January can be a cold, dark, cruel month around Boston. But Xconomy plans to liven it up—at least for one very loud evening—with our second annual Battle of the Tech Bands, planned for January 22 at the Middle East Restaurant and Nightclub here in Cambridge, MA. If you’re a musician and at least one member of your band works for a local tech company, send in your MP3s before the December 12 deadline to compete for a slot in the Battle. If you’re a music lover (or you just like to watch geeks bang on drums), mark your calendar and buy a ticket in advance.
If last year’s Battle was any indication, the event will be a blast. We’ll have sets from five finalist bands selected by our celebrity judges (Boston Celtics Managing Partner and CEO Wyc Grousbeck, investor-musician Giles McNamee, and Harmonix Music Systems founder and CEO Alex Rigopulos), as well as a special musical guest band, Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives, which features Xconomy’s own Greg Huang on bass guitar.
Finalists will be competing for seriously cool prizes, including band promotional services from Framingham, MA-based Nimbit and seven hours of studio time (plus engineering and production help) from Boston-based Bristol Recording Studios. There will be two Grand Prize winners: The crowd will choose the Audience Favorite using a text-messaging-based voting system provided by Cambridge’s Aerva. And our elite panel of judges will award a second grand prize for Most Innovative band (hint: there was a River Dance at last year’s battle).
But everyone wins, really. This year, Xconomy will donate half of the ticket proceeds from the Battle to two worthy local non-profit groups: The Science Club for Girls, which offers free after-school science literacy programs to K-12 girls, and the Community Music Center of Boston, a music school that serves more than 5,000 students per week in Boston’s South End.
If you’re a band member and you’d like to enter, go here for more details on how to submit your band for consideration.
If you’re only interested in attending, tickets are on sale now for $20 (they’ll be $25 at the door, so plan ahead) and will get you not only several hours of top-notch entertainment, snacks, and a free drink or two, but a chance to win fabulous door prizes.
Stay tuned to Xconomy for a list of the finalist bands later this month, plus added information about the door prizes and the lineup of events for the evening.
