21 ms·

A few things I’ve come to believe in my years in music tech

226 points by legrande 5y ago

samirsd 5y ago
i’m working on a niche electronic music streaming app for what it’s worth nightly beta: https://mixtape.ai https://mixtape.ai app store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mixtape/id1391354414 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mixtape/id1391354414
setgree 5y ago
> 1. Music is not “inherently social” - it is just as often anti-social Or, as one of my favorite metal bands put it when asked about going on tour: "Our music is a solitary experience." From: https://www.invisibleoranges.com/interview-blut-aus-nords-vindsval/ https://www.invisibleoranges.com/interview-blut-aus-nords-vi...
peterkelly 5y ago
> 17. The music/tech graveyard is *full* of product ideas just like yours. Spending a little time learning about them and why they failed at the time is a high ROI activity. This is my favorite. It applies to pretty much any technology or business idea.
- bluediscussy22 5y ago
  "those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
buro9 5y ago
The best idea I've had for the music industry goes like this: A market place for gig tickets, with open data for artists. That's it. Embrace touts, allow resale, reduce fraud (counterfeit tickets)... by making tickets ephemeral, transferable, verifiable. At this point all you've got is a more legit version of what happens in the real world. The data part... give artists and their promoters full access. The benefit is that it removes a huge part of uncertainty for the artsists and their management. They can now more accurately predict total ticket sales, comparable ticket sales, see ticket sales across other acts in the same city on the same night, etc... meaning they get to do two things: 1) They choose more appropriately sized venues (which makes the event more vibrant as it's fuller - a fuller venue makes better margins as the fixed opex is spread over higher revenue - less lost revenue too as more fans get to see a band and less money left on the table), and 2) They get to set the price of a ticket more accurately to what the market can bear (which means they get more of the ticket value and touts get less, so the artists come out better and more realistic pricing will make a better end-to-end experience for music fans). The data part is so valuable for filling small and medium venues that it can start to break the stranglehold Ticketmaster have on venues. The tenure of most promoters is around a decade, and Ticketmaster exclusivity deals with major venues come up within a similar time period. By building a grass roots effective ticketing system built on data you have a 10 year bet on knocking out the incumbent if you can keep the promoters and artists on your side as you and they grow. The Ticketmaster stranglehold isn't impenetrable, they have venue agreements with large traditional venues - but there are a lot of alternative venues whose seat you can fill easily, i.e. theatres and cinemas. Within a single "generation" of music (less than a decade), you should be able to take the majority of small and medium venues, most festivals, and have serious inroads into the territory of Ticketmaster. Are there things like this? Not really. Sure things like Dice in the UK for clubbing does the resell tickets, etc as a full and complete part of the original ticketing experience, but I do not know of a single company that is really creating anything like an open and transparent dataset that the participating artists and promoters can use without fee. Songkick were going to be my bet on who could do this, but once they went down the Ticketmaster affiliate route I no longer believe this is possible.
- corrigible 5y ago
  On a technical level, it sounds near-trivial... Would need a very strong bizdev posture
  - rabuse 5y ago
    Ahem, Ticketmaster owning the contracts to almost every venue.
    - buro9 5y ago
      That's built in to this approach. Ticketmaster owns the contracts to every major venue. Great... there's a hell of a lot of smaller venues, festivals, and other events that can be taken whilst Ticketmaster ignores you and you add significant value. By the time you worry about Ticketmaster or they worry about you, you already have momentum from artists, promoters and fans, and due to the bad press Ticketmaster gets through their tout-resell sites you also have political pressure. Ticketmaster is built in to this plan. Their presence makes the grassroots stuff even more compelling as you don't have to boil the ocean, you figure out how to make it work on a small venue level, city level, and go for scale in the bottom layers. Worst comes to worst, they're forced to consider purchasing you as you take all of the oxygen out of the system that feeds artists and promoters into them.
- kall 5y ago
  Check out vivenu [0]. I‘m not sure what their data offering includes because I haven‘t actually tried their product, but it sounds like they are thinking in a similar direction to you. [0] https://vivenu.com https://vivenu.com
- ticviking 5y ago
  Seems to me to be trivial to do. Maybe you could link the ticket to a NFT and put the data on the blockchain for extra hype? I could actually really dig having a wallet with some kind of digital memorabilia of tickets and concerts as well.
  - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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pueblito 5y ago
I think he means discovery of people in a social media sense, not as in discovery of music
- squeaky-clean 5y ago
  I was a bit confused because the article picks those 3 items as if they're related, but they're just the first items of many from the linked tweet, and most of those aren't related to social media.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  This article is just recapitulating a series of tweets, with essentially zero value added. And, since the tweets were off-the-cuff and ambiguously worded, it's hard to say what the original author meant. I assumed he was referring to the discovery of music, as in "coming up with a new algorithm or process that recommends music to people does not, by itself, amount to a financially sustainable product". It reminded me of Steve Jobs' reaction to Dropbox: that the entire product was more like a feature that some other product should have. Of course, Jobs was wrong about that, and this guy may also be wrong about his intuition here, even though he is informed and experienced at his business.
oxymoran 5y ago
This advice applies mostly to pop music that involves outside songwriters, marketing, and publishing music, etc. and I agree, the music industry has a tight grip on that sort of “music”. But there is plenty of room for niche products for bands that actually write their own music (ya know, real musicians not dancing, lip syncing performers). Any band can find a producer to work with without a record label and there are plenty of examples of highly successful bands releasing their own albums.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  This is less about bands and more about startups building listening platforms. The article is basically saying that data about what people are listening to has almost no value past the present moment. There are already too many places to get that data and it’s basically already stale by the time you aggregate it. Even with “indie” artists (many of whom are ironically mega-millionaires in their own right), there’s a workflow aspect to the promotion side of things. You can do it yourself, but there’s no money in streaming (artists in 2021 are influencers first and foremost who look at streaming as a way to acquire new listeners) so you gotta go through concert promoters, which usually means means hiring a manager to rep you. The money is in the live shows these days — which is why the pandemic hit musicians so hard. But the fundamental problem is still getting people to listen to your stuff, same as it ever was.
- meremortals 5y ago
  What sorts of niche products? Things like DistroKid?
jasongrishkoff 5y ago
I started two music-related websites: 1) https://www.indieshuffle.com https://www.indieshuffle.com - a music discovery blog 2) https://www.submithub.com https://www.submithub.com - a service that connects musicians with music curators I make my living off these platforms (primarily the second). So in essence, my discovery-centric services are viable products. That said, I'm not sure that's 100% what he was after in the Twitter thread this article was based on: https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513 https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513
- nemothekid 5y ago
  What I thought "Discovery" was is finding new music given some other music preferences - like Spotify's curated playlists or Song Radios. Submithub doesn't fit that to me - it's more like a social network (and I guess you make your money the same way, via advertising).
- underwires 5y ago
  I appreciate the counter-take — it seems like almost every take I read on the modern music business is coming from people who don't actually know what the reality on the ground is. And gd submithub is awesome, I have been sucked right in, making submissions, buying credits, rating songs. It's taken up my whole morning, well done!
- noja 5y ago
  Could you add Airplay to your Indie Shuffle app?
  - jasongrishkoff 5y ago
    I kinda thought it already worked?
- usrusr 5y ago
  Sounds like a perfectly fine mismatch between proper bootstrapping and the mindset of growing investment fueled by some hypothetical value proposition. Is submithub what I think I am seeing? Basically a solution to a spam problem by offering a channel that requires the equivalent of stamps so that senders rate-limit themselves, focusing a bit more on quality over quantity? If that's not a complete misperception I like it very much, great niche-spotting!
jakear 5y ago
Not much substance in the article so allow me a bit of a rant: As someone with both Apple Music and Spotify Premium subscriptions, I think the more accurate take is that discovery is not a solved problem, at least in the algorithmic sense tech companies want. Spotify’s idea of “discovery” is dedicating more and more home page real estate to bullshit podcasts I have no interest in, and showing me endless “upsell” notifications when I’ve already bought their damn product. I have “Product News” and “Spotify News and Offers” notifications off, yet I still find that whenever I open their app I need to close out of some popup telling me about some new bullshit their PM’s want to boost engagement on. They do have a dedicated “discover” tab on the app, but you can’t stream the audio from it to a network speaker so it’s basically useless for me. I will admit their “Daily Mix”’s are decent. Apple Music is better about keeping out of the way, but their generated playlists often feel either boring or stale; good when I want to listen to throwbacks but I can’t recall the last time I heard a new artist I really liked from one. In my opinion, the best source for music discovery continues to be local radio, especially college radio. The good news is that having been a part of college radio pledge drives, I can pretty confidently say that the discovery service provided by local/college radio is indeed a viable product. Just not in the algorithmic world-scale sense tech companies want to see.
- nluken 5y ago
  Great points. I'd even go a step further and suggest that "discovery" is not really a problem that can or should be solved in the manner that tech companies would like. I ran a radio show in college on my college's station, and from my experience most of that crowd is uninterested in further tech penetration of music.
- baran1 5y ago
  do you just Shazam the songs you like from the local college radio?
  - jakear 5y ago
    That or I check the online playlist.
- 5y ago
motohagiography 5y ago
The business of music essentially started as a way to sell preaching and alcohol, which in turn monetized real estate investments (bars), and then it was used to sell little blobs of plastic and cardboard with pictures on them, t-shirts, instruments and some lessons, and then maybe matchmaking at concerts and festivals. Music is the sizzle, not the steak. It's the sound of gross margin, but it's not the product. We just keep letting musicians believe it's a problem to be solved and they keep producing music more and more cheaply, while businesses find new tchotchkas to sell into the channel that a listenership creates. Digitization decoupled the attractive sounds from the merch, and now we're trying to find a way to couple them again. Bandcamp has done some very interesting stuff with merchandising. Same with the resurgence of vinyl records as a luxury item. Selling cosmetics and endorsements is the main play for making money with music I think. I looked into whitelablling cannabis products for bands (like the song? experience the complete vibe with X branded prerolls, etc) and this is explicitly banned in legalization legislation because it's such an obviously good idea. There was a dating site that matched people based on their music preferences and playlists, and that was one of the best hypoethesis I've seen tested in a product. I don't think it dominated the way one might have expected it to. I agree with the advice, that discovery isn't a product, and the big question is how to tie music back to merch, or move on to new artforms if that's not going to happen. Otherwise it's like trying to sell math.
- CPLX 5y ago
  What the fuck are you talking about? Music is one of the most powerful elements of the human experience. It's common to all cultures across all periods of history and it has the capacity to inspire people, enrage them, and cause them to fall into tribal affiliation with each other. A large percentage of the largest mass gatherings of humans that have ever occurred have had music as their draw. Entire generations are defined by their music choices, or even a single music festival. It's something our soul needs, it's as essential to to being alive as love, or sex. Pretty sure the business of music is driven by that need.
  - katbyte 5y ago
    Pretty sure this comment is as hyperbolic as the one your replying to. Not everyone has the same feelings toward music you do, some are quite indifferent because we are all quite different. Case in point people who are asexual.
pvarangot 5y ago
I don't agree. I think there's still room for "purpose specific" social media, and in the case of music that would be being able to follow people and plug into their feeds of what they are listening to and what playlists, sets or charts they put up with what tags, and let them stream. Spotify has something like this but the UI is only usable on the desktop client. You can do something like this on Youtube or Twitch and a lot of artists do. There's also sets on Soundcloud. Kinda like what Beatport does but with a more social and better website, and without the gatekeeping and heavy editorializing. I think Last.fm was on the right track with social features but didn't get the streaming right (I think mostly because of IP issues). What some projects like everynoise.com do with Spotify tags for genres is pretty amazing but of course it's missing the social features.
larsiusprime 5y ago
Here's the actual content the blog is summarizing: https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513 https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513
- sbuccini 5y ago
  @dang should consider making this the actual link
- dang 5y ago
  Thanks! Changed to that from https://musically.com/2021/12/02/herskowitz-advice-for-music-startups/ https://musically.com/2021/12/02/herskowitz-advice-for-music..., which points to it. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
swalsh 5y ago
In the world of web 2.0, that's probably true. Paying people in hearts rarely translates to a viable business model. In the world of Web 3.0. It might not be true. Smart contracts builds a way for creators to realize a larger share of the value they create, and for listeners who discover them early to be rewarded as well. In web 3.0, you're not rewarded with hearts, but tokens which can be traded for dollars. This is a really cool project https://mirror.xyz/davidgreenstein.eth/3_TAJe4y8iJsO0JoVbXYw3BM2kM3042b1s6BQf-vWRo https://mirror.xyz/davidgreenstein.eth/3_TAJe4y8iJsO0JoVbXYw...
- WhisperingShiba 5y ago
  Who is going to host the actual content? This seems like a missed opportunity to create a decentralized music hosting platform, where artists get paid in proportion to bandwidth used. Something like file coin.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - sprkwd 5y ago
    Music coin? https://musicoin.org/welcome https://musicoin.org/welcome
    - WhisperingShiba 5y ago
      nice.
- claudiulodro 5y ago
  What's the difference between a heart and a token? If tokens can be redeemed for dollars, why can not hearts?
  - MathYouF 5y ago
    YouTube, Facebook, TikTok already do convert things like hearts into money. The terms by which they do are very arbitrary and seemingly opaque to me, an outsider of that. One undeniable benefit of web3 would be the possibly for immutable and transparent rules for compensation (whether those would be enacted for any given platform is unclear).
orblivion 5y ago
Data point of one: I'm not huge into social features in the first place, but I really appreciated how Rdio handled it. Easily spy on everything your friends are listening to. Homepage is a dynamic looking feed of stuff including random recent stuff your friends listened to or things they listen to a lot. I found a lot of cool music this way and the context of a friend-based recommendation, I think, was valuable to me in a way. I was disappointed that I had to switch to Spotify. Spotify does the bare minimum here. You can only see what your friends are currently listening to. Maybe their history as well, but I don't even feel compelled to check. I hardly even notice it there in the corner of the window. And it only exists on the desktop client, last I checked. I can't even share a song with a friend within Spotify, I have to copy a link and paste it in a chat window, or connect on Facebook (which I don't have). Why wouldn't they want to encourage intra-platform sharing? The only social feature I've found useful is building playlists. It's baffling to me. But obviously they know what they're doing.
- amelius 5y ago
  You can always Shazam when you are at your friend's place.
  - suction 5y ago
    If one's taste is slightly off-mainstream Shazam won't find many of the tracks you aim it at, for instance older electronic music from the 80s and 90s.
kingcharles 5y ago
Confusingly domained web site. I thought this was a link to TikTok predecessor, Musical.ly.
csours 5y ago
From the twitter thread at https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513 https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513 "5. Middlemen are not inherently evil - they are desired if they can provide more value than they extract" This reminds me of bureaucracy - people only call it bureaucracy when it fails or takes special attention or impinges on expected rights or privileges. When it works, there's not really a name for it (it's still bureaucracy)
adamnemecek 5y ago
I’ve been working on an IDE for music composition https://ngrid.io https://ngrid.io. Launching soon.
codeulike 5y ago
This guy had senior positions in both Limewire and Spotify, pretty interesting
- pvarangot 5y ago
  And on both of them Discovery sucks, I'm not surprised he thinks this way. Not sure if it's a problem of their engineers or executives sucking, quite the contrary, I think it's a problem that needs to first be solved at a smaller scale before it catches up. Music streaming was also a niche thing when not many of us had a portable device that was connected to the Internet.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    Spotify discovery is just a way for them to sell ads. Artists pay to get onto spotify's curated playlists.
marstall 5y ago
> 3. Discovery is not a viable product I guess define viable? The future has got to hold more ways to relate to music than the main apps of Spotify, Apple Music, etc., which push music in a very specific, generic way. Mostly around top 40, opaque personalizations, algorithms and “algotorial”. We’re never getting back to a place where your identity is defined by which record store you go to. But shouldn’t 1000 music apps be blooming right now, a burbling ecosystem of experiences for every kind of listener? (my hat in the ring: https://avant.fm https://avant.fm)
- Minor49er 5y ago
  Do you track anything other than Spotify (eg: Bandcamp or YouTube)? And is there a way to submit labels?
  - marstall 5y ago
    just Spotify for now ... do hope to widen support - to suggest labels -- email me or @ me https://avant.fm/about https://avant.fm/about
- nerdponx 5y ago
  > But shouldn’t 1000 music apps be blooming right now, a burbling ecosystem of experiences for every kind of listener? Maybe, but where's the money in it?
- baran1 5y ago
  hat soon to be in the ring https://gliss.fun https://gliss.fun :)
marstall 5y ago
> 1. Music is not “inherently social” - it is just as often anti-social but going to a record store was/is. if you could bend your mind to think of a record store as "music tech" this might suggest a possible place for other humans within finding-music 2.0.
scelerat 5y ago
For myself and a lot of people I know, discovery is nearly as much a reward as the music itself. And there is no comparison between the one- or two-dimensional "discovery" offered by social media and streaming platforms and the rich discovery experiences of any of the following: 1. listening to records with a friend 2. going to a dance club 3. attending a live performance 4. listening alone while reading liner notes 5. pawing through a stack of records at a flea market 6. reading a book So for "discovery" to be a viable product I think it has to somehow be at least as engaging as any of these more traditional ways. That's not to say that various curated playlists and algorithmic suggestions are useless. But it's rare that I'm introduced to something new that I like. The algorithms are good at guessing that if I like the Zombies, I'll like the Turtles (which is true) but it never jumps to (for instance) current, contemporary indie/DIY stuff that is influenced by '60s rock and '70s punk. I make those associations all the time. Indie/college radio DJs do it all the time, but Spotify never does. But again, Spotify is trying to sell millions of subscriptions for people who just want something to listen to in the car or put on at their dinner party. For the "hands-off" experience, it's fine. But discovery by its very nature is not hands-off.
- baran1 5y ago
  when I learn about an artist or song through a friend, I end up having a mental association between that person and the song/artist which feels good
- john61 5y ago
  For me, the richest discovery is playing the music on my instrument for myself. The discovery of music in myself through improvisation is the richest possible discovery.
  - pvarangot 5y ago
    Besides jamming, for electronic music I also find the joy of discovery using something like Beatport LINK with something like dJay for iPad to listen to music. It's an alternative to passively playing a playlist or playing an album.
gorgoiler 5y ago
The record industry isn’t as alien as you think. Music is inherently human and more people than you think show genuine talent at their chosen musical craft. Hype separates the cream from the milk. Cream here is a value judgment that can best be described as “not milk”, and therein lies the capriciousness of… …marketing. Look around your workplace. Do you see an iota of evidence to suggest that marketing is going on? Welcome to the competitive hell of anything akin to the music industry. You and I are brethren here. Honesty, looking at A&R at least they are open about being 99% hype and 1% talent. Can SNAP say the same?
reggieband 5y ago
I must admit I am a bit surprised that a social network based on music never really took off. If you really squint at it, TicToc kinda sorta is. Instagram made photos social in a way that Facebook never really did. I think taking a photo and applying a filter as a way to express mood/personality is just an easier thing for the average person to do. It also requires almost no license. The user took the photo with their phone, no one else owns it. Even if a short snippet of a commercially created song is a perfect explanation of my current mood, I can't widely share it on a social network without license. I think that revolution could come but it requires something fantastical. It would require a music making device as easy to use as a mobile phone camera. Some method of expressing mood/personality using sound that is effective.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  Personally I think it'd be tough to listen to a bunch of moms and tweens singing for 15s trying to go viral ;0 Could be cool to see some simple generative music like pick a genre, a beat, hum a melody and ML composes something. Or a quirky fun karaoke social app. Add remix, duet, group lives like tiktok IG have.
- pvarangot 5y ago
  > music making device as easy to use as a mobile phone camera The technology is kiiinda there, look at the iPad music production stack. If you have what it takes you can put up a complete track only in your iPad. I think there's at least two big issues: - Iterating on music until "it's good enough" is not as fast as iterating on a picture or video where you can do multiple takes and check exactly what's going on in your screen. - Conveying your feelings with music is kinda like learning a new language, and then becoming a poet. Like for example everyone has access to sharing text now, with your friends or with the world, yet not everyone is making poems or short stories that convey their emotions effectively.
  - reggieband 5y ago
    Those kind of issues are really the tip of the iceberg IMO. Writing a 140 character tweet or taking a photo with a modern mobile phone has a higher average quality with minimal effort. Yes, not every tweet is poetry but a huge volume of average tweets are consumable (if not entirely palatable). What I mean to say is, the average person is certainly able to write a better Tweet or take a better Insta snap than that same person could reasonably create a pleasing snippet of audio worth sharing. That would be true even if they took the time and effort to learn to use even the simplest iPad music production stack.
timdaub 5y ago
Blockchains, NFTs and anonymous p2p file transfers gonna be the music industry's final nail in the coffin and it's because of people like that author. They've resistet innovation for to long, so inevitable they're gonna pay the price one day.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
> If you are building tools for DIY artists that can’t grow to support larger teams around the artist as they find success they you have painted yourself into a tiny corner. This is a fine point, but sometimes I wish we weren't always optimizing for infinite scaling everything. Some of my favorite places are tiny corners that are intentionally tiny corners.
- ip26 5y ago
  That sounds more like basic business principles, e.g. prefer customers who have money over customers who don’t.
  - notyourwork 5y ago
    And enable support for customers with deep pockets up front because when a tiny customer's pockets grow they will be quick to complain.
wwarner 5y ago
i think i understand the sentiment— my fb network knows all too well what i’m listening to. OTOH i really like following threads of discovery on Bandcamp. People who’ve bought records that I really like are a great source of new music. And you can also browse BC releases by town, which I’ve found pretty fruitful.
oh_sigh 5y ago
I think I used to work with this guy...a lamp fell like 20' from the ceiling and hit him on the head the first week he was in the office.
jonathankoren 5y ago
I've always wanted a music recommendation system that worked in some sort of latent vector space. Song2Vec if you will. That way you could search for music similar to how people describe it. Something like: metal + Abba = Ghost. I know Pandora used to (still?) was doing this, but the features were never exposed to users, and were very music theory. (Apparently I like vamping, but until I looked it up, I couldn't tell you want it was.)
- nelsondev 5y ago
  Vectors are generated for songs, and distance (nearest neighbors) is how recommendations are currently generated in major apps. But there isn’t a user friendly way for people to browse multi-dimensional vector space. But the embeddings (vectors) are capable of Kanye West - Jay Z + Frank Ocean , but don’t have a UX to match.
serverlessmom 5y ago
I definitely disagree with the sentiment that generally people don't care what music other people(especially their friends) enjoy. One of my favorite aspects of Spotify is the ability to understand other people better by exploring the unique blending of intellectual and empathic tastes that comes with music.
d3ntb3ev1l 5y ago
The music business is not a viable business model. In other news, the ocean is wet.
8bitsrule 5y ago
* Apart from supporting music-makers, making a business out of music is destructive to music. * Video does not add to music, it turns it into a mere soundtrack to move one or more products. * Recorded music is always inferior to live music performance. * The enslavement of music, like all enslavement, diminishes the culture that practices it.
- notyourwork 5y ago
  > * Video does not add to music, it turns it into a mere soundtrack to move one or more products. MTV was an entire television network surrounding music videos. I grew up on music videos.
zelienople 5y ago
This man is illiterate.
d--b 5y ago
These points are rather vague and seem to refer to specific things that the OP encountered in his career. I mean: what are we supposed to make of “music is not inherently social”. That sort of implies “I’ve encountered many people trying to build social features into music platforms, and these didn’t seem to provide any value to customers”. Cause otherwise music is definitely a social thing… And the same comment applies to nearly all the points there…
normcoreashore 5y ago
I've been working on a website/app which is designed to optimize the recording and sharing of audio files between musicians in private groups. My friends have been joking that it's an anti-social network of sorts. It's not built to facilitate any mass distribution, and has no option for a publicly subscriptable feed. It just smooths over a few of the sticking points in the record, listen, share(sometimes large file), iteration loop that many collaborative musicians find themselves working within. The project has been a labor of love between friends and I would really love to find a few more users out there! https://www.audiopile.cloud/ https://www.audiopile.cloud/
atoav 5y ago
> 8. If you are building tools for DIY artists that can’t grow to support larger teams around the artist as they find success they you have painted yourself into a tiny corner. Depends on your own goals too. Beeing able to live from what you do while working with people who's work you like, in an environment that is not the mainstream music industry may sound dystopic, but it could totally be the other way around as well. And even if your goal is becoming big, growing out of a certain culture can be useful as well (depending on what your app does), e.g. think about soundcloud.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
goddamnyouryan 5y ago
I made a music player that pulls data or organization purposes from Spotify but uses hidden videos from YouTube to play the actual music, bypassing the licensing issues: https://minotaur.fm https://minotaur.fm

226 points by legrande 5y ago

i’m working on a niche electronic music streaming app for what it’s worth nightly beta: https://mixtape.ai https://mixtape.ai app store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mixtape/id1391354414 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mixtape/id1391354414

setgree 5y ago

> 1. Music is not “inherently social” - it is just as often anti-social Or, as one of my favorite metal bands put it when asked about going on tour: "Our music is a solitary experience." From: https://www.invisibleoranges.com/interview-blut-aus-nords-vindsval/ https://www.invisibleoranges.com/interview-blut-aus-nords-vi...

peterkelly 5y ago

> 17. The music/tech graveyard is *full* of product ideas just like yours. Spending a little time learning about them and why they failed at the time is a high ROI activity. This is my favorite. It applies to pretty much any technology or business idea.

bluediscussy22 5y ago
"those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

buro9 5y ago

The best idea I've had for the music industry goes like this: A market place for gig tickets, with open data for artists. That's it. Embrace touts, allow resale, reduce fraud (counterfeit tickets)... by making tickets ephemeral, transferable, verifiable. At this point all you've got is a more legit version of what happens in the real world. The data part... give artists and their promoters full access. The benefit is that it removes a huge part of uncertainty for the artsists and their management. They can now more accurately predict total ticket sales, comparable ticket sales, see ticket sales across other acts in the same city on the same night, etc... meaning they get to do two things: 1) They choose more appropriately sized venues (which makes the event more vibrant as it's fuller - a fuller venue makes better margins as the fixed opex is spread over higher revenue - less lost revenue too as more fans get to see a band and less money left on the table), and 2) They get to set the price of a ticket more accurately to what the market can bear (which means they get more of the ticket value and touts get less, so the artists come out better and more realistic pricing will make a better end-to-end experience for music fans). The data part is so valuable for filling small and medium venues that it can start to break the stranglehold Ticketmaster have on venues. The tenure of most promoters is around a decade, and Ticketmaster exclusivity deals with major venues come up within a similar time period. By building a grass roots effective ticketing system built on data you have a 10 year bet on knocking out the incumbent if you can keep the promoters and artists on your side as you and they grow. The Ticketmaster stranglehold isn't impenetrable, they have venue agreements with large traditional venues - but there are a lot of alternative venues whose seat you can fill easily, i.e. theatres and cinemas. Within a single "generation" of music (less than a decade), you should be able to take the majority of small and medium venues, most festivals, and have serious inroads into the territory of Ticketmaster. Are there things like this? Not really. Sure things like Dice in the UK for clubbing does the resell tickets, etc as a full and complete part of the original ticketing experience, but I do not know of a single company that is really creating anything like an open and transparent dataset that the participating artists and promoters can use without fee. Songkick were going to be my bet on who could do this, but once they went down the Ticketmaster affiliate route I no longer believe this is possible.

corrigible 5y ago
On a technical level, it sounds near-trivial... Would need a very strong bizdev posture
- rabuse 5y ago
  Ahem, Ticketmaster owning the contracts to almost every venue.
  - buro9 5y ago
    That's built in to this approach. Ticketmaster owns the contracts to every major venue. Great... there's a hell of a lot of smaller venues, festivals, and other events that can be taken whilst Ticketmaster ignores you and you add significant value. By the time you worry about Ticketmaster or they worry about you, you already have momentum from artists, promoters and fans, and due to the bad press Ticketmaster gets through their tout-resell sites you also have political pressure. Ticketmaster is built in to this plan. Their presence makes the grassroots stuff even more compelling as you don't have to boil the ocean, you figure out how to make it work on a small venue level, city level, and go for scale in the bottom layers. Worst comes to worst, they're forced to consider purchasing you as you take all of the oxygen out of the system that feeds artists and promoters into them.
kall 5y ago
Check out vivenu [0]. I‘m not sure what their data offering includes because I haven‘t actually tried their product, but it sounds like they are thinking in a similar direction to you. [0] https://vivenu.com https://vivenu.com
ticviking 5y ago
Seems to me to be trivial to do. Maybe you could link the ticket to a NFT and put the data on the blockchain for extra hype? I could actually really dig having a wallet with some kind of digital memorabilia of tickets and concerts as well.
- 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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pueblito 5y ago

I think he means discovery of people in a social media sense, not as in discovery of music

squeaky-clean 5y ago
I was a bit confused because the article picks those 3 items as if they're related, but they're just the first items of many from the linked tweet, and most of those aren't related to social media.
karaterobot 5y ago
This article is just recapitulating a series of tweets, with essentially zero value added. And, since the tweets were off-the-cuff and ambiguously worded, it's hard to say what the original author meant. I assumed he was referring to the discovery of music, as in "coming up with a new algorithm or process that recommends music to people does not, by itself, amount to a financially sustainable product". It reminded me of Steve Jobs' reaction to Dropbox: that the entire product was more like a feature that some other product should have. Of course, Jobs was wrong about that, and this guy may also be wrong about his intuition here, even though he is informed and experienced at his business.

oxymoran 5y ago

This advice applies mostly to pop music that involves outside songwriters, marketing, and publishing music, etc. and I agree, the music industry has a tight grip on that sort of “music”. But there is plenty of room for niche products for bands that actually write their own music (ya know, real musicians not dancing, lip syncing performers). Any band can find a producer to work with without a record label and there are plenty of examples of highly successful bands releasing their own albums.

wayoutthere 5y ago
This is less about bands and more about startups building listening platforms. The article is basically saying that data about what people are listening to has almost no value past the present moment. There are already too many places to get that data and it’s basically already stale by the time you aggregate it. Even with “indie” artists (many of whom are ironically mega-millionaires in their own right), there’s a workflow aspect to the promotion side of things. You can do it yourself, but there’s no money in streaming (artists in 2021 are influencers first and foremost who look at streaming as a way to acquire new listeners) so you gotta go through concert promoters, which usually means means hiring a manager to rep you. The money is in the live shows these days — which is why the pandemic hit musicians so hard. But the fundamental problem is still getting people to listen to your stuff, same as it ever was.
meremortals 5y ago
What sorts of niche products? Things like DistroKid?

jasongrishkoff 5y ago

I started two music-related websites: 1) https://www.indieshuffle.com https://www.indieshuffle.com - a music discovery blog 2) https://www.submithub.com https://www.submithub.com - a service that connects musicians with music curators I make my living off these platforms (primarily the second). So in essence, my discovery-centric services are viable products. That said, I'm not sure that's 100% what he was after in the Twitter thread this article was based on: https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513 https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513

nemothekid 5y ago
What I thought "Discovery" was is finding new music given some other music preferences - like Spotify's curated playlists or Song Radios. Submithub doesn't fit that to me - it's more like a social network (and I guess you make your money the same way, via advertising).
underwires 5y ago
I appreciate the counter-take — it seems like almost every take I read on the modern music business is coming from people who don't actually know what the reality on the ground is. And gd submithub is awesome, I have been sucked right in, making submissions, buying credits, rating songs. It's taken up my whole morning, well done!
noja 5y ago
Could you add Airplay to your Indie Shuffle app?
- jasongrishkoff 5y ago
  I kinda thought it already worked?
usrusr 5y ago
Sounds like a perfectly fine mismatch between proper bootstrapping and the mindset of growing investment fueled by some hypothetical value proposition. Is submithub what I think I am seeing? Basically a solution to a spam problem by offering a channel that requires the equivalent of stamps so that senders rate-limit themselves, focusing a bit more on quality over quantity? If that's not a complete misperception I like it very much, great niche-spotting!

jakear 5y ago

Not much substance in the article so allow me a bit of a rant: As someone with both Apple Music and Spotify Premium subscriptions, I think the more accurate take is that discovery is not a solved problem, at least in the algorithmic sense tech companies want. Spotify’s idea of “discovery” is dedicating more and more home page real estate to bullshit podcasts I have no interest in, and showing me endless “upsell” notifications when I’ve already bought their damn product. I have “Product News” and “Spotify News and Offers” notifications off, yet I still find that whenever I open their app I need to close out of some popup telling me about some new bullshit their PM’s want to boost engagement on. They do have a dedicated “discover” tab on the app, but you can’t stream the audio from it to a network speaker so it’s basically useless for me. I will admit their “Daily Mix”’s are decent. Apple Music is better about keeping out of the way, but their generated playlists often feel either boring or stale; good when I want to listen to throwbacks but I can’t recall the last time I heard a new artist I really liked from one. In my opinion, the best source for music discovery continues to be local radio, especially college radio. The good news is that having been a part of college radio pledge drives, I can pretty confidently say that the discovery service provided by local/college radio is indeed a viable product. Just not in the algorithmic world-scale sense tech companies want to see.

nluken 5y ago
Great points. I'd even go a step further and suggest that "discovery" is not really a problem that can or should be solved in the manner that tech companies would like. I ran a radio show in college on my college's station, and from my experience most of that crowd is uninterested in further tech penetration of music.
baran1 5y ago
do you just Shazam the songs you like from the local college radio?
- jakear 5y ago
  That or I check the online playlist.
5y ago

motohagiography 5y ago

The business of music essentially started as a way to sell preaching and alcohol, which in turn monetized real estate investments (bars), and then it was used to sell little blobs of plastic and cardboard with pictures on them, t-shirts, instruments and some lessons, and then maybe matchmaking at concerts and festivals. Music is the sizzle, not the steak. It's the sound of gross margin, but it's not the product. We just keep letting musicians believe it's a problem to be solved and they keep producing music more and more cheaply, while businesses find new tchotchkas to sell into the channel that a listenership creates. Digitization decoupled the attractive sounds from the merch, and now we're trying to find a way to couple them again. Bandcamp has done some very interesting stuff with merchandising. Same with the resurgence of vinyl records as a luxury item. Selling cosmetics and endorsements is the main play for making money with music I think. I looked into whitelablling cannabis products for bands (like the song? experience the complete vibe with X branded prerolls, etc) and this is explicitly banned in legalization legislation because it's such an obviously good idea. There was a dating site that matched people based on their music preferences and playlists, and that was one of the best hypoethesis I've seen tested in a product. I don't think it dominated the way one might have expected it to. I agree with the advice, that discovery isn't a product, and the big question is how to tie music back to merch, or move on to new artforms if that's not going to happen. Otherwise it's like trying to sell math.

CPLX 5y ago
What the fuck are you talking about? Music is one of the most powerful elements of the human experience. It's common to all cultures across all periods of history and it has the capacity to inspire people, enrage them, and cause them to fall into tribal affiliation with each other. A large percentage of the largest mass gatherings of humans that have ever occurred have had music as their draw. Entire generations are defined by their music choices, or even a single music festival. It's something our soul needs, it's as essential to to being alive as love, or sex. Pretty sure the business of music is driven by that need.
- katbyte 5y ago
  Pretty sure this comment is as hyperbolic as the one your replying to. Not everyone has the same feelings toward music you do, some are quite indifferent because we are all quite different. Case in point people who are asexual.

pvarangot 5y ago

I don't agree. I think there's still room for "purpose specific" social media, and in the case of music that would be being able to follow people and plug into their feeds of what they are listening to and what playlists, sets or charts they put up with what tags, and let them stream. Spotify has something like this but the UI is only usable on the desktop client. You can do something like this on Youtube or Twitch and a lot of artists do. There's also sets on Soundcloud. Kinda like what Beatport does but with a more social and better website, and without the gatekeeping and heavy editorializing. I think Last.fm was on the right track with social features but didn't get the streaming right (I think mostly because of IP issues). What some projects like everynoise.com do with Spotify tags for genres is pretty amazing but of course it's missing the social features.

larsiusprime 5y ago

Here's the actual content the blog is summarizing: https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513 https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513

sbuccini 5y ago
@dang should consider making this the actual link
dang 5y ago
Thanks! Changed to that from https://musically.com/2021/12/02/herskowitz-advice-for-music-startups/ https://musically.com/2021/12/02/herskowitz-advice-for-music..., which points to it. Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

swalsh 5y ago

In the world of web 2.0, that's probably true. Paying people in hearts rarely translates to a viable business model. In the world of Web 3.0. It might not be true. Smart contracts builds a way for creators to realize a larger share of the value they create, and for listeners who discover them early to be rewarded as well. In web 3.0, you're not rewarded with hearts, but tokens which can be traded for dollars. This is a really cool project https://mirror.xyz/davidgreenstein.eth/3_TAJe4y8iJsO0JoVbXYw3BM2kM3042b1s6BQf-vWRo https://mirror.xyz/davidgreenstein.eth/3_TAJe4y8iJsO0JoVbXYw...

WhisperingShiba 5y ago
Who is going to host the actual content? This seems like a missed opportunity to create a decentralized music hosting platform, where artists get paid in proportion to bandwidth used. Something like file coin.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sprkwd 5y ago
  Music coin? https://musicoin.org/welcome https://musicoin.org/welcome
  - WhisperingShiba 5y ago
    nice.
claudiulodro 5y ago
What's the difference between a heart and a token? If tokens can be redeemed for dollars, why can not hearts?
- MathYouF 5y ago
  YouTube, Facebook, TikTok already do convert things like hearts into money. The terms by which they do are very arbitrary and seemingly opaque to me, an outsider of that. One undeniable benefit of web3 would be the possibly for immutable and transparent rules for compensation (whether those would be enacted for any given platform is unclear).

orblivion 5y ago

Data point of one: I'm not huge into social features in the first place, but I really appreciated how Rdio handled it. Easily spy on everything your friends are listening to. Homepage is a dynamic looking feed of stuff including random recent stuff your friends listened to or things they listen to a lot. I found a lot of cool music this way and the context of a friend-based recommendation, I think, was valuable to me in a way. I was disappointed that I had to switch to Spotify. Spotify does the bare minimum here. You can only see what your friends are currently listening to. Maybe their history as well, but I don't even feel compelled to check. I hardly even notice it there in the corner of the window. And it only exists on the desktop client, last I checked. I can't even share a song with a friend within Spotify, I have to copy a link and paste it in a chat window, or connect on Facebook (which I don't have). Why wouldn't they want to encourage intra-platform sharing? The only social feature I've found useful is building playlists. It's baffling to me. But obviously they know what they're doing.

amelius 5y ago
You can always Shazam when you are at your friend's place.
- suction 5y ago
  If one's taste is slightly off-mainstream Shazam won't find many of the tracks you aim it at, for instance older electronic music from the 80s and 90s.

kingcharles 5y ago

Confusingly domained web site. I thought this was a link to TikTok predecessor, Musical.ly.

csours 5y ago

From the twitter thread at https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513 https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513 "5. Middlemen are not inherently evil - they are desired if they can provide more value than they extract" This reminds me of bureaucracy - people only call it bureaucracy when it fails or takes special attention or impinges on expected rights or privileges. When it works, there's not really a name for it (it's still bureaucracy)

adamnemecek 5y ago

I’ve been working on an IDE for music composition https://ngrid.io https://ngrid.io. Launching soon.

codeulike 5y ago

This guy had senior positions in both Limewire and Spotify, pretty interesting

pvarangot 5y ago
And on both of them Discovery sucks, I'm not surprised he thinks this way. Not sure if it's a problem of their engineers or executives sucking, quite the contrary, I think it's a problem that needs to first be solved at a smaller scale before it catches up. Music streaming was also a niche thing when not many of us had a portable device that was connected to the Internet.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  Spotify discovery is just a way for them to sell ads. Artists pay to get onto spotify's curated playlists.

marstall 5y ago

> 3. Discovery is not a viable product I guess define viable? The future has got to hold more ways to relate to music than the main apps of Spotify, Apple Music, etc., which push music in a very specific, generic way. Mostly around top 40, opaque personalizations, algorithms and “algotorial”. We’re never getting back to a place where your identity is defined by which record store you go to. But shouldn’t 1000 music apps be blooming right now, a burbling ecosystem of experiences for every kind of listener? (my hat in the ring: https://avant.fm https://avant.fm)

Minor49er 5y ago
Do you track anything other than Spotify (eg: Bandcamp or YouTube)? And is there a way to submit labels?
- marstall 5y ago
  just Spotify for now ... do hope to widen support - to suggest labels -- email me or @ me https://avant.fm/about https://avant.fm/about
nerdponx 5y ago
> But shouldn’t 1000 music apps be blooming right now, a burbling ecosystem of experiences for every kind of listener? Maybe, but where's the money in it?
baran1 5y ago
hat soon to be in the ring https://gliss.fun https://gliss.fun :)

marstall 5y ago

> 1. Music is not “inherently social” - it is just as often anti-social but going to a record store was/is. if you could bend your mind to think of a record store as "music tech" this might suggest a possible place for other humans within finding-music 2.0.

scelerat 5y ago

For myself and a lot of people I know, discovery is nearly as much a reward as the music itself. And there is no comparison between the one- or two-dimensional "discovery" offered by social media and streaming platforms and the rich discovery experiences of any of the following: 1. listening to records with a friend 2. going to a dance club 3. attending a live performance 4. listening alone while reading liner notes 5. pawing through a stack of records at a flea market 6. reading a book So for "discovery" to be a viable product I think it has to somehow be at least as engaging as any of these more traditional ways. That's not to say that various curated playlists and algorithmic suggestions are useless. But it's rare that I'm introduced to something new that I like. The algorithms are good at guessing that if I like the Zombies, I'll like the Turtles (which is true) but it never jumps to (for instance) current, contemporary indie/DIY stuff that is influenced by '60s rock and '70s punk. I make those associations all the time. Indie/college radio DJs do it all the time, but Spotify never does. But again, Spotify is trying to sell millions of subscriptions for people who just want something to listen to in the car or put on at their dinner party. For the "hands-off" experience, it's fine. But discovery by its very nature is not hands-off.

baran1 5y ago
when I learn about an artist or song through a friend, I end up having a mental association between that person and the song/artist which feels good
john61 5y ago
For me, the richest discovery is playing the music on my instrument for myself. The discovery of music in myself through improvisation is the richest possible discovery.
- pvarangot 5y ago
  Besides jamming, for electronic music I also find the joy of discovery using something like Beatport LINK with something like dJay for iPad to listen to music. It's an alternative to passively playing a playlist or playing an album.

gorgoiler 5y ago

The record industry isn’t as alien as you think. Music is inherently human and more people than you think show genuine talent at their chosen musical craft. Hype separates the cream from the milk. Cream here is a value judgment that can best be described as “not milk”, and therein lies the capriciousness of… …marketing. Look around your workplace. Do you see an iota of evidence to suggest that marketing is going on? Welcome to the competitive hell of anything akin to the music industry. You and I are brethren here. Honesty, looking at A&R at least they are open about being 99% hype and 1% talent. Can SNAP say the same?

reggieband 5y ago

I must admit I am a bit surprised that a social network based on music never really took off. If you really squint at it, TicToc kinda sorta is. Instagram made photos social in a way that Facebook never really did. I think taking a photo and applying a filter as a way to express mood/personality is just an easier thing for the average person to do. It also requires almost no license. The user took the photo with their phone, no one else owns it. Even if a short snippet of a commercially created song is a perfect explanation of my current mood, I can't widely share it on a social network without license. I think that revolution could come but it requires something fantastical. It would require a music making device as easy to use as a mobile phone camera. Some method of expressing mood/personality using sound that is effective.

dillondoyle 5y ago
Personally I think it'd be tough to listen to a bunch of moms and tweens singing for 15s trying to go viral ;0 Could be cool to see some simple generative music like pick a genre, a beat, hum a melody and ML composes something. Or a quirky fun karaoke social app. Add remix, duet, group lives like tiktok IG have.
pvarangot 5y ago
> music making device as easy to use as a mobile phone camera The technology is kiiinda there, look at the iPad music production stack. If you have what it takes you can put up a complete track only in your iPad. I think there's at least two big issues: - Iterating on music until "it's good enough" is not as fast as iterating on a picture or video where you can do multiple takes and check exactly what's going on in your screen. - Conveying your feelings with music is kinda like learning a new language, and then becoming a poet. Like for example everyone has access to sharing text now, with your friends or with the world, yet not everyone is making poems or short stories that convey their emotions effectively.
- reggieband 5y ago
  Those kind of issues are really the tip of the iceberg IMO. Writing a 140 character tweet or taking a photo with a modern mobile phone has a higher average quality with minimal effort. Yes, not every tweet is poetry but a huge volume of average tweets are consumable (if not entirely palatable). What I mean to say is, the average person is certainly able to write a better Tweet or take a better Insta snap than that same person could reasonably create a pleasing snippet of audio worth sharing. That would be true even if they took the time and effort to learn to use even the simplest iPad music production stack.

timdaub 5y ago

Blockchains, NFTs and anonymous p2p file transfers gonna be the music industry's final nail in the coffin and it's because of people like that author. They've resistet innovation for to long, so inevitable they're gonna pay the price one day.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

> If you are building tools for DIY artists that can’t grow to support larger teams around the artist as they find success they you have painted yourself into a tiny corner. This is a fine point, but sometimes I wish we weren't always optimizing for infinite scaling everything. Some of my favorite places are tiny corners that are intentionally tiny corners.

ip26 5y ago
That sounds more like basic business principles, e.g. prefer customers who have money over customers who don’t.
- notyourwork 5y ago
  And enable support for customers with deep pockets up front because when a tiny customer's pockets grow they will be quick to complain.

wwarner 5y ago

i think i understand the sentiment— my fb network knows all too well what i’m listening to. OTOH i really like following threads of discovery on Bandcamp. People who’ve bought records that I really like are a great source of new music. And you can also browse BC releases by town, which I’ve found pretty fruitful.

oh_sigh 5y ago

I think I used to work with this guy...a lamp fell like 20' from the ceiling and hit him on the head the first week he was in the office.

jonathankoren 5y ago

I've always wanted a music recommendation system that worked in some sort of latent vector space. Song2Vec if you will. That way you could search for music similar to how people describe it. Something like: metal + Abba = Ghost. I know Pandora used to (still?) was doing this, but the features were never exposed to users, and were very music theory. (Apparently I like vamping, but until I looked it up, I couldn't tell you want it was.)

nelsondev 5y ago
Vectors are generated for songs, and distance (nearest neighbors) is how recommendations are currently generated in major apps. But there isn’t a user friendly way for people to browse multi-dimensional vector space. But the embeddings (vectors) are capable of Kanye West - Jay Z + Frank Ocean , but don’t have a UX to match.

serverlessmom 5y ago

I definitely disagree with the sentiment that generally people don't care what music other people(especially their friends) enjoy. One of my favorite aspects of Spotify is the ability to understand other people better by exploring the unique blending of intellectual and empathic tastes that comes with music.

d3ntb3ev1l 5y ago

The music business is not a viable business model. In other news, the ocean is wet.

8bitsrule 5y ago

* Apart from supporting music-makers, making a business out of music is destructive to music. * Video does not add to music, it turns it into a mere soundtrack to move one or more products. * Recorded music is always inferior to live music performance. * The enslavement of music, like all enslavement, diminishes the culture that practices it.

notyourwork 5y ago
> * Video does not add to music, it turns it into a mere soundtrack to move one or more products. MTV was an entire television network surrounding music videos. I grew up on music videos.

zelienople 5y ago

This man is illiterate.

d--b 5y ago

These points are rather vague and seem to refer to specific things that the OP encountered in his career. I mean: what are we supposed to make of “music is not inherently social”. That sort of implies “I’ve encountered many people trying to build social features into music platforms, and these didn’t seem to provide any value to customers”. Cause otherwise music is definitely a social thing… And the same comment applies to nearly all the points there…

normcoreashore 5y ago

I've been working on a website/app which is designed to optimize the recording and sharing of audio files between musicians in private groups. My friends have been joking that it's an anti-social network of sorts. It's not built to facilitate any mass distribution, and has no option for a publicly subscriptable feed. It just smooths over a few of the sticking points in the record, listen, share(sometimes large file), iteration loop that many collaborative musicians find themselves working within. The project has been a labor of love between friends and I would really love to find a few more users out there! https://www.audiopile.cloud/ https://www.audiopile.cloud/

atoav 5y ago

> 8. If you are building tools for DIY artists that can’t grow to support larger teams around the artist as they find success they you have painted yourself into a tiny corner. Depends on your own goals too. Beeing able to live from what you do while working with people who's work you like, in an environment that is not the mainstream music industry may sound dystopic, but it could totally be the other way around as well. And even if your goal is becoming big, growing out of a certain culture can be useful as well (depending on what your app does), e.g. think about soundcloud.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

goddamnyouryan 5y ago

I made a music player that pulls data or organization purposes from Spotify but uses hidden videos from YouTube to play the actual music, bypassing the licensing issues: https://minotaur.fm https://minotaur.fm