USC Students Create A Music Based Social Network
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USC alum Sidhant Gandhi, and current student Johnny De La Cruz, have teamed up on a new venture called Hypetrax.
Hypetrax, which will launch on March 24 in the iPhone App Store, is a social network platform that focuses solely on music.
Unlike music streaming sites like Soundcloud and Beats Music, Hypetrax fosters a community in which users are able to connect by sharing music clips with one another.
The mobile app is set up to accommodate people seeking to listen to music, but also those interested in promoting their own personal music.
Users can have a private profile, in which they share music directly with specific people, or a public profile, where the user can share music with anyone who views their page.
Gandhi and De La Cruz are hoping that this tool will offer more exposure for up and coming artists, and they have started with USCs underground talent.
"By the time Hypetrax drops, we will be featuring 6 - 8 USC centric artists. These are artists that we have identified as very up and coming," De La Cruz said. "They have a pretty strong following and they basically just make good music, because at the end of the day, we just want to share good music."
The urge to share good music struck Gandhi in April 2013, when he first began to develop the application.
"Hypetrax started as an idea" Gandhi said. "I picked up IOS programming over a summer when I was doing a hedge fund internship. On nights and weekends I was learning as much as I could in order to build the product that would turn my dreams into reality. A product that would bring to life the idea that I originally had."
After months of programming, Gandhi was finally able to make his dream tangible. At that point, he presented the concept to his fellow trojans during a course at the USC Marshall School of Business. That's when De La Cruz joined the team.
"Sid spoke at a class that I am currently enrolled in, and he told the class about the idea," De La Cruz said. "it just hit me immediately, I thought, he has something here."
Since then, the pair have been working together on the app and finding new ways to advance their product.
Most recently, they have entered the 2014 New Venture Seed Competition. A competition held by the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies that awards up to $50,000 in cash and free legal services to USC students who present innovative and potentially prolific business ideas. Hypetrax is now in the semi finals round of the competition.