Whether it’s an altruistic push to give back to and interact with their fans or to just drum up publicity for their brands, it seems that a number of well-known musicians, artists, and creatives are turning to Talenthouse to get inspiration for their projects from everyday web users like you and me.
These crowdsourced projects tend to range across the board: Soundgarden (I had no idea they were still touring, either) used Talenthouse to search for a photographer to take their glamor shots as they traveled around the world, Comic book guru Stan Lee asked his fans to help him create a new superhero, and rapper The Game is asking his fans to help him write a verse for a new track — and more.
Talenthouse, which went live at the end of 2009, is a startup that specializes in getting big names to find not-so-famous, but equally-as-talented collaborators through global social media competitions. Essentially, you can think of these projects as speedy, micro online versions of American Idol or X Factor, except the winner actually collaborates with the talent.
So, in practice, the startups posts these trumped-up, multimedia craigslist listings, or invitations, that are announced through the company’s website and Facebook page. If the contest (or invitation) is to write a verse, for instance, you then drop your hot rhymes into Talenthouse’s digital form and submit. Once the submission period is over, users vote on their favorite ideas, and the winner gets to collaborate with the stars. This voting takes place through Facebook (different from Facebook likes), Twitter, and Talenthouse’s distributed cloud architecture — all of which is proprietary technology developed by the startup itself.
As another illustration, X-Men and Rush Hour film director Brett Ratner, today launched his own series of crowdsourcing projects, in which he’s casting for an assistant director, a walk-on part for an upcoming production, somebody to design his company’s animated logo, as well as an assistant on a magazine photo shoot.
And because Talenthouse runs a distributed platform approach built for reach and engagement, projects like Ratner’s can live on talenthouse.com as well as on host pages, media partner pages, Facebook fan pages and blogs.
On a quick TechCrunch-related note, as you may remember, TC’s own Erick Schonfeld was memorialized in a meme following TechCrunch Disrupt SF last year, when he rocked out on stage with none other than MC Hammer. (You can see the results to the left.) And it’s now come to light that this is not the first time. So this would be the perfect place to introduce the early-nineties version of dancingerick, who it seems made his professional dancing debut in a Brett Ratner music video. R&B and Dick Clark are both involved. Check it out here, especially starting at 30 seconds. Awesome.
For more on Talenthouse collaborations, watch Ratner’s video below: