Indie music label Fuzz launches Twitter-like music sharing

Blip, engineered and launched on Fuzz — an indie label music discovery and management platform — by lead engineer Arin Sarkissian, lets users search for song tracks via music search engines Skreemr and Seeqpod and add them to short messages a la Twitter.

In fact, the design and interface very much resembles Twitter, although it’s not quite as clunky.

Sarkissian was originally tasked with redesigning Fuzz’s mixtape product, and in a project reminiscent of Google’s “20 percent time” came up with the concept for Blip after stripping away feature after feature to make the product extremely simple.

Sarkissian was tracking the buzz of competing mixtape products Mixwit and Muxtape and noted that Fuzz’s own mixtape product, released before its competitors, was too heavy handed and unusable. So he quickly abandoned the mixtape customizer and created something that merged a bit of Twitter with the lighter mixtape apps.

Fuzz CEO Jeff Yasuda envisions Blip as a way to share music with multiple friends simultaneously. He says the service has attracted thousands of users since it was made available to the public last week, although it hasn’t been officially announced by Fuzz yet. And he’s been noticing Blips in Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and German.

Yasuda and Sarkissian eagerly watched the reaction on Twitter, and despite “a few commenters on Techcrunch”, the pair say it seems the service has been well received and does a nice job of integrating with other social services.

Although Fuzz hasn’t ironed out how it will integrate Blip with its main platform, Yasuda says it will become yet another tool where fans can connect with their favorite bands.

Sarkissian does not consider Blip a competitor to Twitter but rather a complementary service, reaching demographics (specifically, the female high-school teenage one) that Twitter has seemingly had trouble attracting to date.

With the web, Yasuda says, artists have begun to communicate and promote music in ways they’ve never been able to do before, although the abundance of choice in the market can sometimes lead to inaction on a consumer’s part.

Fuzz’s main tools help bands understand and reach their demographic by providing real-time data on fan demographics for every user who streams and/or downloads an artist’s songs in a way that is unmatched by any other service, Yasuda says.

For do-it-yourself artists, who Yasuda sees as the innovators for the future of the music business, the service seems to be right on target, and Blip is just one more tool in their arsenal to better reach fans.

Sarkissian says the company is planning a recommendation engine, a la Pandora or Last.fm, that will connect users to indie artists similar to some of their major label counterparts by connecting the data of “users that listen to your music also listen to …”

It’ll be interesting to see if Blip can create some serious traffic –and attract mainstream attention — but possibly more importantly, help shape the future of the digital music era.

There’s certainly no shortage of Twitter-based and Twitter-like applications. Most are independent applications built by creative developers, but not Blip, a new music micro-blog launched last week.

David Adewumi, a contributing writer with VentureBeat, is the founder & CEO of http://heekya.com a social storytelling platform billed “The Wikipedia of Stories.”