Featured Startup Pitch: Artist Radar enables users to keep up with new releases and live events for their favorite entertainers and authors

By Jörg Fehlinger, Artist Radar co-founder and CEO

ELEVATOR PITCH

Artist Radar is a personalized entertainment and news platform that transforms the way people stay up-to-date with their favorite artists.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

Artist Radar is a platform which allows users to follow different types of artists, including singers, bands, authors, and actors, by using a personalized dashboard with a news feed that tracks music, book, and movie releases, as well as event announcements.

We realized that the globalization of our musical tastes, the actors we follow, and the authors we love to read has expanded beyond our normal tracking means, and it has become increasingly harder to keep tabs on our growing list of favorite artists every time they release something new. By complimenting one of the biggest media libraries in the world with a beautifully-integrated news feed and a simple presentation, Artist Radar users can easily discover exactly what they want without the information overload.

With hundreds-of-thousands of new releases and concert dates each year, Artist Radar provides users with an effective platform to stay-up-to-date with their favorite artists and receive the information that matters most to them.

FOUNDERS’ STORY

Artist Radar was founded by Rolf Frank, Moritz Borgmann and me. We all have different but complementary backgrounds. I have a strong business background as a Harvard Business School graduate, with several years of consulting and management experience at several Fortune 500 companies. Rolf is very sales orientated and used to be a Groupon executive before joining Artist Radar. Moritz is the technical mastermind who builds the magic into our applications. He used to work for Bergfürst, a virtual stock exchange where startups can conduct an IPO to raise money.

One evening while philosophizing about the hassle it takes to stay-up-to-date on new music, books, and movies, we decided to resolve this situation for ourselves. After launching Artist Radar, we realized that many people around the world have been waiting for such a service.

MARKETING/PROMOTION STRATEGY

Besides initiating classic marketing activities such as advertising and press releases, we will be rolling our ‘follow on artist radar’ links across web sites. This allows singers, bands, authors, and actors to give their fans a one-click opportunity to follow them on Artist Radar, never missing any important updates.

MARKET OPPORTUNITY

Artist Radar addresses a $41.2 billion digital entertainment market which consists of music, ebooks, movies and ticket sales. Our target group shows comparable characteristics to users of the following:

– iTunes with 600 million registered users that generate a yearly revenue of $4 billion.

– Amazon (media) with 615 million visitors annually that generate $27 billion (37 percent of total Amazon revenue) in media purchasing.

– Shazam with 350 million users that generate $300 million yearly.

DIFFERENTIATORS VS. THE COMPETITION

There are some players on the market that inform about new artist offerings, but they all just cover a particular segment. For instance, Songkick informs users about concerts but does not address anything else, and Shazam only informs its users about artists that they have ‘Shazamed’ before. For many users, this is not enough, as they need to handle multiple services to stay on top of things. Artist Radar looks to solve this. Once a user follows an artist, users are informed about all new releases, whether it is an album, ebook, audiobook, video, TV series, or movie, and all concert announcements. Artist Radar is the only service that covers everything, which makes us globally unique.

Also, part of the fun of discovering new media from our favorite artists is sharing it with our friends and contacts via our social networks. Artist Radar gives users access to more than 28 million media items, and when they find something amazing that their friends must hear they can easily share the artists, new release, or concert announcement with friends via the app’s integrated posts on Facebook or by email.

BUSINESS MODEL

Artist Radar is a free service for users. We get commission if people purchase products through any of our affiliate partners.

CURRENT NEEDS

Well, we are always looking for new users, but our most current need is investors. We are setting up a Seed funding round and are actively seeking investors for this.

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HEADQUARTERS: Berlin