Music Power to the People

Setting trends in music has long since stopped being about A&R people alone, but TastemakerX makes it official.

Image: Masson / Shutterstock

Stranded on a small desert island with just one band to listen to forever, Marc Ruxin, cofounder of TasteMakerX, said he’d go with the Velvet Underground. And his favorite all-time album? Bryter Layter by Nick Drake.

This cat is cool—and today his still-stealth startup announced it has raised a cool $1.8 million to help him gamify the discovery of new bands.

"What music fan doesn't want to be the first to discover the next big band and get credit for it?" said Ruxin. "Like fantasy sports for music lovers, players will be able to browse portfolios of like-minded music aficionados to discover new music and see real-time news about the artists they love."

TastemakerX is a social gaming platform that allows users to build “taste graphs” of their personal tastes and share them with friends. Fans discover artists and trends and compete against other tastemakers for the right to be the best A&R rep never paid.

Ruxin, who formerly worked as the A&R manager at EMI Records, has returned after taking a break to study in greater detail the business world he suspected was passing him by.

He earned an MBA from Columbia University and went on to lead WPP Group’s West Coast corporate ventures. But, all the while, just beneath the slowly steadying business executive was a rock-and-roll tastemaker just waiting to return.

So after 25 years of secretly plotting and planning to start a revolution in the way the music industry is marketed, he has at long last gathered the troops and founded TastemakerX, along with cofounder Sandro Pugliese.

The company is set to release its debut TastemakerX Music mobile app as a private beta at the SXSW Festival in early March of this year.

Investors in this $1.8 million round of financing include Guggenheim Partners, Baseline Ventures, True Ventures, AOL Ventures, and Tekton Ventures. Angel investors including Andrew Anker, Mich Mathews, Michael Kassan, and Mike McGinley have also put money into the company.