Broadjam

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Broadjam Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	1999
Headquarters	Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Key people	Roy Elkins, CEO
Employees	approx. 30
Website	www.broadjam.com

Broadjam is a US-based music community website, founded in September 1999. The service is aimed primarily at independent musicians. Users can interact with other artists, enter contests, and collaborate with peers through email, reviews, blogs and other social networking tools. Broadjam also works with related industries to provide various licensing opportunities, including placement in films, TV shows, advertising campaigns and video games, radio play and professional reviews.

Broadjam claims to be one of the world's largest web communities catering to independent musicicians^[1]. The site has an online database of over 300,000 searchable songs and is home to approximately 85,000 artists^[2] from all over the world.

The company was founded by Roy Elkins with assistance from Stephanie Essex Elkins, a former corporate sales and marketing executive, classical singer, and classical music radio deejay, with the intention to provide promotional services for unsigned musicians. The company is based in Madison, Wisconsin. Roy was formerly the Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Sonic Foundry.

Broadjam offers a variety of services for artists to gain exposure and feedback. Musicians make up the bulk of the site's membership. Broadjam also offers template-based hosting services to help members create their own website.

1 History
2 Features
3 Pro Services
4 References
5 External links

[edit] History

The main Broadjam page as of May 2008.

Broadjam was founded in 1999 and the site initially launched in 2000. Broadjam was originally headquartered in New Glarus, Wisconsin and relocated in 2003 to Madison, Wisconsin. The site was originally developed to provide services to independent musicians hoping to get their foot in the door of the music industry. Over time the service has evolved, and now provides a wide range of services for artists, and music industry professionals.

[edit] Features

Broadjam holds a variety of sponsored contests that aim to expose and reward exceptional musicianship and songwriting. Broadjam hosts 5 "Song of the Month" contests each month – one general category, one lyric category, and three other varying categories each month. Artist reviews and a scoring system based on "Good", "Better", or "Best" are used to determine a winner.

Members can submit their songs for radio play, professional reviews, or placement in films, TV shows, commercials, and video games.

Music supervisors for film and television can utilize Broadjam to provide music for feature films, TV shows and commercials.

Broadjam Radio Opportunities allow artists to distribute music to radio stations in the United States. Broadjam sends broadcast quality audio directly to each selected station. The Broadjam Pro Review service is used to deliver music to music industry professionals for review.

Members are able to give one another feedback through a reviewing mechanism by choosing to review songs in a specific genre or simply review random songs from the entire site. The highest rated songs are presented in the Broadjam "Top 10s". Broadjam has 230 different Top 10 charts sortable by genre, region, production style and reviewer demographics. All Top 10s are based on fan and artist reviews and are automatically updated daily.

Broadjam offers hosting services to premium members. The service allows artists to host their existing sites or create one using templates.

Artists have the option to mark songs for download in the MP3 file format. Members can browse the Broadjam library by genre, region, production, or based on "fan picks".

[edit] Pro Services

As part of its Professional Services group Broadjam provides an online mechanism for the tallying of votes for use in popular music award ceremonies. Current customers of the service include the Academy of Country Music, and the Madison Area Music Awards.

Broadjam also provides a music encoding service. The service is used by major record labels for encoding, cataloging, and metadata projects.