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MyMy Hip Hop Helps Discover New Artists
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.
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.
GigaMonster raises $45M, merges
GigaMonster, an Atlanta-based fiber optic internet provider to multi-family residential communities, has raised $45 million in a recent funding round from Post Road Group.
In addition to the money raised, the company also announced a merger with Portland, Ore.-based competitor Fibersphere.
Bill Dodd, chairman and CEO of GigaMonster, said the investment from Post Road Group was the perfect strategic move for the company’s next investment partner.
“We selected Post Road as a partner because of their in-depth knowledge of the multi-family (market,)” he said.
The merger developed following GigaMonster’s recent entry into the West Coast market just over a year ago, Dodd said, where Fibersphere reigned for several years.
“They’re well established. We really wanted a more-established presence on the West Coast, so that merger really made that possible (to) jumpstart our West Coast initiative,” he said.
Following the funding raised, Dodd said, the Atlanta-based company would continue to grow its presence in Atlanta, as a complimentary service to telecom giant AT&T. Within the next two years, GigaMonster hopes to add 50 employees to the 100 members currently working in their Atlanta offices.
“We’re certainly growing our employee base in the Atlanta area,” he said.
Launched in 2015, GigaMonster primarily focuses on providing “freeway” connections to multifamily communities such as apartment complexes, town homes and other residential areas, according to Dodd. The company currently operates in more than 25 markets nationwide.
