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The viral side of music videos just got a bit more so with the advent of SplashCast, a social network gaining traction among the major labels.
SplashCast provides a movable window of a performer’s video with a template to enable messaging. Users can transfer their favorites to a MySpace page and share them. They can post videos, pictures or comments and chat with other users.
The service will soon allow insertion of its advertising into the video streams, thanks to HotSpot technology.
In a nod to the popularity of urban music, SplashCast is setting up a site for an established rap star it declined to identify, and expects he’ll be one among many.
“To date we’ve worked with labels,” says SplashCast CEO Michael Berkley. “Now we’re working with artists themselves, particularly in the urban category.”
The urban music channels created by SplashCast get the most viral distribution. The typical user is a tech-savvy African American ranging in age from 14 to 19. Females are in the majority.
SplashCast already has distribution deals in place with Sony BMG, Universal, EMI, Geffen, Warner Bros., MTV, NPR and PBS.
“It’s all about connecting our conversation,” says David Bell, director of digital marketing for Sony BMG’s Zomba label. “It’s about creating new communities, creating communities of our own.”
Bell says songs usually are a bigger draw than artists. But Chris Brown’s is the most popular of the 40 SplashCast channels featured on Sony BMG’s site. Roughly 40,000 users added it to their MySpace or Facebook pages within a month of its posting. It eventually was embedded in more than 75,000 pages.
Visitors “gobble up immediately” any news about stars like Brown, Bell notes, adding that urban music is the subject of a “huge number” of blogs. He says Zomba hopes to build content sites in collaboration with brands.
SplashCast plans a reality series on its “mystery” hip-hopper’s site.
“Once it’s out there on tens or hundreds of thousands of MySpace pages, the fans will be able to influence the reality show,” Berkley says. “It’s enabling artists to create content in a very efficient, cost-effective manner so they can essentially have a videographer follow them around, create this in real time and edit it.”