HITLANTIS

Hitlantis, a Finland-based indie music discovery service currently for iPhone and iPad. It allows users to visualize Hitlantis content as circles of various sizes arranged around a larger, open circle in the middle of the screen. More popular music artists are closer to the middle, less popular artists closer to the edge. Artists with larger catalogs are represented through larger circles. And the sea of circles is arranged so that artists of the same genre are colored the same and situated toge... ther. It's a social experience, too. Users can see what other Hitlantis users like specific bands learn more about both the user and band. In addition, bands can list what bands they like, which gives users a additional context for discovering new music (just like the way bands list other bands on their [Myspace](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/myspace) pages). Hitlantis currently has about 5,000 bands and a community of roughly 200,000 monthly visitors, co-founder and VP, Timo Poijarvi told Billboard.biz last week as he was in Northern California for meetings. He added the app has been downloaded nearly 1 million times. The app has been successful in some parts of Europe. The iPhone app peaked at #5 at the iTunes App Store in Finland, #66 in the Netherlands and #217 in Belgium, according to app analytics site App Annie. The iPad version has fared better, peaking at #1 overall in Finland and #13 in the Netherlands and #49 in Belgium. However, in the U.S. the app peaked at #112 for all iPhone music apps on May 12 and has yet to crack the top 1,000 overall.More