Djooky’s new HitHunter tool pays fans for identifying hits

The new service follows last year's introduction of the global song contest Djooky Music Awards, which encourages its app users to support their favourite songs.

HitHunter prompts users to vote for the songs that they believe will become popular on the platform. Djooky will run weekly and seasonal leaderboards for HitHunter via its app, with each user being granted 100 ‘hit points (HPs)’, which will be reset every week. Djooky is offering users weekly prizes of up to £75 ($100) and an overall global prize of £750 to the ‘ultimate HitHunter’ at the end of each season.

The more HPs a user allocates to a given song, the higher the user will rank if the track becomes a hit among other users in the Djooky Music Awards. If a user is among the first to give HPs to a track before it increases in popularity then they will earn more points in the user rankings. HPs, however, do not contribute to voting in the Djooky Music Awards.

“We always envisioned that this competition would go beyond the songwriting aspect of the contest for our creative community, especially given that the fans play such a huge part in their success through the voting functionality,” Djooky co-founder and multi-platinum US producer Brian Malouf said. “Now HitHunter gives the non-musicians in our community a fun and unique opportunity to showcase their talent-spotting prowess and more importantly become recognised for it in the form of leaderboards and prizes.”

Co-founder and CEO at Djooky Andrew Dakhovsky said: “These are incredibly difficult times for artists, and we are proud to be presenting the HitHunter function in our app to help new talent engage with new audiences. It extends the principle of music recommendation by involving our community in the curation process.”

HitHunter along with the awards feature is available to all registered users on the Djooky Music Awards app. Users can find more information and signup here.

The winter season will conclude with the Global Voting Round on 28 February. The winners of the previous edition include Nigerian singer and songwriter Mimigold who took first place in Africa and came second in the world, US singer Gina Brooklyn and Peruvian singer Gaona. More than 623 songs were submitted from 91 countries.