Copyright infringement can lead to legal trouble for content creators; shares Co- founder of Hoopr

Gaurav Dagaonkar, CEO and Co-founder, Hoopr

Tell us in detail about Hoopr.ai

Hoopr presents you with India's first music licensing services that focus on helping every creator discover and license the right music for their videos. While Hoopr is currently catering to the demands of music licensing, it looks forward to collaborating with artists and exploring better opportunities with them through innovative ways of monetization.

Hoopr envisions building tools and technologies to leverage data and consumer insights. These data and insights can further help creators with intelligent recommendations to streamline the discovery process.

Meghna Mittal co-founded Hooper with me. Apart from being an award-winning music director, I'm an IIM alumnus and an entrepreneur with more than 14 years of experience in the music industry. My co-founder, Meghna, is a serial entrepreneur as well. She has been associated with several promising ventures, including Hubilo and Yessworks, in the past.

Hoopr.ai is a funded startup with notable investors such as Venture Catalysts, 9Unicorns, Inflection Point Ventures, Ashneer Grover, Sahil Barua (Delhivery), Anshoo Sharma (Magicpin), Anuraag Srivastava, Pradyumna Agrawal, Giri Malpani and others.

Hoopr.ai is a part of GSharp Media - a content and technology company focused on creating media-tech platforms and content brands. In fact, GSharp Media also operates Songfest India, which produces music IPs with brands.

2. How is Hoopr helping creators, filmmakers and brands soundtrack their videos?

As already discussed, Hoopr.ai is a music licensing platform. It helps content creators and businesses with the discovery and licensing of the right music for their videos.

India has an 80 mn+ creator community comprising vloggers, podcasters, gamers, filmmakers, live-streamers, and influencers creating audio-visual content on a variety of topics. With over 25,000 tracks and sound effects, Hoopr.ai is not only enabling these creators to get specific music for their needs, but also helping them avoid legal and copyright-related issues.

In addition, we have actively been a part of this community ourselves. We introduced a campaign #HarGharCreator with an ad to celebrate and empower creators across India. Furthermore, we also noticed changing mindsets with regards to content creation, with more people embracing it as a career choice. And that is exactly what the ad captures.

In the ad, a young college student can be seen telling his strict father that he doesn't want to be an engineer but rather a content creator. The reaction of the father makes the ad a must watch for all content creators and their families.

3. What big things are you looking forward to?

Hoopr looks forward to holding hands with both content creators and musicians.

The abundance of content demands uniqueness. At the same time, viewers enjoy familiarity. Music presents both while enhancing the quality of engagement in a video. Hoopr looks forward to being the household name when a creator thinks of a perfect background music that fits right, minus copyright claims. Every creator deserves the best. Hoopr looks forward to being a part of the journey to it.

In contrast, musicians always like more than one source of income. It's the age of abundance, and possibilities should be endless too. Hoopr looks forward to being a great partner in this journey, educating them about trends, opportunities, and more.

In addition, Hoopr presents just one more for them. As musicians actively work with Hoopr to produce music for creators, they can count on the royalties we share with them, expanding avenues of income as they grow with us.

4. How much of the world is going to change by what you are doing?

The fundamental issue of copyright infringement can lead to legal trouble for content creators. The violation can also damage their reputation and bring financial losses to their doorsteps. Hoopr is incorporated to solve these issues by offering a solution that addresses the root cause and helps build synergistic alliances in other areas.

Firstly, because we offer licensed music to content creators, they don't have to worry about copyright strikes. They can create more content knowing that the platform won't take down their videos due to legal issues on the music front. Secondly, this will help pave the way for many of these creators to become a part of the creator economy.

Hoopr, apart from licensing music, also helps users select the best soundtrack and music for their content. This will ensure that even though creators use fully licensed music, the variety and quality of music on offer do not suffer. Lastly, Hoopr is also actively working on the supply side of things, wherein we're sourcing music from great musicians, composers, and producers across India.

Hoopr also plans on sharing royalties with the artists so that they are compensated for their creations. This will expand the avenues from which musicians, composers, and producers can earn money.

5. How do you explain your company to someone in the industry?

To someone who has been in this industry for a long, I'd call Hoopr the right music partner for every content creator. As we streamline discovery too (other than licensing), the term music partner fits well. Creators should check out the playlists to get what I mean.

Now, why do I say "right"? Firstly, I want to point towards variety. It is more challenging for the regional creators to get the right tune for their backgrounds. Where do you get an excellent regional track? How do you license it now? Hoopr presents you with the sounds of India. When your content never leaves your community out, why should the music behind it do?

Secondly, Hoopr is surprisingly affordable. And the last reason must be its approach. Hoopr not only equips you with tools and technologies that make creators' lives easier, but we also educate them.

While we are still talking about the creators, we have a similar approach to musicians as well. We look forward to educating musicians about different licensing aspects and opening up new avenues for them.

6. What are the growth and expansion plans for Hoopr?

The future belongs to the creator economy, and we at Hoopr project our vision to solve content creators' problems through innovative tools and technologies. In terms of our future focus, we are striving to become a large-scale platform and revolutionize the music licensing industry by offering musicians and content creators an ideal platform for interaction.

We are also expanding our database to incorporate a wider variety of music and tracks that take into consideration the preferences of creators and emerging trends. This expanded scope will bring enormous benefits to creators and help the entire ecosystem of the music industry to flourish in the long run.

7. How did Gaurav and Meghna come along?

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8. What is the future of the creator's economy? Share some insights of the industry

We have all noticed, experienced, and been a part of the exceptional growth of the creator economy. While different reports can project a very different number if you want the exact size of the creator economy, Linktree recorded around 200 million people as of 2022. This community can include consumers, entrepreneurs, and anyone or everyone who keeps the economy growing.

Nowadays, brands are bothered by a "creator" strategy rather than an "influencer" strategy. But the question is, what more can change? As the creator economy continues to thrive, niche content will start evolving. Community building and nurturing have become more and more crucial already.

Thus, community-centric marketing strategies would get more popular too. Creators have already become more integral to businesses. However, I feel with exponential growth; several companies would come up with a vision to make creators' lives easier too.

9. By what size/number are we looking to expand business?

We're proud to have on-boarded more than 60,000 creators, brands, and broadcasters. This includes notable influencers and media houses across India. With the scale at which the content creation economy is slated to grow, we want to scale up and expand at least 10x in the coming year. This will not only include growth in the number of entities we partner with, but also product-related growth. We also plan on growing our catalog, our team, and the overall strength of brand Hoopr.

10. Talk about Hoopr Originals

Hoopr Originals presents a platform for artists, especially, aspiring musicians from diverse backgrounds, professions, and other walks of life. The idea is to empower the discovery of undiscovered talent in India.

We will also provide the artists with an additional chance to unlock revenue through sync. Their original tunes, which will be on Hoopr, will be accessible for users to licence and use in their videos, vlogs, and other content. In addition to helping them spread their music globally, the site will also help them get discovered.

With Hoopr and Songfest we have worked with numerous celebrities over the past few years such as Shaan, Divya Kumar, Ash king, Monali Thakur, Mame Khan, Shamali Kholgade, and several large influencers too. However, as we have been building Hoopr over the last eight to nine months, we've seen incredible depth and diversity in terms of new songwriters, composers, music creators, and producers across India.

11. Any other information that you would like to share with us?

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