Last month I had lunch with Epinions co-founder Mike Speiser, who showed me a preview of a product his team at his new company created. The company is called Bix (named after the early jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke).
The idea behind Bix is neat — a combination of American Idol and YouTube's lip syncing madness. Basically, anyone can set up a contest — karaoke, lip-syncing, beauty, whatever (I suggested magic routines and Mike seemed to like that idea). People can enter that contest (sometimes paying a required entry fee, which will be split between the contest winner, the contest creator, and Bix) and use their webcam to record their performance. Bix has licensed the use of lyrics and music from the record companies, which I'm sure is costing quite a bit of money.
One thing I'm interested in is seeing what happens when bands perform original music on Bix. If Bix (or something like it) really takes off, then bands who win "best original song" contests will have a built-in audience to buy their music. And who needs the record industry to press CDs or make deals with iTunes then? Bix and the artists could simply sell the music as MP3s right from the site. Sure, parts of the music industry probably won't ever go away, especially publishing. But the parts that involves making bands and making CDs are going to have to learn from these new experiments if they want to be around in the next five years.
Om Malik has more to say on the business of Bix. Link
