Chelmsford’s OurStage.com, the site that bills itself as the only 100% democratic competition for emerging music and film, announced today that has come out of beta (do web 2.0 companies ever come out of beta?) and launched a whole new section that will pair it’s top acts with professional artists.
The Ourstage premise is simple. Up-and-coming bands and filmmakers upload their content to the site for users to vote for their favorites. At the end of each month, the top 20 and the top 10 in each channel go head-to-head in special judging channels to determine the winner of that channel. Then a site-wide judging contest is held to determine our Grand Prize winner. The top act from music and file both win a $5K prize.
Traffic has grown steadily since the site launched in beta earlier this year. The site claims that visitors have judged over 1,000,000 “battles” – sorting over 12,000 submissions from best to worst across 24 channels of entertainment. Anyone that has been in a garage band will know that the monetary incentive combined with musician vanity is enough to build traffic from the bands alone. However, the founders of Ourstage hope that their patent-pending judging system that it is designed to almost eliminate cheating will help set the site them aside in a very crowded field.
In addition to coming out of beta the site also announced it’s all new section Artist Access. The new section will take the top-ten acts from both the music sections of the site and provide them with access to top artists including one-on-one meetings and live performance opportunities. These artist, including John Legend, will personally choose the final winner from the top 10 ranked acts in their channel of expertise. The small local start-up has pulled in some decent talent from music side of the house.
From the world of Music:
* John Legend, music entrepreneur and five-time Grammy-winning R&B musician
* Curt Smith of Tears for Fears (love the 80s)
* G. Love (Garrett Dutton) of G. Love and Special Sauce!
From Video & Film:
* David J. Burke, emmy-nominated Director, Writer, & Producer (Animal, Kidnapped andLaw & Order: SVU)
* John Cameron Mitchell, writer, director and star of Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
* Chris Gore, writer, filmmaker (recently named one of the 25 Most Influential People in Independent)
* Matt Dentler, producer of the South by Southwest Film Conference & Festival
* Sarah Diamond, director of programming for the Slamdance Film Festival
* Adam Roffman, IFFBoston’s Film Director.
The Artist Access section will also include advice and tips for all aspiring artists who visit OurStage.com. The site will capture the advice in a series of interviews, which will appear regularly on the site Initial interviews already posted include Blonde Redhead, Crystal Method and Kaki King.
Anyone into music or film should check out this interesting local offering.
Technorati tags: ourstage, boston web 2.0, chelmsford, music, videos, online video
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7 Responses
Wow, really interesting idea for a Web site. If they get the patent for the judging system, any number of competitions could be exclusively judged.
If the judging system proves popular and eliminates cheating, that patent alone could be very lucrative.
True – I have not heard if they plan on licensing out the technology but it could be another revenue stream.
Thanks a lot for this well written post. But I had trouble navigating through your web site because I kept getting 502 bad gateway error. Just thought to let you know.
@Matt – Thank you…I’ll check it out. Probably a hosting issue.
I’ve had a great relationship with http://www.ourstage.com, I love putting my music in to competition each month and watching how they do.
I joined OurStage.com for some of the great partnerships they had, but as a member I really enjoy the whole judging process
They also have a great blog, that spotlights some of the sites artists, I’ve found a couple of awesome bands through that http://www.ourstage.com/blog