YouTube for dance videos DanceJam has launched into open beta today after several months of private testing.
DanceJam offers dance battles where users dance off against each other, with viewers voting on the best video. DanceJam also offers general dance videos, including locally uploaded content and videos from external sites such YouTube.
DanceJam was founded by M.C. Hammer, and Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young from Flock. The company has taken $4.5 million in funding over two rounds, with investors including Ron Conway, Alex Algard, Michael Tanne, Geoff Ralston, Alex Welch, Ariel Poler, Rustic Canyon Partners, Softbank Capital and Michael Arrington.
You can see an example of a “Dance Jam” here.
Disclosure: Michael (as noted in the post) is an investor, I’m not.
Hammer is the man. I’m rooting for DanceJam
about time! been waiting for it. i have video on youtube but can’t battle with it. i’ll upload again. go hammer.
This site looks pretty cool. The focus seems to be more about dance competition, so it’s not really like Youtube at all.
There’s a fair bit of both fun and useful content on there already, I definitely like what I see here.
Ok, I was not a fan of this, but this guy is sick:
http://dancejam...g-in-my-kitchen
I don’t get it, but there are some hot chicks!
Looks pretty cool, the new age of entertainment!
lol – i entered the site rolling my eyes already, with like most sites.
but it was actually pretty good – watching dance moves, can be really entertaining.
nice, young demographic too – the kind advertisers salivate over!
Not bad … if they can tap into the House Ballroom community, they’d have a really really solid early adopter crowd right there (and they already have loads of dance off videos to upload!)
I’ll waive my usual fee on that advice!
Good site, good luck Hammer.
Still why you needed $4.5m to do it I’ll never know.
wow, I laughed when I first heard about this.. then… I watched one of the videos , and I can see how this would warrant a niche video site. Question is, when are we going to start seeing Nike ads in the videos?
This will be fun!
I am building something similar… another tale of bootstrapped site vs. venture backed behemoth anyone?
I am working with club owners and promoters rather than mass public, which is a hell of a lot less expensive.
I look forward to buying Dancejam’s assets in a bankruptcy auction
Love the UI. Great content. Why is there no embed code?!!
Good stuff Mike. Seems the haters have gone into hiding for now. Looks good, I think it’ll be a success.
@9 unless you bootstrap something like this yourself, $4.5mm is needed so that the company is well capitalized to properly market itself, hire the right people, and get the product off the ground.
Once it’s off the ground, you want to be well capitalized enough to have time to raise another round without having your original investors holding a gun to your head.
That is why you need $4.5MM.
wont touch youtube.
Why can’t youtube just throw up a niche site too if it becomes popular, or am I thinking too much like microsoft?
Super happy about this being out!
its kinda funny. a lot of re-packaging of youtube contentent. i wonder if this ever got too big they would dissalow them to keep using their videos.
every one of these 12 of these videos are just imported over from youtube:
http://www.danc...;y=9&order=
Why not post these videos on YouTube and get 100000x more views?
It’s cool. I wish I had thought of it. But I guess if anybody was going to do it, it would be Hammer.
I have one question, though.
How do user-submitted video sites deal with the copyright of the music in the videos? There are gobs of video sites. How come they (or their users) are not all involved in copyright infringement suits?
I read DanceJam’s terms of service. It seems like the legalese shifts all the responsibility either to the user (as if some kid with a webcam is going to secure the rights to a song before they include it in their video), or to the copyright owner (the infringement continues until the owner goes through the precise motions to halt it).
Any copyright experts want to chime in?
Youtube commanded the bulk of the $1.6 billion payday on the back of copyright infringement. It is very convenient to throw legalese on the user. Hey! But in the mean time, I will take the money and it’s valuation.
Works for big corporations all the time.
What’s right and what’s wrong is all arbitrary. Or so it may seem.
Good luck to Dance Jam.
Kick-ass site. Really engaging (my girlfriend is addicted already). Kudos to Geoffrey and the gang at DanceJam.
On the plus side, DanceJam has:
1) extended the battle meme in an entertaining way
2) raised a s***load of cash with noting more than an idea
3) allowed Arrington to invest so TC will pimp the site
On the minus side, DanceJam has:
1) launched on a Saturday. the story will be dead by monday
2) launched with almost 0 content – the top video has 396 views right now despite the TC link
3) launched without any hot chicks (did #5 above even go to the site?)
4) allowed Arrington to invest. dude is blogging genius but he has bad angel karma
Deadpool in 6 months. Sorry Michael. Better luck with Seesmic.
Love the slow motion toggle in the videos!
This is the most ridiculous site I have ever seen. Dance battles? Really?
Wicked Cool, Dance moves… then I saw you had to sign in to post a comment. I left immediately. Comments should be treated like a blog.
Just a tip…
This is ala Myspace for dance club, pretty cool idea. McHammer been a guess at GigaOm and share his idea on why he build this kind of website to promote Dance style or niche instead kid doing drug somewhere.
2 thumbs up for McHammer.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
$4.5 million pissed away. DanceJam is destined to fail. That is all.
MC who?
I really like the battle meme. I reckon the interface is going to develop in a different direction from that of YouTube.
I am pleasantly surprised by it. I thought it was going to be failure when I first read about the concept, but I think it may actually have legs.
Launching, even a beta, on a Saturday is a bad idea though.
RE: #18 (My own post)
Sorry. I should have looked around first. They all use the same (almost exact) TOS to shift the onus… the DMCA and Safe Harbor save the day.
Anyway, it’s Miller time….. umm, I mean Hammer time.
dancejam 24 hours later:
4 new videos added
all-time top video now has 879 views
I hpoe I am wrong and it does take off, but so far, the only people who think this is cool are the VCs and some commenters above. maybe we can have a duncan riley v allen stern hyphy battle. or maybe investor v investor. come on Michael, throw down and take on the Hammer.
dance jam = fail.
deadpool
I had this exact idea about year ago, called YouDanceLikeAFreak.com. I never followed through on it, but nice to know that other people are thinking the same thing.
I think the site has potential. However TAKKLE.com has a similar product to that of DanceJam its called Throwdowns. In essence you could do the same exact thing on TAKKLE as you could on DanceJam. Create a Throwdown and label it just for fun: Best Dance Moves. You should check it out, its a relatively new product to the space as well and it looks great.
Good luck to DanceJam however.