4 tech companies defend Austin’s title as live music capital of the world

by Colin Morris
October 15, 2015
If you’ve ever walked down East 6th Street after dark and heard four bands playing on every block, you know Austin has an appetite for live music few cities can match. With so many musicians performing in a place that makes so much tech, it should come as little surprise Austin is home to several businesses making seriously cool innovations for the music business.
 
Here are four of our favorites.
 

CEO Chris Bush was at a SXSW concert in a bar last year when he found himself cashless and unable to support the band he was watching with an electronic donation. Fortunately for bands, Bush is a software engineer, and he committed right then and there to solving the problem. The resulting company is called TipJar, which he founded with talent booker and show promoter Rene De La Mora. Their platform, TipCow, is currently available for Android and is pending approval in the Apple App Store.
 
Bush and De La Mora plan to expand the platform with an API that will allow bands to install “Tip” buttons on their profiles across sites like Facebook and ReverbNation.
 
 

This is a classic example of a startup improving on an idea that’s already in the market. Equipboard is an online database of equipment used by famous musicians that unlocks what every player wants to know: How their heroes achieve the unique tone on their recordings. The information is aggregated from interviews with artists and contributed from the site’s staff and crowdsourced from its users.
 
Of course, a database of famous musicians’ equipment already exists, and has been done very well for years over on guitargeek.com. But Equipboard takes the concept several steps further by cataloging equipment used by drummers, rappers, DJs and singers too, and tops it all off with useful articles and roundups of the best sites for online guitar lessons, the best equipment, and even gear giveaways.
 
 

One of the most valuable things an artist can offer fans in exchange for a little income and recognition is live recordings. But recording usually requires dedicated equipment and someone focused on operating it — and musicians have enough to worry about at gigs as it is.
 
The people behind Set.fm know this conundrum well, so they developed an iOS app and website dedicated to making it easier to record live shows. All an artist has to do is connect an audio signal from a venue’s soundboard to their laptop or iOS device, and set.fm uploads the signal in real time so fans can buy the live recording before they even leave the show.
 
 

Austin's most visible disruption music in tech may be Livid Instruments, whose lightweight and relatively inexpensive USB MIDI controllers look like toys, but have the guts for serious music making.

Electronic music used to require fragile and expensive keyboards and samplers. That equipment is still popular among those who can afford it, but since you can accomplish much more running software on a laptop, the physical triggers like sampling pads can be much smaller, cheaper, and more lightweight.

 
And that’s what Livid does best. Their products’ small form factor and low price point make them approachable for amateurs and attractive to pros. They even make a controller called the Guitar Wing (shown left) that attaches to your axe for manipulating its signal. And it all just looks so darn cool.

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