David Hyman

Early life and background

Hyman was born and raised in Melville, NY. The son of Martin and Diane Hyman, he is the youngest of three siblings. His father Martin Hyman was Executive Vice President of Milgray Electronics. Hyman was educated on Long Island, graduating in 1985. He attended the University of Vermont from 1985-1989 and holds a bachelor's degree in Economics.

Career

Hyman started his online career in online advertising sales at Wired Digital in San Francisco, CA, where he was an active participant in the web's constructs of online advertising. While at Wired Digital he sold one of the first advertisements online and also created the first platform for pioneering e-commerce entities to advertise.

From 1996-1999 Hyman worked as the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Sonicnet. From 1999 to mid-2000 he worked at MTV Interactive as the Senior Vice President of Marketing, where he oversaw all marketing functions for MTV.com, VH1.com, Nickelodeon.com, and Sonicnet. (A little known fact is that Hyman was the voice over announcer on the only television ads done in MTVi's and Sonicnet's history]).

In 2000 Hyman moved on to Gracenote as President and CEO. There, he took fledgling compact disc identification technology (CDDB) and turned it into the world's largest music identification and music management company. Hyman’s efforts helped to drive Gracenote to become core plumbing for all mp3 players & encoders in hardware and software. Gracenote was sold to Sony for $260 million in 2008.

In 2005 Hyman founded MOG in Berkeley CA. As founder and CEO of the award-winning music subscription service, Hyman developed what has been described as one of the world's best music listening services. MOG provided consumers with over 19 million songs for a flat rate of $10/month with an easy, intuitive interface and the highest quality audio. Hyman also was responsible for creating the MOG Music Network, noted at the time as the largest music-centric advertising network, with over 1500 music publishers represented across 70 million unique visitors a month. While at MOG, Hyman worked with hundreds of publishers and labels to negotiate deals that would end up providing music catalogs that contained 19 million songs across every major label and hundreds of independent labels. Hyman also closed deals with large distribution partners across Carriers, ISPs, CE manufacturers, and Auto, including Verizon, AT&T, Telstra, Ford, BMW, Samsung, LG and many others. MOG was consistently voted "Best Music Service" by countless review publications.

Chosen

On January 21, 2014, David Hyman joined Chosen, a next-generation competition platform for performers, as co-founder and CEO. Chosen is the first music video talent competition app where fans compete alongside performers to gain followers, earn points, and compete their way up the ranks for prizes. Chosen officially launched in Q1 of 2015. Starting with music, but with the ability to expand to any and all genres, Chosen has created a platform that turns video content into the foundation for a fast-paced mobile game. To date, Chosen has raised over $6.5 million in funding from top-tier investors, including DCM, Rhodium Capital, Fosun and CrunchFund. Chosen’s board of advisors includes Rio Carraeff, founder and former President & CEO of Vevo, and award-winning hit-maker and founder of Kemosabe Records and Prescription Songs, Dr. Luke.

Personal

Hyman holds three patents: one in automatic meta-data sharing of existing media through social networking (US 7685132 B2), another in automatic meta-data sharing of existing media (US 7979442 B2), and a third in multiple step identification of recordings (US 8468357 B2).

He is a frequent speaker at conferences such as SXSW, CES and Midem. In 2008, he founded Musica Tecnomica, a regular gathering of music-focused innovators in San Francisco.