Last summer, the guys from Tracks.by launched Hipset as a discovery site for music aficionados. The idea was to provide a place for music fans to keep track of all the latest jams from their favorite artists. And, in turn, to provide a new marketing channel for celebrities to promote their music and to get fans to sign up and like their Facebook pages and posts and whatnot.
The team is still working on Hipset, but over the last several months they’ve morphed it into something totally new. That is, they’ve made it into a YouTube network for musicians and celebrities, providing them a way to reach new audiences, as well as promote and monetize their videos.
The new YouTube network follows the lead of those which have come before it, aggregating various channels of video creators and finding new ways to manage those channels at scale. In that way, it’s not all that different from what the folks at Machinima or Maker Studios are doing. Except, of course, that Hipset is designed for, and is made up of, a whole bunch of celebrities, whom the team has been working with over the last several years.
Today, Hipset has about a dozen different celebrities signed up for the network, including folks like Tyga, Souljaboy, Lil Twist, Daughtry, 3 Doors Down, Rob Zombie, Kraddy, Kris Allen, DJ Skee, Tory Lanez, and Ryan Leslie. Together, they have more than a billion video views, more than a million subscribers, and more than 35 million fans across other social networks, like Facebook and Twitter.
