Brendan Mulligan, the entrepreneur behind ArtistData, announced today that AD had been acquired by SonicBids. You can read Brenden’s announcement here.
So what does this mean for artists, promoters and others involved in the DIY music business? The main advantage is that users will be able to book gigs like they did through SonicBids then promote them like they did on ArtistData. (Oh, and ArtistData will be giving their users access to premium/paid services for free until September 1st.)
Is this exciting news for the indie music scene? Not really. Personally, I was never a big fan of SonicBids as it is. The results, or lack thereof, didn’t justify the cost. Plus I’m a big believer in using your OWN website to share your EPK rather than paying to host it somewhere else. SonicBids just didn’t seem to do much for anyone that I knew that was using it.
ArtistData, on the other hand, was a great service….until they started taking away some of the best features and offering them as paid services instead. That’s when I quit using it. And there were quite a few bugs too. Status updates to other sites – Facebook, MySpace – didn’t always work.
So with each service having its own share of problems, maybe combining the two will correct some of those and make both SonicBids and ArtistData more useful. Useful isn’t the problem though – providing enough value and producing enough results to make it worth the expense is the issue as far as I’m concerned.
