MPme, Crowdsurfing, Wild Chords and Webdoc win the music-focused Midemlab competition

Midemlab is music industry conference Midem‘s startup competition, a part of the event that has grown significantly since its introduction in 2008, when a then little-known service called SoundCloud emerged victorious.

30 startups with a music focus, or with services of use to the music industry, were selected for the competition, across three categories. The companies pitched their businesses to a panel of judges during the first two days of this year’s Midem and today the winners were announced.

Music Discovery, Recommendation and Creation

This category was won by MPme from UK startup Apsmart, which was founded by  Rahul Powar, who was part of Shazam’s founding team. MPme is an online radio discovery app for the iPad. This free download lets you search for artists you like and then find radio stations that are playing them right now. The benefit is that hopefully you’ll discover new stations from around the world that you’ll enjoy.

You can browse the recent play history for  radio stations, and add artists to a watch list that will alert you in the future whenever they’re playing on any of the support stations.

Marketing & Social Engagement

Crowdsurfing from US startup LiveOne came out on top in this category. Crowdsurfing enhances live video streams from events with social features, letting you find out who else is watching the feed with you, and interact with them.

The service can handle millions of concurrent users and offers filters to help you find users relevant to you (e.g., people in the same town). To help companies offering live streams generate additional revenue, advertising units and merchandise sales can be inserted.

Direct-to-consumer Sales and Content Monetisation

Wildchords from Finland’s Ovelin was the winner in the third category. We first spotted this iPad app, which gamifies the process of learning to play the guitar, last summer, when Ovelin had a small stand at Media Evolution’s conference in Sweden.

The game launched two months ago and has already won a string of awards for its innovative approach to education.

Vivendi prize

MidemLab sponsor, Vivendi picked a startup that may be familiar to The Next Web readers as its prizewinner. Switzerland’s Webdoc, which lets users express themselves with rich, interactive multimedia ‘webdocs’ is being used by major labels as part of fan engagement strategies for both new acts like British pop band One Direction and classic names like Nirvana.

Webdoc launched three new widgets at Midem, which make the service even more useful to the music market.

This year’s Midemlab winners join the likes of Songkick, The Echo Nest, Kickstarter and the aforementioned SoundCloud who have gone on to big things after wins in previous years.

Keep up with all The Next Web’s Midem coverage here.