I've spent some time toying with Blip, the new "Twitter-for-music" service from Fuzz.com, over the past day or so. (As I write, it's playing Yo La Tengo, courtesy of someone in Mexico named "karnevil".) Blip allows users to stream whatever songs other users are playing at that moment or in the recent past, as well as post their own songs. It's a new spin on an old idea -- on-demand streaming via your friends -- that fits into Fuzz's overall strategy: Centralize a lot of music services in one network, so that a listener doesn't have to visit a bunch of different sites or deploy a variety of different services to hear what they want.
I visited Fuzz's office in San Francisco Wednesday afternoon, and talked with founding CEO Jeff Yasuda (pictured). A former VC with Redwood Ventures and investment banker with Lehman Brothers, Yasuda is a self-described music nut who clearly feels most at home surrounded by guitars and stacks of CDs, and Fuzz has become his labor of love. He said the company -- formally Fuzz Artists Inc. -- has subsisted thus far on three angel rounds of funding since 2005, with unidentified Google executives providing a portion of the money. Yasuda wouldn't specify the dollar amount, but when I asked him if it was in the single-digit millions, he said it was "more than a couple."
Yasuda walked me through the company's Web site, pointing out editorial content, social networking features, Web services for bands to connect with fans and promote music, local show calendars, a Muxtape-like song-sharing tool complete with movable graphic art elements, and Blip. (I wrote about a separate Fuzz site targeting older consumers, Sonic Boomers, here.) My first impression is that Blip could quickly become the most popular thing Fuzz has done, partly due to a familiar, easy interface whose visual similarity to Twitter's is unmistakable. It's built on the backs of three other music search engines including Seeqpod, and only streams what its crawlers can turn up elsewhere on the Web or within Fuzz's own archives (no uploads are required, or permitted). Even without a critical mass of users, Blip entertained; I can imagine it becoming addictive.
Yasuda admits that Fuzz is pre-revenue, and has yet to test its money-generating ideas (advertising, brand sponsorship, b-to-b plays for media companies). Surely the company will find itself racing against time as the other popular music services it echoes build their brand names, and it will have to show consumers the benefits of centralizing these services under one umbrella. At the moment, its niche audience remains independent music fans; whether it will aim for a general audience remains to be seen.
Fuzz won't seek additional money from venture investors, according to Yasuda. Instead, it will seek its next outside funding from media companies, and has been offered at least one term sheet. Yasuda said he sees record labels, retailers, print and television media, and other Web companies as potential investors. And although Fuzz at one point aspired to be a record label, signing up artists including Oakland, Calif.'s The Lovemakers, Yasuda says it won't go any farther down that road. -- Paul Bonanos
See May 6 post on Sonic Boomers from Tech Confidential
For more, see TechCrunch
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