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Ross Levinsohn And Ted Meisel Put $3.5 Million Into FatTailOctober 15th, 2008 at 7:31 amSource:TechCrunch Amie Street, the music store that sells songs on a sliding price scale based on how popular they are, has launched a totally revamped website and new features including a new music player and an enhanced recommendation system. We’ve been big fans since first hearing about them in 2006. Despite Amie Street’s growing popularity, especially in the indie music scene, the site has long had a somewhat barebones or even amateurish look that was functional but not very visually appealing. The new site is much more professional, with a rotating ‘featured’ panel prominently displaying new releases and promotions, and more intuitive overall design. New features for the release include a new music library/player that looks very similar to iTunes. Users can access all music that they’ve purchased through Amie Street and stream it from this player free of charge, from any computer. Users can also browse through the music libraries of their peers, though they’ll only be able to listen to brief previews of songs they don’t own (the company hopes to eventually include full song previews, but it sounds like this is still a ways off). Federated Media (our advertising partner) has been experimenting with “conversational marketing” almost since their launch in 2005. Today they are launching a new marketing toolbox for advertisers which gives them tools to track all the ways users interact with these ads. The goal, says Federated Media, isn’t just to track ad impressions and clicks, but also to look at a new set of metrics like posts, trackbacks, votes, RSS subscriptions, comments, etc, where users somehow interact with the advertisement and talk about it. Hopefully, a conversation occurs between users, the ad publisher and the advertiser, which gives the advertiser’s brand more face time. An old example of this is Hakia’s ad that asks bloggers what better search means. Other examples are here. The definition of conversational marketing is a little squishy. But the general idea, which Federated Media founder John Battelle writes about in the primer below, is that you as an advertiser figure out which content sites best associate with your brand, and then you grab the leader in that space and pay them to start conversations on your behalf: The Karaoke Channel, a video on demand karaoke service that is available through cable in 30 million households, is launching its own online karaoke hub. The site offers a catalog of over 5000 popular karaoke songs, including songs available in a number of foreign languages. To gain access to the site’s full catalog, users will have to become paid members. Membership fees run around $10 a month or $100 a year, with a $15 24-hour membership available (the site advertises that these are intended for “karaoke parties”). There’s also a free plan, but this only grants access to 100 of the site’s songs. For each song that they have access to, users can play back and record their songs through the site’s Flash-based media player. The site also includes community features that allow users to make friends and rate and view the most popular (and hopefully talented) singers. There’s always money in helping Websites make more money. FatTail tries to do that with its ad optimization software that tells Web publishers which ads and ad networks, in what combination, will give them the most ad dollars. The Southern California company, started in 2001 by math geeks who previously built a financial derivatives exchange, has bootstrapped itself until now. With more than 500 customers including WebMD, Bloomberg, TheKnot, and Orbitz, FatTail is raising its first series A round. It raised $3.5 million from Velocity Interactive Group, Ted Meisel (the former CEO of Overture and president of Yahoo Search Marketing), and others. Velocity’s Ross Levinsohn will join the board. I asked Levinsohn why he invested. His answer:
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