Hitlantis secures $1.5M for indie music discovery

Like a Pandora or Shazam for the little guy, Hitlantis on iOS and Web serves indie recommendations

Music discovery service Hitlantis announced Monday that it has closed a $1.5 million angel round.

Private investors participating in the round include senior Nokia executives, JSH Capital Oy, Hasan & Partners, PM Ruukki Oy, Notion Oy, Rock Island Investment Oy, and T&T Enterprises Oy, in addition to individuals from the media and telecom sectors.

Hitlantis lives in a crowded market. There’s Pandora and the other radio/subscription sites like MOG, Rdio and Slackr, all of which are about serving up new discoveries in addition to your favorite music. There’s Shazam, which just last week raised a $32 million round of funding. And on and on.

As shown above, Hitlantis draws in users with a unique aesthetic for music discovery. Each artist is a dot and each color represents a genre. To find music, users need only select a genre, search for an artist, or just browse through the array of dots.

In spite of its pretty visualizations, this Helsinki-based will have to keep improving its user experience if it truly wants to be a hit with users. Right now, the app has a 2.5 star rating out of 5 in the App Store, which wouldn’t normally be notable, especially for an app which only got rated five times.

Out of those five user ratings, however, two come with lengthy reviews full of valid criticisms. For example, the search function isn’t that great. If you type in an artist as well-known as Daft Punk, you should probably see more than one related artist. Searching for smaller, more independent or more obscure artists only makes the app less likely to return any related artists at all.

In fact, if you browse through artists in Hitlantis, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any names you recognize.

Here’s the company’s comment on those criticisms:

Discovery is an issue in general and music is just our jumping off point, though we fully intend to make it the best offering indie artists have at their disposal.  In Finland, for example, a band just competed in a Hitlantis competition in partnership with LiveNation and this teenage band won a slot to open for Bon Jovi.

[...]

The only criticisms we've seen are people hoping to find major label content along with indie artists, and while that may happen, it's not our focus today, though we have been approached by some surprising entities who already have the content and are fascinated by our platform.

So they’re all about indie. In that case, the app needs to somehow live and breathe that mantra, so users know what they’re in for. Comparing yourself to Pandora paints a different picture.

Criticisms aside, Hitlantis appears to be doing pretty well. Before this round of funding, the company saw a 40 percent increase in its user base after the launch of its iOS apps. An Android version is coming by the end of the summer, and the company expects to raise a Series A between $4 and $7 million in the fall.