Photo by Martin Fisch.

Add one part MySpace and one part American Idol to a martini shaker over ice and give it a powerful shake. Serve in a martini glass and garnish with a million dollars and world peace. This wild cocktail is called WorldSings.

Essentially, WorldSings is a new social media network that gives musicians a free venue and connects music lovers to new sounds the world over. Unlike MySpace and Imeem, however, the community being built at WorldSings comes with a significant perk: the potential for musicians to win 1,000,0000 dollars in prizes.

The web has done a lot to pulverize the geographic barriers between us and WorldSings is a good example. Their annual contest for the World’s Best Song is open to anyone in the world with talent and a good enough internet connection to upload a video. Members of the site then get to vote over the course of the year on the artists that they like best.

Like most everything else today, it started with reality TV.

“We were watching Eurovision,” co-founder Dragana Ognenovska told me laughing over the phone when we spoke yesterday. “Do you know Eurovision? It’s like American Idol.”

The Eurovision Song Contest, which has been broadcast since 1956, is an annual music contest held among member countries of the European Broadcasting Union. The premise is simple: every country selects a singer and song to be performed and then other countries vote for the songs, eventually selecting the most popular.

“It’s actually one of the most watched non-sporting events in the world,” Ognenovska told me. She’s right. According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, the show is viewed by 600 million people.

“Me and my brother, we thought, wow, why don’t we do something like this for the world?”

That was only a year ago. Today, WorldSings is a social network blossoming with talent and the rush that comes every time a user discovers a new band or artist.

Anyone can join the site for free and begin browsing bands by country, keywords or genre immediately.

“For bands, it’s great, you get to upload your music for free, and we don’t take the rights to the music,” Ognenovska said. “And you can expand your fan base—we give musicians the statistical information so you know where your votes are coming from. Let’s say you’re Canadian and Canadians don’t love your music, but Brazil may love what you’re doing. You don’t know exactly who voted for you, but you get the demographic information such as age and country.”

WorldSings offers report-like stats on fans so bands know who’s digging their stuff. But being able to check in on your fans’ details isn’t really new in the world of social media, where everyone slaps that kind of information right on their profiles.

“There’s a climax,” Ognenovska told me when I asked how WorldSings is different from sites like MySpace and Imeem. “There, you put your music up, people check it out, but you’re not looking forward to something, whereas here you’re looking forward to a contest that’s happening every year. You can win 500,000 dollars or 10,000 as a finalist, so you’re working toward something, you’re not just adding friends and putting events up so people go to your shows.”

Another difference is that unlike most other musical competitions, WorldSings’ World’s Best Song fosters individuality among participants.

“WorldSings is not like American Idol in that we’re here for the musicians,” Ognenovska told me. “We’re not looking for people that just sing well or not. American Idol is a great concept, but you have to have your own music, your own style, to be a musician. It’s really hard—you may sing like Mariah Carey, but can you do that for yourself and be someone totally different? We’re looking for the trade musicians that put in the hard work, for the musicians that go out, spend their money, write their own songs, play and put everything together.”

Even with the lure of such a hefty sum, time and again, Ognenovska impressed upon me that WorldSings seeks to be more than a contest.

“We’re really trying to make a home, too. A home for people,” she told me. “It’s more than a place where you go make money. We want to bring people from all over the world under one roof. Music is a universal language, and we want too bring everyone in through that to promote peace.”

Music as a trojan horse for peace? Their vision of involves working with charities around the world and donating a part of their profits to varying important global causes.

“We plan on giving part of our proceeds to charities,” Ognenovska said. “We’ll do little fund-raising events where all the money will go to charities—all over the world, not just the US, in every continent. We still don’t have a clear-cut plan about how it’s going to be done, though we are working with several ideas right now. Once we have it figured out, we’re going to put that information on the site.”

When I asked her whether her interest in music originates from personal aspiration as a musician, Ognenovska confessed she plays no instruments.

“But I love music and I’ve traveled around the world and listened to all kinds of music,” she said. “I always wanted to do something with music, but I’m not really talented when it comes to being a musician so I had to get in on the back end of it.”

WorldSings is a wonderfully ambitious way to go about it.

Of Possible Interest:
WorldSings Official Contest Rules