Gigswiz, a Finnish startup founded by Juuso Vermasheinä with the ex-Floobs duo Kai Lemmetty  and Joonas Pekkanen, has just launched in Beta. The service aims to enable bands and artists to better tell where they have fans who’d be willing to come and see them play. The team hasn’t wasted any time as the beta launch came just months after they started to work on the idea in this February.

Spotify has just announced that it will expand its service offering to Netherlands. Netherlands is the seventh country Spotify is available. The other countries are Finland, France, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the UK. Dutch people can now sign up to the service using the link on their website.

iTunes just got  a kick in the head when Spotify revealed their plans this morning realeasing the Spotify version 0.4.3 which includes the largest feature upgrade since Spotify’s launch in late 2008. Why? Because music just become very social. It’s on now and Apple can ignore it only at its peril.

SongHi Entertainment is a few years old Finnish startup aiming at empowering the masses with tools to create music. They will try to achieve this through a variety of means, such as casual music oriented games. SongHi Entertainment’s mains service is called SongHi – a virtual community created around people interested in creating music. The company’s on a roll too, a few months ago they closed an investment round that had a group of angels, Optiomi Invest Oy and Veraventure finance the company.

The dust has barely settled since we reported about Floob’s ending up in the deadpool on Jan 21st. Now the founding team, Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen, is at it again and this times its music gigs they are after.
The new startup is called GigsWiz and is founded by Lemmetty, Pekkanen and  Juuso Vermasheinä who has a background in game retail business.

The other week I had the privilege to participate in Benjamin Zander’s (homepage and bio) excellent presentation. Benjamin, or Ben, among other things is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and has an extensive speaking career. He has, for example, appeared four times as a keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

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As the region’s reigning consumer web champion, there can never be enough stories about Spotify. And since today they’ve released a verison for Android and some new user & track figures, it’s a good time as any to wonder what the future might hold for them. Especially in light of Apple’s recent acquisition of US based La La Media.

Steam Republic, a Finnish startup in the mobile space, is focusing on digital fan oriented marketing. They are big in mobile and want to enable bands to control the relationship with their own fans and consequentially make money through that.

Reporting from the second day of MoneyTalks, being held here in Otaniemi, Espoo, Finland I bumbed into a new innovative music startup called Hitlantis. I talked to one of the co-founders Timo Poijärvi about the concept and what they are doing. Poijärvi has worked in the music industry and with some startups before, but has a strong experience from the ways the music industry works. This showed up in our talks and he openly questioned the need of Teosto (Finnish Composers’ Copyright Society) and record labels for musicians.

The Finnish Heavy Metal band Mokoma, has publicly thanked Spotify for their payout model. Their Facebook fan page states that for “every 100 album playbacks we get 30 euro cents from Spotify. Thanks Spotify.” The deals that Spotify has struck with different artists have been kept secret, so it is not known if this is the only payout model. However, if there were 1000 people listening to an album and to my understanding would listen it through, Mokoma would get 3 €.

"manSEDANse is a festival of electronic music, art and culture taking place in Tampere, Finland. In it's fourth year, manSEDANse keeps gaining momentum and magnitude to bring forth electronic culture of the highest order!"manSEDANse is clubs at Klubi and Telakka October 8-11, seemanSEDANse Lineup

Icelandic social music marketplace” gogoyoko has expanded their open Beta to cover the whole of Scandinavia. The service now works in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Faroe Islands and Greenland. gogoyoko’s tagline is bringing “Fair Play” back into the music business – through the service music fans can purchase music directly from the artists and labels.

Our annual festival - Tampere Art Factory (TAF) - was in May, but much of the student works seen there are still visible online. In this part of the story we present the games and music videos and the contribution of the Dutch Academy of Popculture.In the first part on July 29 films were presented, the second part August 4 presented fine art and animations.Music videosOf the music videos with

The Swan Lake: Moving Image & Music Award (SL:MIMA) invites young talented filmmakers to participate with a movie in one of the three categories: ’Computer-Animation’, ‘Digital Film’ and ‘Interactive Movie’. Modern piano music by international artists serves as the basis for the competition.The participants download a piece of music composed by one of the supportive pianists and visualise it with

We all love Spotify here at ArcticStartup and use it everyday to listen our favorite tracks. We also know that it was not cheap to begin with for the VCs to invest in Spotify even though it was (and still is) the early days, since the founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon had plenty of experience, capital of their own and know what they were doing.

We all love Spotify here at ArcticStartup and use it everyday to listen our favorite tracks. We also know that it was not cheap to begin with for the VCs to invest in Spotify even though it was (and still is) the early days, since the founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon had plenty of experience, capital of their own and know what they were doing.

We all love Spotify here at ArcticStartup and use it everyday to listen our favorite tracks. We also know that it was not cheap to begin with for the VCs to invest in Spotify even though it was (and still is) the early days, since the founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon had plenty of experience, capital of their own and know what they were doing.

Looking at the credits of the short films made at Tampere School of Art and Media this and last year you notice that the composer is often Michael Law. This was obvious at Tampere Art Factory festival in May; the music score was made by him in six of the films screened. Michael Law has composed the music e.g. for Hera by Sanni Rajapolvi and Sideline by Maria Kaurismäki, both presented earlier in