Atlanta’s bustling tech scene might be a recent development, but the southern city has reigned king in the hip-hop world for decades. Now, a new startup is combining the two.
MyMy Hip Hop, an Atlanta and Minneapolis-based crowdsourcing app for uploading and reviewing rap and hip-hop music, has officially launched in Google Play and the iPhone App store to shine a light on independent artists.
Shawn Pouliotte, the startup’s CMO, said the idea sprang from MyMy Hip Hop’s CEO and his daughter, who works in the recording industry, who were both frustrated with how difficult it is for independent artists to get exposure.
“He had a vision of creating an environment for independent artists that was different and allowed people to find a fun way to discover good talent, so with much research and a lot of work we decided to launch rather than a generic music service, which there are many of, we decided to do something a little different.”
Instead of launching a clone of SoundCloud or other crowdsourcing music platforms, the team decided to focus solely on hip-hop/rap music. In order to provide relevant, valuable content to listeners, MyMy Hip Hop uses a crowdsourcing methodology for blind judging, where listeners will vote on whether a track is “whack” or “lit,” Pouliotte said.
“We put all the judges on equal playing field,” he said. “Anyone can upload their music, but we presented it in a blind fashion and a random fashion to listeners who choose to curate the catalogue and that’s been proven to be very effective in kind of stack ranking the content. So not only now when you come to MyMy Hip Hop do you get relevant hip-hop, you also get relative hip-hop that the community of fans has decided in what you’re hearing.”
Prior to launching, MyMy Hip Hop was in a catch-22 situation, Pouliotte said.
“You’re launching a music service, if you don’t have music, you won’t have listeners,” he said. “If you don’t have listeners, you won’t get artists.”
To find underground talent, Pouliotte reached out to independent artists on Craigslist who were perusing for gigs. The emerging artists had a major influence on vetting the early ideas of the app, he said.
“Since we launched we moved over to primarily a traditional marketing campaign, some traditional radio and word of mouth seems to be working and we get a regular flow of new content every day,” he said.
Suliman Chillis, a spokesman for MyMy Hip Hop, said the city is a prime location to launch a platform like theirs to not only generate a community but garner attention to their talent, especially now that hip-hop is more popular than ever.
“Atlanta is definitely an industry for hip-hop and it also has a very strong underground cultural scene,” he said.
MyMy Hip Hop now has more than 1,000 artists on the app, according to Pouliotte. Musicians are able to upload pictures, social media accounts and their tracks onto their profiles, while judges are also rated on their likelihood of predicting whether a song will be popular.
“It really is a platform for allowing artists to get great exposure and get real statistics in real time,” he said.
