Austin City Limits is upon us, Austinites! While many of us revel in the excitement of performances by legends like Pearl Jam and Dave Matthews Band, there’s a lot happening behind the scenes.

Austin Startup caught up with Scott Owens this week to talk about DoStuff Media. You may not be familiar with the company, but it most certainly fits the bill of the “story behind the story.” In fact, DoStuff Media is a testament to the ongoing convergence of Austin’s vibrant technology and music scenes. Owens started Do512, an interactive site for Austin events, in 2006, and has recently been hard at work as the founder of DoStuff Media.

DoStuff Media has built a platform hyper-focused on helping two main groups of customers with their web sites: local media companies and music festivals. In fact, due to a strong relationship with C3 Presents, the company now powers portions of the sites for ACL and Lollapalooza. The technology that those festival sites employ is a product that evolved from the development that was done for Do512, which still lists and manages the data for an impressive 1,500 Austin events each week.

When you are looking at the ACL schedule, you are using the DoStuff Media Festival Platform. DoStuff aims to help festivals better monetize their web properties by providing a technology that aggregates, organizes and displays critical information about the festival, all while incorporating social networking, sharing and interactive features. In the case of ACL, DoStuff Media is powering the artist lineup page, the artist discovery content and the main schedule.

In regards to the festival product the company is bringing deeper interactive capabilities to sites by way of features such as:

· Artist Discovery pages where you can integrate audio, video, images and text so that users can learn more about the artist without having to leave the site.

· Facebook Connect integration, which makes it possible to extend each visitors’ interest in the festival to all of their friends on Facebook with the intent of increasing their likelihood to sign up because they don’t have to create a brand new account on the site.

· Sharing tools that make it simple for users to share their custom-built schedules with friends.

· A mobile API which allows you to extend the features on your site to a mobile app.

On the back-end, administrators have access to features such as Google Analytics integration, deep customizability of the look and feel, and the convenience of having DoStuff Media host the actual pages that it powers on your site. Owens points out that the back-end administrator tools are designed for maximum usability so that customers can easily make changes and updates. This is, of course, an important feature for the festival platform as there will inevitably be changes that need to be made, such as when a few artists back out of a scheduled performance and new bands fill their spots.

The separate local media platform leverages the same code base as the festival product, but is able to present the content in a way that is geared more towards the purposes of, for instance, a local newspaper. In fact, DoStuff Media recently closed a deal with the San Antonio Current and will soon be bringing interactive features to their event pages. The key values for customers such as the San Antonio Current include better tools for monetization such as an advertising tool that makes it easy to cater to the needs of venues, events, bars and bands. The company is also increasing the interactive and social components of the event pages on these sites so that visitors find more value in each visit, and hopefully find more reason to come back repeatedly. While not only aiming to increase their customers’ ability to monetize their pages, they’re also improving their ability to attract more traffic to the site.

Owens also says that the ease of use and customization have been major selling points. DoStuff Media’s typical customer is a festival organizer or a local media company such as a newspaper. In the case of the festival organizers, he notes that it’s important to remember that the organizer is not typically tech-savvy and therefore is looking for a simple tool to plug into the existing site. In the case of a newspaper, the broader issue of shrinking revenues and gloomy paid subscription forecasts make a turn-key solution more feasible and financially attractive than custom development of a similar platform in-house.

Owens founded the original company, Do512.com, with a college friend in 2006 with the intent to provide a guide for drink specials at local bars. The idea expanded quickly from drink specials to encompass local events and, eventually, DoStuff Media was born. The company has been bootstrapped since the very beginning, which is no small feat given the depth of the platform. Pricing for the DoStuff Media platform starts with a one-time start-up fee of $5,000, and from there, the license for the product claims a percentage of the ongoing revenue with a preset monthly minimum.

There’s no doubt that DoStuff Media is serving a legitimate need in its core markets, but it’s also providing meaningful enhancements to the Austin music and entertainment culture with its technology. While you’re making and sharing your custom schedules for ACL this weekend, don’t forget that the experience is being well supported by technology that emerged from Austin’s own startup community.