All that musical talent locked up behind bedroom doors. The shower crooners. The rush hour rock stars. They're out there and you can lose hours (trust me) treading in the ocean of their cover-song recordings, homemade music videos and creative play-throughs.
Alex Mitchell used to do just that. He worked at a company where he watched countless hours of video surveillance to find the key moments that needed to be enhanced so attorneys, jurors and judges could see what went down. Occasionally, you need a break from this sort of job.
"I just couldn't look at 30 seconds of video surveillance footage any more....What came out of that was a lot of hours spent on YouTube looking at cover videos."
"I just couldn't look at 30 seconds of video surveillance footage any more, over and over again," he said. "What came out of that was a lot of hours spent on YouTube looking at cover videos."
The thing about watching cover videos on YouTube is that there are zillions if you're looking at a popular song by Taylor Swift or the like. So when Mitchell moved from Los Angeles to Austin, he came with the idea of creating a way to corral those songs and give the viewers a gamified way to rate the videos and independent musicians an avenue to win cash prizes.
And that's what Music Meets Video is all about. It creates cover song contests for specific tunes. Users submit videos. And viewers cast votes, with the MMV team weighing in as judges to balance talent with popularity. The winners typically get a $1,500 cash prize.
But making that idea work isn't as simple as 3 chords and the truth.
Intro to Music Meets Video from Music Meets Video on Vimeo.
Musicians lose untold sums of potential income when their songs are collecting cash for someone else. That's where licensing comes in, and it's a daunting piece of legal turf for a startup to manage.
Mitchell and co-founder Luis Berga wanted to do covers, karaoke and filmmaking by crowdsourcing the videos.
"At the time, "Gangnam Style" had just come out and we were like 'fuck, if we do a "Gangnam Style" contest that's going to be huge!,'" Mitchell recalled. But a chat with their attorney shut that down.
"We had been naive in that we just thought we could do whatever we wanted to do with a cover contest," he said. "Because it's all over YouTube, we thought there can't be that much risk."
But they soon learned that YouTube has agreements with record labels and monetizes those cover songs, splitting royalties with the artists when cover songs draw huge traffic. That's where Larry Mills comes in. He's a former VP at Sony ATV. His new company, New York-based We Are the Hits, is all about finding new platforms to monetize for publishers.
"We were like the perfect fit for him," Mitchell said. They struck up deal with We Are the Hits that gave Music Meets Video access to about 6 million songs.
Boom! With that, Music Meets Video had access to do cover song contests for jams by big names like Taylor Swift and The Beatles. The platform has attracted tens of thousands of people. It gives musicians a way to spread their name and attract new fans. It gives viewers an endless string of homemade videos to click through and vote on. And it provides enough traffic for MMV to sell ads, sponsorships and simple, lightning quick surveys for market research companies.
Each contest draws 45 to 70 video submissions and 500 to 4,000 voters, which translates to even more individual votes.
"Every video you watch is a new page view, so those add up pretty quickly," he said.
Much of their success hinges on how much people -- mostly Millennials -- share videos on their social networks, drawing yet more viewers.
"The idea is to actually get those big artists on board," he said. "And if we get Taylor Swift to tweet us, it's game over. We'll be bought up pretty quickly."
