Fanatic.fm is The New Ads Platform For Musicians

Fanatic.fm provides a new way for musicians to make money online by allowing fans to directly sponsor artists. The company's mission is to "find the right match between music and advertising." Ian Kwon, fanatic's co-founder, says this is how the system works:

• Musicians upload songs
• Fans and Brands select a musician and create an Ad campaign 
• Whenever the selected band's music is played through web/mobile player, sponsorship Ad will be displayed together 
• Music fans send feedbacks on the match, which is reflected in fanatic's Ad exposure algorithm

 

60% of the sponsorship revenue goes directly to musicians, and 5% gets donated to charities (under the name of the musician).

Fanatic.fm was co-founded by Peter Baek, former Chief Strategy Officer at Bugs Music, the leading music streaming service in Korea with more than 20M users (which is roughly 40% of the country's total population) and by Ian Kwon, who worked at Bain and Company, NHN (Korea's biggest internet company that runs Naver.com and Hangame), and at First Snow (the search company that had been acquired by NHN at $35M.)

Though both founders are Koreans, Fanatic is vying to be a global company. Also the company is a virtual organization, running on Google Docs and Skype by people all around the world. Competitors include YouLicense.com, and in a larger sense, Myspace combined with Google Adwords.