through advertisements from companies such as Gap—a partner Sonicbids signed on last year.)

Panay launched Sonicbids in February 2001, as somewhat of a band’s version of career site Monster.com (whose founder Jeff Taylor sits on the Sonicbids board of directors.) Bands pay between $50 and $100 a year for the service, which enables them to compile electronic press kits—giving promoters responsible for filling slots at clubs all the content they need to review an applicant. Sonicbids charges … Next Page »

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Boston-based Sonicbids, whose website helps bands discover and book gigs, announced it has acquired ArtistData, an online platform for publishing gig information. Sonicbids, which was used to bookmore than 71,000 gigs last year, says the acquisition of San Francisco-based ArtistData will better enable its customers to market and promote shows through social networks and concert databases. It did not disclose the financial terms of the deal, but said it plans to roll the ArtistData service into its product by the end of this year.

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Chelmsford, MA-based OurStage, which runs an online community where indie bands gain recognition through audience voting in monthly contests, has raised $2.63 million in an offering combining equity, options, and warrants, according to a regulatory filing. In 2009 the company collected $3 million out of an intended $6 million Series B round; its backers then included Portland, ME- and Austin, TX-based Signature Capital and a large group of about 100 angel investors. Added to the company’s 2008 series A round of $13 million, the new money brings the startup’s total venture pot to roughly $19 million. In March OurStage announced a strategic partnership with MTV Networks, owned by Viacom (NYSE: VIA).

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We were really stoked when we received the e-mail from Greg asking if we’d be interested in playing at the Boston Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands. We had a great time at the Seattle battle, but we really thought that was the end of a fun gig… Traveling out to Boston to play a gig sounded awesome! [Juda's Wake is (left to right): Peter Dixon, James Dixon, and Will Dixon---Eds.]

Booking travel accommodations fell nicely into place, lining up vacation time came through, confirmed with Delta that our guitars/cymbals could be carry-ons, doubled our practice schedule to prepare for the “big gig in Boston,” and we were feeling good about pulling off a respectable set.

I had traveled to Boston a bit for work and actually played some gigs in Boston about 10 years ago with another band (long story), and whenever I brought up Boston, my brothers/bandmates responded with, “Meh… Boston. What’s so cool about Boston?” Sure we enjoyed Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and Fever Pitch, but…?

OK, so we had an early flight on Wednesday morning. We get to the gate at SeaTac with 3 minutes to spare, and the clearly metal-fearing gate check attendant exclaimed that bringing our guitars on board was against FAA regulation and they would have to be checked. So we confirm that they would be handled like a stroller and would be handed to us after we arrived in Boston. As we see our guitars dramatically toppling out onto the luggage conveyor at Logan Airport, we cringe at the thought of the damage to our babies that just spent hours freezing in the belly of the plane! Thanks Seattle!

Thankfully they only received some cosmetic scratches to the cases (that’s what they’re for right?), but here’s where the remarkable Boston hospitality starts (not kidding). We go to the luggage desk at Logan to see how we could avoid this on our return… The luggage manager apologizes profusely, files a complaint on our behalf, assures us that there is no FAA regulation against the guitars as carry-ons, gives us all Delta $$ vouchers and stresses that if this were to happen again, make sure to get the PINK check tag, and not the yellow. Luggage with pink tags are handed to you at the door of the plane. Luggage with yellow tags are handed to oversized playful gorillas.

The luggage manager, cabbies, hotel staff, waiters and bartenders—all inquire if we’re in a band, related, where from, etc., and all affirm that the Middle East is THE place to play, especially the lower level. Cool!

Three of the four spots we hit on Wednesday night bought us rounds, did shots with us, shared Boston music and architecture history, tips, and advice. The three of us are out in Seattle all the time, and the whole “Nah, that round is on us—how ’bout doin’ a shot?” just doesn’t happen. Let alone three times in a single night.

There was not a setting during this trip where we spent more than 30 minutes at that a Bostonian didn’t stop to chat with us, take a picture with us, share a story, etc. etc.

Add a really fun gig, big crowd, smooth running operations, at a top notch venue with other great bands… we love Boston—and Xconomy! Thanks guys!

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It’s not getting any easier to write and perform great music. But for up-and-coming artists, it is getting easier to build a fan base—especially if they can get their fans to do part of the work for them.

That’s the idea behind MyStore, a new Facebook application launched last week by Framingham, MA-based Nimbit. The five-year-old startup builds online tools that help artists sell and market their music directly to fans, with no need for a middleman like a recording label or a promoter. Up to now, that’s mainly taken the form of a Web-based platform that bands can plug into their websites or blogs, allowing them to do things like track fans, promote concerts, and sell digital downloads, tickets, CDs, and other merchandise. But with MyStore, Nimbit has transplanted its marketing and e-commerce engine into the world’s largest social networking site—which means every transaction a band or artist conducts can potentially be magnified many times over by the power of its fans’ social connections.

Once an artist or a band joins Nimbit and sets up a MyStore tab in their Facebook profile, Facebook’s own networking tools swing into action on their behalf. Every time a fan plays a song from the MyStore, or buys a download, or leaves a comment, that action shows up on their wall for all of their friends to see. If a Facebook member recommends a band to a friend, the recommendation will lead them back to the band’s MyStore. And nobody ever has to leave Facebook to make a purchase—the store provides a shopping cart, credit-card processing, the whole e-commerce shebang.

It’s a big step for Nimbit, whose main previous venture into the social networking world was an “online merchandise table” widget for MySpace. The 14-employee company, which has angel funding from Lexington, MA-based CommonAngels, was already growing fast, with 10,000 artists and labels signed up as users and 50 percent year-over-year revenue growth, according to co-founder and CEO Patrick Faucher, himself a professional trumpet player and vocalist. With Facebook’s population zooming past 300 million users (and MySpace’s plummeting at a similar rate) the MyStore integration could become an important new selling point for Nimbit. I talked last week with Faucher, and had a chance to ask him how the MyStore app can help artists, how social networking fits into the company’s vision, and what it was like to work with Facebook. An edited version of our conversation follows.

Xconomy: Obviously most serious bands have a MySpace presence. Is there a lot of music discovery going on through the other social networking sites?

Patrick Faucher: It depends on the genre and the demographic. Some might do well on MySpace, some might do well on traditional radio, and some are still basically out there doing regional touring, and that’s where they are generating exposure. But at some point in every artist’s process for marketing and promotion, there is an opportunity for a fan to interact with them online, whether that happens to be on MySpace or on their own official website or on Facebook. That is the point at which we maximize that interaction, by making sure the artists can capture their fans, engage them with product offers, and give them a rewarding way to buy directly from them.

X: If you’re an artist or a band, why go to the trouble of building a store inside Facebook—what’s wrong with iTunes?

PF: If the fan has taken the time to find you and you have them right there in front of you, why send them down the street to buy from someone else? We act as a transparent layer between the artist and the fan. Our job is to … Next Page »

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And then there were five. Here at Xconomy, we have made our selections for the five finalists who will compete at our inaugural Battle of the Tech Bands in Seattle, to be held on the evening of Thursday, July 30 at the WTIA Summer Celebration at the Pyramid Alehouse. We are looking forward to putting on a spectacular show. (Registration info is here.)

It’s been a long road. We put out the call for bands more than two months ago. We got a couple dozen competitive entrants (thanks to all the bands who applied). We listened to demos, sorted through band bios and websites, consulted our esteemed judges, and listened some more. After a few days of intensive discussions, we arrived at our top picks.

Five finalists, and five words: They are going to rock.

Their mix of musical styles, personalities, and companies represented (each band has at least one member from a Northwest technology firm) is pretty awesome. Most of all, each of them has a legitimate chance to win. In music, as in business, it all comes down to execution, right?

Two awards will be given at the event on July 30. One will be for Audience Favorite, based on voting by all of you, the attendees. The other will be for Most Innovative Band, which will be decided by a select panel of judges, together with Xconomy and WTIA staff.

So here they are—the five bands—along with the tech companies their members represent, my personal impressions of them, and why each has a real shot at winning. Please check out their stuff, come out and support the local tech-music scene, and cast your vote on July 30. We’ll see you there.

Drumroll, please…

Afraid of Figs
(MorphoTrak, Robert Half Technology)
Light, infectious pop rock reminiscent of Barenaked Ladies and Cake.
Why they could win: With a song called “I Ate a Vegan,” anything is possible.

Between These Lines
(Hewlett-Packard)
Contemporary alt-rock quintet with a polished, radio-ready sound.
Why they could win: With expertly crafted songs and strong stage presence, they might be hard to top.

Indigo Soul
(Microsoft, Adobe)
The melodic intersection of classic rock, 80s pop, soulful lyrics, and rocking rhythms.
Why they could win: Their music might be just perfect for a warm, mid-summer evening celebration.

Juda’s Wake
(Microsoft)
Killer metal chops. Need we say more?
Why they could win: This band would have a chance to win any contest they entered—and I mean any.

Lions Ambition
(Boeing)
Energetic hip-hop, rock, and soul with monstrous hooks and catchy lyrics.
Why they could win: The whole city might be dancing after one song.

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We are in the final stages of selecting the five finalist bands who will perform on July 30 at the Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands, to be featured at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s Summer Celebration at the Pyramid Alehouse across from Safeco Field in Seattle.

We will announce the finalists very soon, but suffice to say that our esteemed judges were suitably impressed by the quality and diversity of the bands who entered. It is going to be a really rocking show, with a great mix of musical styles and companies represented.

The WTIA has also secured two Seattle-based charitable partners for the event, who will receive the proceeds from all raffle tickets sold. They are Technology Access Foundation, a nonprofit that prepares children of color for academic and professional success through a rigorous K-12 curriculum (Luke profiled TAF here), and Jack Straw Productions, a multidisciplinary arts center that fosters communication of art and ideas to diverse audiences through audio media and artist residency programs. To register for the event, click here.

In the meantime, here’s a quick behind-the-scenes look at Bill Gates and Paul Allen’s exploits in cartoon-land, as they prepared to send in their band demo to the contest. It’s the latest installment of Protingent Man, courtesy of Donn Harvey and David J. Locher:

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Two more days… That’s all that stands between us and the start of the ultra-competitive judging process to determine the finalists for Xconomy’s Battle of the Tech Bands. In case you haven’t heard, the big event is taking place on July 30, at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s annual summer celebration in Seattle (event details and band instructions here). The deadline for band submissions is this Friday, June 12, at midnight Pacific Time. All you have to do is send your band’s info (and an MP3 or two) to techbands@xconomy.com.

We’re looking for the best five bands to perform on July 30 as finalists. Each must have at least one member who works at a Northwest technology, life sciences, or tech-investment organization. Each will get 15 minutes of set time in front of an audience of hundreds. Our judges will include Steve Hall of Vulcan Capital (a lead guitarist himself), Jeff Lin of Microsoft (co-founder of the band Harvey Danger), and Peter Blecha, author of Sonic Boom!, the definitive book on the history of rock and roll in the Northwest (and former senior curator of the Experience Music Project). We’re working on prizes too, and hope to make an announcement about that soon.

So will the next Pearl Jam or Fleet Foxes make its debut on our stage in July? Will the top band of the evening be from Microsoft, a small tech startup, or a life sciences firm? Or will the best young band out there not even get heard because it didn’t get its act together in time? (That’s rock and roll for you.) If you’re thinking of entering, don’t delay. The clock is ticking…

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Here at Xconomy, preparations are in full swing for our Battle of the Tech Bands, which is happening at the WTIA Summer Celebration on Thursday, July 30, at the Pyramid Alehouse in Seattle. If you or anyone you know plays in a band with at least one member from a Northwest tech, life sciences, or tech investing firm, please submit your band’s stuff to techbands@xconomy.com (full details and event info here).

The deadline for submissions is coming up fast—next week, June 12—so don’t delay. We’ve already got a bunch of worthy competitors, but a few more bands from the tech powerhouses (Microsoft? Amazon? Real?), as well as the gaming cluster, certainly wouldn’t hurt. We know you’re out there.

We’ve lined up a team of stellar judges, and are working on a few more, as well as some great music-related prizes. Stay tuned for details on those.

Meanwhile, in cartoon land, Bill Gates and Paul Allen have some extra time on their hands to devote to getting their musical act together in time to participate in the Battle. It’s the latest installment of the Protingent Man comic, courtesy of David J. Locher and Donn Harvey (see the last installment here and the full strip here):

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Are you ready to rock? We’ve already received quite a few submissions from Seattle-area musicians in the tech and life sciences community who want to compete in the Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands. The big competition is happening at the WTIA Summer Celebration at the Pyramid Ale House on July 30. (Event details and band application info is here; the deadline for applicants is June 12.)

But we also got a submission we didn’t expect. It looks like tech luminaries Bill Gates and Paul Allen, a known music buff, are planning to enter the competition—at least in one alternate reality. Donn Harvey, the president of Bellevue, WA-based Protingent Staffing (and bass guitarist with Hettel Street Blues), sent us a rather unusual e-mail. It seems his company has a comic-strip superhero who works with Gates and Allen.

I’ll let the cartoons, drawn by David J. Locher, tell the rest of the story (see below):

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(To be continued…)

OK, so it’s a little self-promotional (for both of us), but we laughed out loud when we received it. Besides, it’s all in the spirit of fun and a great cause, right? We’ll be announcing the judges and prizes for the Battle soon. In the meantime, please help us spread the word, and e-mail us at techbands@xconomy.com if your band would like to enter.

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I don’t care whether I’m good enough at Dance, one of the online games that’s part of the new music site Loudcrowd, to impress other users. What I want to know is whether I dance better than Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

As part of his January 30 tour of the Cambridge Innovation Center, the Govinnovator stopped by the offices of Conduit Labs, the software startup behind Loudcrowd. Co-founder and CEO Nabeel Hyatt sat Patrick down at a computer and invited him to try Dance, a simple video game where you try to click on directional arrows at the exact moment that a rotating marker passes over a symbol. Your performance determines whether your avatar dances more like Fred Astaire or Jerry Lewis in a little video that’s shown to your game partner.

I was in Patrick’s press entourage during the visit, but I couldn’t see how well he danced. Given that the tour was a bit rushed, he couldn’t have been too fleet-footed—nothing close to his impressive performance in a table-tennis match against Google’s Steve Vinter during a visit to the search giant’s Cambridge office last May.

I’ll probably never be a good dancer, but after playing about six games of Spin, another game on Loudcrowd, I can report that I’m the proud owner of one virtual goodie—the track “Underwater” by Mock & Toof. (Never heard of them before.) Alas, I haven’t earned enough decibels—i.e. credits—to play my track for other Loudcrowd users.

As you may have guessed by this point—or as you may have read, if you’ve been following the news from the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, which just wrapped up in Austin, TX—Loudcrowd is a music-driven casual gaming community, finally launched this week after about 18 months of behind-the-scenes labor at Conduit Labs. In technical terms, Loudcrowd is a Flash-based website with a continuous shared soundtrack, where registered users create social networking profiles and customized avatars and then play music-related games. Playing the games wins users points that they can eventually use to become DJs and choose the music other users hear.

At least, I think that’s the goal. But it may be that the competition is beside the point. In the language of Web marketing, Loudcrowd is designed to keep users entertained, engaged, and on-site, the better to sell them Loudcrowd points (the site’s virtual currency), iTunes and Amazon tracks, and other products that Conduit may have up its sleeve. In fact, the company boasts in a press release distributed yesterday that “user engagement on the site has…been over twice the average session length of leading online music sites such as Last.fm, Project Playlist, and Pandora.”

Back in August 2007, when Conduit announced that it had collected $5.5 million in venture funding from Prism VentureWorks and Charles River Ventures, Susan Wu, then a partner at CRV, told me she liked the market Conduit was entering, because “it marries the design philosophies of creating lightweight, zero barrier applications that are geared towards mass market audiences with very emotionally engaging, immersive environments.”

Wu wasn’t able to describe Conduit’s plans in greater detail at the time, but she did say the startup hoped to build on the growth of social networking sites like Facebook by making online socializing more shared and synchronous. “Like the Wii and Guitar Hero reinterpreted what it meant to experience social entertainment in a living room environment, there’s a new type of entertainment waiting to be invented using a Web-based form factor,” Wu said. (She has since left CRV to start her own company, a stealth-mode massively multiplayer online game company called Ohai.)

Now that Loudcrowd is out, it’s finally becoming clear what Wu was talking about. The site is obviously aimed at teenage and twenty-something music fans—a slightly more MySpacey crowd than a Facebooky one, from what I can see—and makes use of cartoonish avatars and line-drawn graphical settings reminiscent of the cover art for the Grand Theft Auto video game series. The artists Conduit has signed up to supply songs for the site’s music stream are on the indy side, meaning … Next Page »

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Just a friendly reminder to all of you who trade pipettes, protractors, and powerpoints for whammy bars and hi hats at the end of the day: The deadline to enter Xconomy’s second annual Battle of the Tech Bands is midnight tonight. It’s shaping up to be a spectacular show and the prizes are pretty sweet, so sign up before your van turns into a pumpkin. Eligibility details and instructions for entering are here.

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Xconomy’s first Battle of the Tech Bands last January was such a huge success—with close to 350 people gathering to hear six local groups, from the pop/dub/electronica hipsters Deadbeat Darling to the sonically massive Souled Out Superband to the proudly cheesy indie pop rock band MacAlister Drive—that we’ve decided to do it again. Same place (the Middle East in Central Square, Cambridge), same date (January 22). So, calling all New England tech bands: It’s time to send us your demos!

Half of all ticket proceeds from the event will go to benefit local charities. Once again, the play-off is open to all bands (amateur and pro alike) with at least one member who works at a technology, life sciences, or tech-investment firm in New England. We’ve lined up some great local judges to help us select the final six bands who will perform on January 22, including World Champion Boston Celtics Managing Partner and CEO Wyc Grousbeck, investor-musician Giles McNamee, and Harmonix Music Systems founder and CEO Alex Rigopulos.

If your band is selected, you’ll get to play for a big audience made of fellow entrepreneurs, investors, scientists, programmers, engineers, and musicians—and compete for some serious prizes, including free promotional services for your band from Nimbit. The audience will pick its favorite band, and a panel of Xconomy editors and select guests will do the same.

So join the battle and send us your MP3s now. Details on entering the contest are here—the deadline is Friday, December 12. Tickets for the event will go on sale soon.

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When we hired Greg Huang as our Seattle editor a few months ago, Rebecca wrote an article entitled, Introducing Greg. He Rocks. That’s because right after we hired him, he went on tour with what we described as his “fantastically quirky band,” Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives. The band, which claims influences by the Violent Femmes, Beatles, and Twisted Sister, among others, fairly exemplifies the innovation scene: besides its Xconomy editor, other band members include Dan Schmidt, employee #3 at Harmonix; Bill Foster from Cognex; and Chris Rigopulos from OC&C Strategy Consultants.

Now, Greg is back on the East Coast for a mini-tour to celebrate the release of Honest Bob’s new album, Third Time’s the Charm (look for it soon on iTunes and CDBaby). They played in NYC last night, but tonight are on at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square. They hit the stage at 10:30, and you just might see some of their Xconomy colleagues around as well. If you do, let us know you’re an Xconomy reader, and we’ll buy you a beer.

If we can hear what you’re saying: they crank it.

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Everybody running a startup must wonder from time to time what it would be like to leave it all behind and live on a balmy Caribbean island. And if you want to know what it sounds like, check out Supersaturated, the just-released third album from Jeet “Miki” Singh, co-founder of Art Technology Group (NASDAQ: ARTG).

Singh, who co-founded ATG with Xconomist Joe Chung, now spends much of his time on St. Barts. In 2001 he formed a band called Dragonfly, which has now been renamed The Singhs. Though many of the members of the band are Boston-based, Supersaturated was recorded mainly in the West Indies. It’s the result of a three-year-long effort, with Singh writing or co-writing all the music and lyrics. (We prevailed upon him to take a break from the effort last winter to help us judge our Battle of the Tech Bands.)

The Singhs play an interesting mix combining rock, pop, and funk—and to my ears, anyway, there’s at least some hint of reggae. You can check out the band, whose members include local legend guitarist Peter Parcek and other top area musicians, here. And you can hear tracks from the latest album on The Singhs’ MySpace page, here. My own favorite is Invisible. The album itself is on sale at iTunes, CD Baby, and Amazon, among other venues. The Singhs will be performing live on July 23 at Sullivan Hall in New York, and here in Boston on July 31 at Church, near Fenway Park.

I’m planning to talk to Jeet later today and ask him about the novel he’s writing. Maybe it will make good beach reading.

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I must be the only Web journalist who did not go to Austin, TX, for South by Southwest, the music, film, and interactive-technology festival that dominated the Twittersphere this week. But as fate would have it, I got my SXSW story anyway. It’s about a Boston startup that’s renting out the Dirty Dog Bar in downtown Austin tonight to showcase Horse Stories, Dead Sara, Eric Hutchinson, The Brobecks, Elizabeth and the Catapults, and many more of the independent artists and bands participating in its new Web music distribution service, called Surrge.

Created by serial-entrepreneur brothers Jonathan and Justin Bingham, Surrge is a combination social network and online music store where fans of new bands can earn 10 percent or more of the sale price whenever their friends buy songs based on their recommendations. Significantly more, in some cases: If you’re the first person to download a $1 song from Surrge and you convince two friends to buy it, you’ll earn back your dollar, and if you then convince 98 more friends to buy it, you’ll earn another $28.50. (I’ll explain the math in a minute.)

The basic idea behind Surrge is to accelerate the spread of new music by giving fans a way to become invested—literally—in the success of the bands they enjoy. It’s basically a big system for tracking music referrals, counting purchases, and dividing up and shuffling around the resulting micropayments. Referrers earn the aforementioned 10 percent commission, while a “scout” who gets a new band to join Surrge does even better, earning a 1-percent cut of that band’s Surrge revenues for life. (The percentages come out of Surrge’s slice of the pie, not the bands’.)

So, that hip friend of yours who’s always putting you on to the coolest new bands? Now he can earn some cash for his trouble. “We are trying to quantify, institutionalize, and monetize word of mouth, which is really the way music spreads,” says Jonathan Bingham, who took the CEO role at Surrge; Justin is CTO. The pair, plus a small crew of programmers and other helpers, have been working on the angel-funded website behind the scenes for about a year, almost ever since the brothers’ last venture, an intrusion-detection software company called Intrusic, went out of business.

The full Surrge site, which launches today, features dozens of independent bands, including artists like Hutchinson and Dead Sara, and will be loaded with 1.2 million songs over the next couple of weeks, Jonathan Bingham says.

Of course, the irony here is that the Internet, which makes it so easy to purchase (or pirate) audio files online, is exactly what’s destroying the traditional channels for promoting and selling music in the first place—thus creating an opening for companies like Surrge to experiment with new kinds of Web-based music marketplaces. And the Binghams are hardly the only Boston-area entrepreneurs exploring this area. Tourfilter, Bandsintown, and Tourb.us help fans track performances by their favorite bands; Ourstage lets fans pick the best band-submitted videos for monthly $5,000 prizes and concert opportunities; Nimbit uses the Net to help bands sell CDs and merchandise directly to their fans; and SonicBids provides an online system matching bands with booking agents, to name just six of the more than 20 companies that make up Boston’s strong music-and-technology cluster.

Surrge could emerge as one of the most intriguing companies in this cluster, simply by virtue of … Next Page »

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We always knew we had it in us to look glamorous on TV. We just needed some hotshot video producers and editors to bring out our inner Ryan Seacrests. Mark Woit, son of Xconomy’s publisher Steve Woit, shot some great video at our big Battle of the Tech Bands event at the Middle East on January 22. And now Boston.TV, the area’s leading independent online video network, has published its own segment on the Battle (embedded below, and also viewable here).

The video features interviews with Xconomy founder Bob Buderi, yours truly, and personnel from all of the bands that competed, including Christoph Krey from McAlister Drive, Thomas Wilson of the Souled Out Superband, Andrew Blowen of One Hand Free, Scott Miller from The Knuckledusters, Rich Savoie from Sad Marvin, and Joseph King from Deadbeat Darling. (King’s band won the Audience Favorite vote , while Krey’s group won the prize for Most Innovative Performance.)

Production of the video was spearheaded by Dave Gutt, Boston.TV’s arts & entertainment producer and post-production supervisor, to whom we’d like to send out a big thank-you.

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It’s a good thing I’m a writer and not much of a talker, because I’m still hoarse after my big stage debut as emcee for Xconomy’s Battle of the Tech Bands at the Middle East Tuesday night. It was a fantastic night of jamming from some of the local technology community’s most talented musicians, and we were thrilled by the huge audience turnout of nearly 350 rockin’ techies, VCs, and other music lovers, not to mention the amazing energy of the bands that competed and the generous support of our sponsors. We made some great new friends among the bands and their fans, and I’m still buzzed from my big chance to live out every boy’s dream of being Ryan Seacrest for an evening.

Now that we’ve gotten past our hangovers and caught up a bit on our sleep—as well as the week’s regular technology news—we wanted to give you the official debrief. For those of you who couldn’t make it, or had to leave early, I’ll cut right to the chase and tell you who won. Akamai’s Deadbeat Darling, an ultra-cool pop/dub/electronica band founded by singer/guitarist Joseph King, dominated the voting all evening long and eventually took home the prize for Audience Favorite band. The award for Most Innovative Performance, handed out by a secret cabal of Xconomy editors and guest judges, went to McAlister Drive, a proudly cheesy indie pop band representing Linedata Services and led by budding heartthrob Christoph Krey on guitar and lead vocals—capped by a special guest who leapt off the stage doing a Jonathan Papelbon-like river dance.

For a taste of Pap and all the talent on hand, check out our YouTube video, which was expertly shot by Mark Woit, son of Xconomy publisher Steve Woit:

Once the playing ended, Giles McNamee, co-founder of Boston-based investment banking house McNamee Lawrence & Co., was in the house to announce the winners and their prizes (we understand that Giles is a musician himself, handling guitar and vocals for local group The Rockhoppers). For winning the Audience Favorite vote, Deadbeat Darling snagged one full year of free retail service from Nimbit, a Framingham, MA, company that helps independent artists promote their music and build their fan bases by selling songs, merchandise, and concert tickets online. McAlister Drive won seven hours of free studio time and audio engineering assistance at Boston’s Bristol Recording Studios, a local institution that’s hosted artists as varied as Meatloaf and Yo Yo Ma. Each prize carried a monetary value in excess of $1,000, and we were delighted to have Nimbit CEO Patrick Faucher and Bristol Studios sales manager Kevin Patey on hand to present the awards in person.

We wish we’d had more prizes to give away, because all of the bands played their geeky hearts out. One Hand Free, a hardcore ’70s rock band based in Portsmouth, NH, and representing IBM, wowed the crowd with their authentic long hair and soul-ripping guitar work. (One Hand Free’s appearance coincided with the release of their latest album, Quadraphonic.) The Knuckledusters, a swing-a-billy band based in Somerville and representing Bioprocessors Corp. and Veritas Medicine, revved up the audience with their rendition of “Rockabilly Rebel.” As an erstwhile trombonist, I was personally thunderstruck by the high-energy performance and professional sound of Bose’s Souled Out Superband, a 9-piece group—including five horns—that belted out a seamless set of Otis Redding and Stevie Wonder covers. (We want to extend an extra-special thanks to the Bose Superband for the invaluable production advice and equipment provided by their drummer, Bud Maclellan.) The final band, Sad Marvin, a black-clad alternative/grunge group representing Smiths Medical, won geek points from me for being named after Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and impressed the crowd with great vocals by lead singer Amanda ZW.

For the record, the final tally in the audience voting was:

We hope that all of the bands will enter the Battle again next year—and we also expect to be hearing from great new competitors at local companies like EnerNOC who missed this year’s deadline. Thanks to a great film crew from Boston.TV who were on hand for the entire Battle, you’ll be able see more clips from the event online next week, along with interviews with Bob, myself, and the band leaders.

We couldn’t have pulled off the Battle of the Tech Bands without the terrific support of our prize donors and event sponsors. In addition to the grand prizes from Bristol Recording Studios and Nimbit, we had eight fabulous door prizes to give away to lucky audience members, including five Zune music players donated by Microsoft, two Rock Band Special Edition video game bundles donated by Cambridge’s Harmonix Music, and … Next Page »

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Many bands have hours of video documenting their performances and their touring adventures, but their options for getting this material out to fans aren’t very broad. There’s MTV on the professional end and MySpace on the popular end, and not much in between. But now Hobnox, a German company that has set up its U.S. headquarters in Waltham, MA, is offering a third alternative: an online network for “prosumer”-produced content about indie musicians.

“Many musicians who are creating great content don’t have a distribution platform for it,” says David Wu, president of Hobnox, which launched its first U.S. content channel, called Mi145, in October. “We are providing a way for them to reach out to their fan base, broadcast high-quality video and audio, and create a community around that.”

Hobnox is attempting to make its first big splash with two series of video documentaries on Mi145, one about the 1967 American debut of electric guitar legend Jimi Hendrix and the other on Boston-based ska-punk band The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, which is reuniting this month after a five-year hiatus. Most of this content is professionally produced, but Hobnox execs say that they expect to introduce tools for users to create and upload their own videsos by mid-2008.

“The younger bands, they are very used to this do-it-yourself culture, and they are pretty much filming everything about themselves,” says Jim Fell, Hobnox’s vice president of design and strategy. “But they haven’t really had distribution platforms that support that. MySpace and some of the other social-networking forums have allowed them to express themselves, but not on a professional level. We are looking to create a grassroots platform that can serve the needs of all of these artists. We’re leading with Jimi Hendrix and some professional content to show what can be done, but it works for more underground media producers, too.”

The Hendrix documentary, called “American Landing,” chronicles Hendrix’s first American performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1967, after he had already achieved notoriety in Europe. The documentary is rich in archival concert film and interviews, and is organized in a format Hobnox calls a “Hypershow,” meaning that viewers can stop the main narrative at dozens of points and explore clips and interviews that go into facets of Hendrix’s career in greater depth.

The Hypershow format is essentially a reinvention of the interactive CD-ROM documentary, which was developed into a high art in the 1990s by companies like Corbis and FlagTower. It may be a measure of how young the folks at Hobnox are—or how old I am—that when I mentioned the similarity during an interview, they had no idea what I was talking about; Macromedia Director and other PC-based tools used by CD-ROM producers in the 90s have long since given way to so-called “rich Internet applications” built on platforms such as AJAX, Microsoft’s Silverlight, and Adobe’s Flex and AIR platforms. (The familiar Flash player—which you must install to watch Mi145—is the browser-based runtime environment in which Flex applications are viewed.)

Making a plain music video into a Flex presentation isn’t simple, which is why you don’t see a lot of interactive content on sites like MTV.com, and why Hobnox is producing all of its own content for Mi145 right now. (The “Mi” stands for Music Intelligence.) Hobnox’s three German channels, on music, film, and urban culture, have begun to show some user-contributed videos, but for the moment musicians who want to get their content onto the U.S. channel need to approach Hobnox directly. “We do have the opportunity of working directly with artists who want to put something like a Hypershow together,” Wu says.

But there’s one quick way for a band to get on Hobnox: be the winner of a contest the company is running in concert with Boston-based music booking site Sonicbids to find the best local ska, punk, or hardcore rock band to open for the Bosstones at their New Year’s Eve bash at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel in Providence. In fact, the company is expected to announce the winning band and runners-up today, based on videos submitted through Sonicbids. The winners and five other finalists will be featured on Mi145, according to the company.

Meanwhile, the channel will continue with its edgy, somewhat antiestablishment fare, including a regular “docuette” feature called “Empty V”—a fairly transparent dig at MTV and its parent, Viacom.

“At MTV and some of the other established media outlets, they have a formula that works and they want to stick with it,” says Fell, who formerly worked as creative director at search portal Lycos. “We have people who have come from MTV and various other media groups, but we’re not afraid to experiment and to say that this Internet medium can provide a different viewing experience. It requires some new thinking and some new concepts.”

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