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Nimbit: Circumventing the iTunes Establishment

Last year Faucher and Antoniades' company, Nimbit, launched a highly successful and ambitious music widget, an online sales tool called "OMT" (short for Online Merch Table).

However, the two former Boston-based musicians would rather people forget the tech jargon and focus on how their easy-to-use products link bands, fans and e-commerce like never before.

Sell Direct

Online widgets are popping up all over band Web sites, music blogs and MySpace profiles. They can provide everything from facilitating MP3, CD and ticket sales to connecting fans. But no widget had OMT's versatility. A handy little box that appears on Web pages and even e-mails, OMT gives artists an easy way to sell their music, merchandise and concert tickets.

Nimbit's widgets mean fans of Bang Camaro -- as well as other local clients including Al Kooper, Guster and Rounder Records -- don't have to go to iTunes for songs, Ticketmaster for tickets or Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) for T-shirts; now they can get everything directly from the artist.

"We had just a couple of guiding principles in all of this," said Faucher. "Give the fan what they want, where they want it, and give the artist the data they've always missed."

Local Band Veterans

The genius of OMT goes beyond the bundling of services. With OMT, artists have access to the demographic information iTunes, Amazon and Ticketmaster keep secret. Bands can learn fans' gender, age and location, and strategize touring and marketing accordingly.

Faucher and Antoniades didn't just stumble into designing widgets for musicians. Berklee alums who logged a decade-plus in local bands, the two crossed paths a few years back after working such tech jobs as designing early online stores for Aerosmith and Phish.

While no one on the Web has put the pieces together like Nimbit, the company faces one massive obstacle: Ticketmaster. You can't use Nimbit to buy tickets for the likes of Britney Spears and Aerosmith. Yet.

"Ticketmaster's days are numbered," Antoniades said. "We work mostly with bands in smaller to midsized clubs -- but not for long."

The Brave New World of Ticket Buying

The Nimbit brain trust believes the ticket giant won't keep its stranglehold on the industry when e-tickets become the standard. But before the duo go Pearl Jam on Ticketmaster, they're keeping busy making their simple product simpler with NimbitSKIN.

Instead of seeing OMT as a distinctive box on a band's Web site, the newly launched NimbitSKIN is indistinguishable from the other pages of an artist's site: same color scheme, same layout, same look.

"NimbitSKIN is the un-widget," Antoniades said. "It's completely transparent, so people don't even know they're using it."

It's like Brave New World, but way less creepy and with more efficient music e-commerce.

"We're changing how everything in this business is done on the Web," Antoniades said.