Audiotube

Audiotube is a music community website where users can view, share and watch music videos. Founded in December 2006 by Karsten Becker and Scott deMercado, it has offices in both London and southern Spain. Audiotube is backed by music and media entrepreneur Chris Blackwell who launched both U2 and Bob Marley under his label Island Records; and the entertainer and industrialist Michael Flatley.

Audiotube focuses on working with indie labels and artists to assist them in marketing and promoting their music online. Visitors can use the site to build playlists tailored to their individual taste, stream music videos from their favourites artists, find new music and interact with like-minded people via its community.

Timeline

November 2007 - Sputnik7.com - Audiotube acquired the Sputnik7 network, host to an on demand audio/video internet entertainment portal which includes sputnik7.com and epitonic.com, in late 2007. Sputnik7.com was founded in 1998 by Chris Blackwell (Island Records) and Les Garland (founder of MTV: Music Television and VH1), Sputnik has been awarded the ‘Invision Award of Excellence in Entertainment’, a ‘Gold Invision for Best Entertainment Streaming Media Site’, the ‘ASCAP Deems Taylor Award’ and was a ‘Webby Award' winner.

November 2007 - Epitonic.com - Epitonic is the sister site of Sputnik7. Launched in 1999, epitonic.com is a source for independent music across several genres from both signed and unsigned artists. Featuring MP3 song downloads, radio streams and many full album streams, at its peak it amassed content from more than 400 independent labels and represented a diverse array of artists helping them to promote and sell their releases.

December 2007 - Cinefex.com - Audiotube acquired the rights to video encoding and desktop playback products and technologies from CineFX, a UK-based open source software development company. CineFX’s products and services provided video transcoding on websites as well as media playback and editing on the desktop.

February 2009 - Tixdaq.com - Audiotube Ltd recently entered into an agreement with Tixdaq.com, a ticket price comparison site, to offer music fans price conscious UK concert tickets. Under the terms of the agreement Audiotube members are able to search and buy tickets straight from the artist pages on Audiotube.com. Each Audiotube artist page features a 'buy ticket' button which, once clicked upon, takes the visitor to the relevant Tixdaq.com page. Visitors are then able to choose from a selection of price-conscious tickets and purchase direct from the site.

Partnerships

Audiotube has partnerships with many high-profile record labels and content providers. To date, Audiotube has agreements with the following labels:

17 North Parade

Against The Grain

Amazon Records

Angel Air

Back Yard Recordings

Blue Canoe Records

Blue Mountain Music

Brownpunk

Candlelight Records

Charly Films

Cooking Vinyl

CR2 Records

Defected Records

Fierce Panda Records

Global Underground

Greensleeves

Gronland Records

Hard2Beat

Heads Up International

Hed Kandi

Just Music

Ministry of Sound

Mush Records

Palm Pictures

Admiral Records

Rotana Records

Slip-n-Slide Records

Split Records

Facts

The Audiotube network currently has over 100,000 registered members. The Sputnik7/Epitonic network currently has over one million registered users.

References