Music

'The MTV of online'

Austin-based Blastro delivers hip-hop videos to music fans

By Lilly Rockwell
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, September 11, 2006

The inside of Blastro Inc.'s offices near the West Campus area look only vaguely like, well, offices.

There is nothing outside the modest apartment complex on West 18th Street in Austin to indicate that it's the address for what might be the most popular place for hip-hop videos on the Web.

Averaging 575,000 to 2 million visitors a month, Blastro has found a niche as an online version of the BET or MTV cable television networks.

Competing against giants such as MTV and RollingStone.com, Blastro has managed to hold its own. The company is known for identifying up-and-coming hip-hop artists before they become mainstream.

"The way we compete is with culturally specific music," said Rob Campanell, one of Blastro's founders. "We are really for the audience that doesn't want to go to a big site that has everything. We want to focus on the audience that is tuned in to the urban culture."

On a good day, that translates to 150,000 unique visitors to Blastro.com, where they can find a bank of 3,400 streaming music videos from major artists such as Shakira and indie Texas artists such as Slim Thug, as well as movie trailers and a hip-hop industry blog.

This summer, Blastro started a rock version of its successful hip-hop site called Roxwel.com. It has a "Total Request Live"-style Top Five music video countdown delivered by an attractive blonde in skimpy clothing.

In July, Blastro announced an agreement with Universal Music Group to stream music videos from artists such as 50 Cent, Blue October and Mariah Carey.

The people behind Blastro all are big music fans, and the company and Web site are skewed heavily toward males. Six of the nine Blastro employees are men, most of them in their 20s.

The cramped and cluttered apartments have a fraternity feel because two employees live in Blastro's "offices," along with the company dog.

Its target demographic group is people ages 14 to 34. The average age of a Blastro user is 18.

The company was started in Austin by five music fans in 1999, a precarious time for any Web startup.

Campanell originally designed the site as a haven for electronic music fans, and it used to be a popular spot to watch a live webcast of a DJ. But the site proved to be more popular with hip-hop fans.

"I don't know how it happened," Campanell said. "We always were programming music videos, and we were programming a lot of Southern hip-hop that you really didn't see on national television. That spread through word-of-mouth over the Internet."

After the dot-com bust in 2000, cyberspace was littered with failed Web companies.

During this rocky time, Blastro buckled down with a small group of four employees, most of whom had day jobs and worked on the site at night and on weekends. One intern from Germany survived by selling his plasma.

Keeping overhead low helped the company survive the bust, and Blastro emerged in 2004 with more advertisers and a bigger audience.

"We were struggling for a four-year time, waiting for advertisers to catch up," Campanell said. "It wasn't until 2004 that advertisers started to really embrace Internet-streaming videos."

In May 2001, Blastro had 90,000 videos played. By May of this year, it had 7.3 million videos played.

That same month, Blastro reported a high of 2.1 million unique visitors. Other streaming music video sites, such as Yahoo's, had 21 million visitors in July.

Blastro's business model is based on advertising-supported content. All of the music videos on the site are preceded by a 15- to 30-second advertisement. Revenue was between $500,000 and $1 million last year, Chief Operating Officer Fletcher Lee said.

The industry is booming, and the number of videos online that are supported by ads has grown 105 percent over the past five years, according to AccuStream research. HBO, Microsoft Corp., Hyundai Motor Co., Reebok, Ford Motor Co., and American Express Co. are on Blastro's roster of advertisers.

"Music videos are the most popular content category on the Internet," said Paul Palumbo, research director at Accu- Stream.

Smaller companies such as Blastro compete against Internet behemoths such as AOL, RollingStone.com, MTV and VH1. All of them offer streaming music videos, Palumbo said, but Blastro has an advantage because it started earlier and is smaller and more nimble. The company is able to add features and content easily, he said.

And it does. During this year's Lollapalooza, Blastro filmed behind-the-scenes interviews with bands and then ran them alongside the music videos.

Blastro helped launch the careers of several hip-hop artists, such as Tyra Bolling, whose indie-label songs became Top 40 hits last year.

"What excites people is discovery and finding out what is good that you don't know about," Palumbo said.

Local artists and music video directors have found refuge at Blastro, where relatively unknown artists can have their music videos seen by thousands of fresh eyes.

Music video director Louie Fattz said there is more opportunity to have his work seen on Blastro than on TV. Blastro is his first stop when releasing a music video. He said the site has helped him get videos on MTV or BET.

Austin is an unusual spot for a hip-hop Web site to thrive, Fattz said. Although it is known as the Live Music Capital of the World, the city doesn't have much of a hip-hop scene, especially compared with Houston.

"Blastro is the MTV of online," Fattz said. "In other words, if I am a music video director who does not get any love from local music television, then Blastro is the only outlet I have where I can sell a client."

lrockwell@statesman.com; 445-3819