A new website is offering aspiring musicians, comedians, dancers and other performers their big break by allowing them to upload video clips of their original content online and get a cut of the advertising dollars.
But the idea is not to create a YouTube-esque site, creators say. “We don’t want thousands of mediocre videos of meaningless content. We’re not a clip sharing site, we are a performance site.”
Performances are rated by other users to gain prominence on the site – much like YouTube. Artists retain ownership of their work that they upload onto the site however, they must agree to “grant to us [FameWave] a royalty-free worldwide perpetual and irrevocable right to continue to use that material.”
The concept was inspired by the way Sam Philips (of Sun Records) launched the careers of stars such as Elvis and Johnny Cash from a small recording studio in Memphis. And FameWave Artists will receive more than just exposure from the site, as for every 20,000 views a video receives, FameWave promises to pay the owner $US100.
In order to get this cash, artists must register their clip to the rewards programme – so it is not every single clip registered on the site that is eligible for this monetary reward.
And though it may not be as popular as YouTube yet, Amor Sexton, Project Development Director of FameWave says the site has already seen a stream of visitors.
“We’ve only been up and running for a month, and in our first 4 weeks we got over 33,000 page views with nearly 1000 unique visitors from 40 different countries.”
She also said a “call is going out to recording companies, studios, music stores, pubs, clubs and like minded business who are looking to book exciting new talent.”
” We are building a global community for serious talent,” Sexton says.
See: www.famewave.com
