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"The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.\nName: Hitlantis\nQuick Pitch: Hitlantis turns music discovery and promotion into a game with a playable heat map.\nGenius Idea: While the web has rendered this one of the most democratic times for music, it has also rendered it one of the most crowded. Furthermore, there are countless services, blogs and apps designed to help you cut through the clutter and find music that you dig, adding another layer to that nesting doll called music discovery: How do you decide what service to use to decide what music to listen to? Anyone else's head hurt?\nWell, Helsinki-based startup Hitlantis aims to give music fans a new, more visual way to find music.\n\"The entire content industry was launching new services almost every month [when we came up with Hitlantis],\" says co-founder Timo Poij\u00E4rvi. \"They all looked the same and had the same horrible content discovery problem: If your band is number 253,998 out of 1,325,998 search results, it is 100% impossible to be found in that digital swamp.\" \n\"We wanted to change that and bring in visual browsing,\" says Poij\u00E4rvi. \"It was the basic idea of normal human behavior: If you are walking down the street and see a record store (they still exist), you do not stop by the door and shout some odd letters into the letterbox. No, you would step into the store and start browsing visually.\"\nHitlantis, which is free for all music lovers, is a rather beautiful service. It features a circular heat map including genres like punk, indie, electro and pop, all of which are made up of circles that denote different unsigned, up-and-coming bands. \nUsers can create profiles, and then click on circles to listen to full tracks from the bands in question, become fans of said bands and buy their music along the way. You can also share songs to a variety of social networks.\n\n\n\n\nBands, for their part, can also join for free to get in on the action. Upon signup, a band is positioned on the outside of the music heat map, but as they gather more fans and song purchases, they move toward the center.\nTo optimize the promotional experience, bands can also pay a monthly subscription of 5\u20AC (which lets bands set up an online store) or 10\u20AC (which includes record company pitching and software features). Bands can also win opportunities like gigs and studio time.\n\"We have several partners offering these things locally, territory by territory,\" says Poij\u00E4rvi.  \"For example our biggest partner is Universal Music, whose A&amp;R department is already using Hitlantis as a source of great new music. In Scandinavia we are running monthly competitions where three to five of the most successful Hitlantis bands are being pitched to Universal A&amp;R (they give us written feedback of the bands, every month).\"\nThose fees make up the bulk of the site's monetization plan, (it has yet to secure VC funding) as well as fees bands can pay for further promotion, and a 10% cut of bands' music sales. Bands take 90% of the cash, obtained using Click &amp; Buy and Moneybookers.\nCurrently, 65% of the bands on the site are from Finland (seeing as how it launched there seven months ago), but it also boasts bands from more than 30 countries and fans from more than 100 \u2014 that's 10,000 registered users and 2,700 bands.\nIn all honesty, Hitlantis is not the easiest site to casually navigate when looking for new music. Clicking on colored dots renders music discovery a gamble. However, Poij\u00E4rvi says that navigation will improve in the future.\n\"The action map of Hitlantis will show many amazing things like what the other users are doing right now,\" he says. \"We will add several kinds of filters to the map so that the user may choose what he/she sees, etc. Additionally we will introduce some data-handling intelligence into the system making the sea of bubbles even more appealing with even stronger information visualisation.\"\nMobile apps are also in the works, with an iPhone version slated for February, and Android apps on the horizon. Check out the video below for a sneak peek.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, PhotoEuphoria\nSponsored by Microsoft BizSpark\nBizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/02/02/artist-map-music-discovery/>