Every now and then a startup comes along with an idea so cool and so simple you wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself. In fact, the team behind Music Meets Video was surprised no one had beat them to their idea when they launched it last year.
That idea is essentially putting American Idol on YouTube.
MMV recruits the budding music stars of YouTube and pits them against one another in cover contests with cash prizes up to $1,000 funded by sponsors. The artists crave the cash and exposure, the sponsors need the impressions and the rest of us get to interact with our entertainment.
But there was a pretty big hurdle to clear early on, and it may be what kept other players out of the game — licensing. It wasn’t obvious to the founders at first, but record labels have deals with YouTube to monetize all that music streaming on the site. That makes it a sticky legal area for newcomers to try to turn a profit.
But MMV found a way. They began partnering with major labels early on, guaranteeing them and their musicians a piece of the pie. The first deal with a former Sony exec paved the way for agreements with Universal, Warner and Kobalt.
Now, MMV can run its singing contests using the licensing equivalent of the world’s biggest karaoke machine, and the hits just keep on coming. The company just closed its biggest contest yet, with 280,000 votes and half a million YouTube views. Around the same time, it raised $120,000 in seed capital to develop a mobile app and was accepted by the Capital Factory accelerator.
COO and co-founder Luis Berga, who previously worked at Techstars and StartupRunner, said the recent milestones MMV has cleared are allowing his company to shift its focus to what the founders really cares about — musicians.
“Up to now, we’ve only been focused on hosting contests as a way to attract a big audience to MMV,” he said. “Now we’re working on building a badass community of up-and-coming musicians to showcase their original music, connect with fans, and finance their careers by participating in our contests.”
Berga’s co-founder and CEO is digital designer and music blogger Alex Mitchell, who used to watch cover videos by independent artists on YouTube to get a break from a tedious video surveillance job.
Berga said the question they get most often is when their app will be ready.
“That is coming very soon,” he said. “We just closed the funding we needed to get the app built, so stay tuned.”
With half a million views on a single contest and a growing audience, it seems like that’s exactly what people will do.
