We’ve been wondering what Gigulate can amount to ever since it launched in private beta last year. Now co-founder Ben Perreau says the music startup is aiming for three revenue streams – advertising, gig ticket sales and a yet-to-be-unveiled API.
Recently called a “TechMeme for music news”, Gigulate crawls music news sites, then runs a number of algorithms to aggregate artist-specific stories, display the day’s most popular music news and plot artist news across charts. It’s the kind of project that could only have been started by someone with passions for both music, data and editorial. Those someones are former NME.com editor Perreau, who has been Sky.com online content director since August 2007, plus Absolute Radio developers Duncan Amey and John Martin.
Self-funded Gigulate is running banner and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) ads but, just 10 days in to its public beta, isn’t yet pulling much money from them, and it takes a share of ticket sales sent to vendors including Seatwave, Viagogo, See Tickets and Ticketmaster, but that won’t really kick in until traffic grows. Next week, Perreau revealed to me, Gigulate will have a working version of an API that will let other developers build applications using his site’s data – the aim is to charge higher-end users for deeper access, and Perreau said some discussions are underway.
Still, it’s early days – so far, the founding trio has been working on Gigulate during evenings and weekends, squeezing in some time to see gigs themselves. Right now, Gigulate is modest, but Perreau aims to “broaden it out” – also next week, for example, it will grow by 70 percent the number of sources it crawls. It’s only surprising that larger music plays like Last.fm haven’t themselves cornered the market for aggregated music news. Perreau: “We have tools at our disposal that Last.fm doesn’t necessarily and we can be more nimble, especially in a recession.”