If they gave out awards for the busiest PR team, the folks who handle the account for Hoopr would be serious contenders for the prize. The Indian micro-sync licensing platform puts out a press release almost every week.
Over the past couple of months, these have covered their newest fund-raising haul (Rs4 crore (approx. $436,560) in a Pre-Series A round, led by Inflection Point Ventures, which values the company at Rs160 crore (approx. $18.4m); the addition of YRF Music’s hit soundtracks for the Hindi films Saiyaara and War 2 to its catalogue; the introduction of the AI-powered tools, ‘brand match score’ and ‘content-idea generator’ for the use of potential licensors; and the announcement of a tie-up with Adobe Express through which the design platform now has a pre-built Hoopr plug-in.
It’s the launch of their partnership with Universal Music India that piqued our interest. The major and the licensor have joined forces to start an ‘artist-accelerator programme for independent artists’, which—from the sounds of it—is a sort of in-house talent hunt.
The participants will be chosen through “curated auditions” conducted by Universal, which will be open to Hoopr’s “community” of over a thousand artists. The selected acts will then receive “end-to-end support—including A&R guidance, studio access, mixing and mastering, music video production, and sync opportunities via Hoopr” to create original compositions, which will be released on its Songfest channel on YouTube and be made available to license on the Hoopr Smash marketplace.
The artists will also be given the opportunity to “reimagine and recreate” songs from “a significant collection of iconic UMI classics”. Some of the reworkings will be put out on the label’s Revibe YouTube channel.
As far as partnerships go, this is “both a strategic and creative one”, says Viral Jani, the chief revenue officer at the Universal Music Group in India and South Asia. The strategy perhaps is that it gives Hoopr another value-add that makes it an attractive proposition for break-seeking independent musicians, while providing Universal a ready supply of talent from which it can find the country’s next singing or composing star.
