Hitlantis – Artist Heat Map (as seen on Mashable)

A friend sent me the link to this Mashable article today, talking about a new music/artist discovery tool called Hitlantis. I haven’t been able to get the actual Hitlantis site to function on my Macbook yet, so this post is purely in response to the Mashable article.

The idea behind Hitlantis is that it’s another site for bands to create their profiles on, and encourage people to become their fans on.  Sounds pretty familiar so far.  Only difference is the size of your fanbase is represented graphically on a map, and all the bands on the service are all placed onto the same ‘heat map’, so music fans can scour the heat map by genre and see what bands have bigger fanbases than others, simply by how big of a footprint they make on the map.  Visually, it looks really interesting, and I definitely want to dig further into it.  If the discovery aspect is fun for the end-user, then this could be a fantastic addition to the digital music landscape.

They’re apparently charging for upsells to artists though, including the ability to have a store (5 euros/month), and if you pay them 10-euro/month, you get record company pitching opportunities, and additional software features.  Then they plan on taking a ten-point commission on any sales you make through their store.  All this weirds me out a little bit, because it sounds like they could be making the bulk of their money off bands that are struggling to sell anything.  It’s tough for an artist to make a living, and if these guys stuck with just the commission model I’d respect it more.  They’d be making more of a committed statement to artist development, because they’d only be making money when their artists do.

I also somewhat disagree with launching yet another place that bands need to upload their music to, and create profiles on, and encourage people to become their fans on.  But I don’t blame Hitlantis for that… I guess this is all Myspace’s fault, because as it declines, there’s no “one solution” to replace it yet.  Could Hitlantis be that one-stop shop?  Only time will tell.

Mobile app versions of Hitlantis are in the works too.  Check out this video for a teaser.