A new Nashville-based music video website and cell phone app, "HitsMeUp," set to launch soon aims at giving consumers access to musical content while giving music creators the compensation they deserve.
"We want to pay people like their content is worth something," Chris King, co-founder of HitsMeUp, said.
King is one of the five Nashville-based co-founders of the new website focusing on music videos, and they saw the need, knowing that one of the main reasons people go online is to watch music videos, but also knowing that artists are not paid fairly for that content.
"A $12.99 album has been reduced to a $1.29 download has now been reduced to fractions of a penny for streams," King said of the current music climate when it comes to artist pay.
HitsMeUp plans to pay the artists and labels the largest cut of profits instead of keeping it for themselves, and the website will not only feature music videos, but artists will also be able to post behind-the-scenes extras, live stream concerts, and interact with their fans.
It will essentially combine the best things of current social media pages and video websites.
"We just want to focus on the music," King explained. "We don't want to get involved with the politics and all of the other stuff, so this is really a place to go connect with artists and enjoy their music."
Seventeen days prior to HitsMeUp's launch, Big Machine Label Group and Warner Music Nashville partnered with the website to allow their artists feature content on the website.
Those rosters included artists such as Taylor Swift, Blake Shelton, Florida Georgia Line, and many others.
Revenue will be made by selling ads to companies that will run every seven minutes or so, just like during a TV show.
HitsMeUp has also partnered with Comcast to use their sales team. It will dedicate thousands of people's time to selling ads for HitsMeUp to make more money for everyone involved.
It's estimated that artists and the labels supporting them will make at least three times as much money through HitsMeUp compared to similar websites and applications.
Upon the launch of the website, there will be the possibility that artists could release their music videos exclusively to HitsMeUp.
"Whatever the artist wants to share with their fans, they can do it here, and they have complete control of putting it up and taking it down at any time," King said.
While HitsMeUp is expected to launch on March 3, Big Machine Label Group is expected to launch their own website BigMachineTV.com sometime in mid-February.
BigMachineTV.com will use the same platform as HitsMeUp and go through the same processes both in creation and advertising, but will feature only Big Machine Label Group artists.
The artists on BigMachineTV.com will have the same content on HitsMeUp as well.
