6 ms·

Show HN: We're building a better music distribution platform

27 points by hartleybrody 14y ago

hartleybrody 14y ago
As someone who started a music blog several years ago, I've worked with tons of artists and used many different "file sharing" websites to distribute music. And they all felt a little lacking. Soundcloud is probably the closest, but their focus on "sounds" as opposed to "music" left much to be desired. We're offering real time stats, geolocation analytics, and a whole bunch more to help artists distribute music and watch it spread. Let me know what you think!
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- lewisflude 14y ago
  Looks great. As a band member, active new-music-finder and song-downloader, I fit within your demographic. If you'd like some feedback and stuff I'd be happy to take a look!
  - brianlovin 14y ago
    Thank you! We'd love some feedback, especially from the artist's perspective as far as our feature set and pricing.
    - lewisflude 14y ago
      As far as the branding goes, MVSIC reminds me of a minimal Bandcamp and I assume the whole V thing is taken directly from Svpply? Now, I'm sure this will resonate with the artist, but the problem you have is the same problem faced by many sites I've seen before. It's partly a branding issue (on the front page, all I see is a globe) and a distribution issue. Do I have to post a link to mvsic somewhere in order to get people in the door? If so, what are the benefits of sending them to mvsic rather than somewhere like Bandcamp? I'm not saying that Bandcamp does what you guys do, better (I'm sure mvsic is awesome, and I'm going to delve into it further after work), but it's not clear what value it actually brings to me as an artist. So, here's some things you can do now. * Make the front page friendlier. Pictures of the product in action. Keep it minimal, that's a great thing you have there, but just take a think about what someone wants to see when they visit mvsic.co. * What IS your USP? Give me it in plain english. (It's definitely a SP but not sure how U it is!). * Maybe think about offering a free tier. I know you've put a reason as to why there isn't one, but I'd urge you to experiment with offering a free trial for a certain amount of downloads, restrictive features etc. For instance, make your account FOR FREE , after first 50 downloads prompt the user to subscribe to your service.
      - hartleybrody 14y ago
        Thanks for the feedback. To answer some of your points: I think our goal is to one day drive our own traffic to an artist's music. Have people coming to the site and clicking around to find stuff. But in the near term, we can't promise we'll drive any of our own traffic to the artist, so we're relying on the artist to spread it. The other thing people have seemed to love is the concept of real-time stats similar to Google analytics. When an artist posts a new release, there's that "moment of truth" where they blast it out to their fans and then wait for a reaction. But it's hard to really get insights into what's happening. Who is listening right now? Where did they come from (referrer)? Where are they located geographically? And then eventually being able to do cool things with all that data to follow up with the right fans with the right message at the right time. We're also aiming to take a lot of things other sites have done (ie, charging money for a download) and making is simpler for the artist to manage. We'll deposit money directly into an artist's stripe account, for example, rather than holding it until they hit a threshold. And we've gone back and forth about offering a free tier dozens of times. Our current solution is to allow anyone to sign up and get their hands on the software for free, but then they have to pay before they can publish a track. Among other things, we're hoping this cuts down on the risk of DMCA violations we have to worry about :) Screenshots coming soon!
        lewisflude 14y ago
        Sounds awesome! I'll talk to the rest of the band about signing up with you guys.
        brianlovin 14y ago
        Thank you! We'll definitely be posting updates on our blog (blog.mvsic.co) in the coming month or two as the service continues to be built.
  - hartleybrody 14y ago
    Definitely! Shoot either of us an email: (hartley and/or brian) at mvsic.co
- prezjordan 14y ago
  Hey Hartley, what blog? (If you don't mind me asking). I built ilictronix, but abandoned it when I started college a few years ago. Now I'm rebranding it [1]. Regardless, I imagine we've crossed paths, I've chatted with many many other music bloggers. Great community, I miss it. [1]: http://ilictronix.herokuapp.com http://ilictronix.herokuapp.com
  - hartleybrody 14y ago
    I started Fresh on Campus[1] during my sophomore year of college, but moved on from that over a year ago. I also unified The College Cartel[2]. We probably have crossed paths! It's a great community to work in -- straddling the line between technology and pop culture. [1] http://www.freshoncampus.com/ http://www.freshoncampus.com/ [2] http://www.thecollegecartel.com/ http://www.thecollegecartel.com/
dclaysmith 14y ago
I don't know if SEO will be a priority for your company--you might be relying on a different source of traffic. If you need SEO, you are hurting yourself by not having "music" in your domain name. Using the "v" might be cool but it isn't going to help your effort.
- hartleybrody 14y ago
  Do you think that "music" is a keyword that people normally use when searching for music? It sounds like a rhetorical question, but I'd argue that it's actually not that important. We're planning on having really SEO-friendly link structure: mvsic.co/artist-name/track-name/ But the majority of search rankings are determined by off-site factors, like how many inbound links a site has. We're definitely hoping to rank well for branded search times (ie, someone looking for a particular artist or song) but we know it'll take awhile before that traffic becomes meaningful to the artist, so we're not advertising it yet.
waxjar 14y ago
I couldn't find an example of an artist page, so it's hard for me to evaluate. I have a question though. How are you ever going to compete to Bandcamp? From what I read, the services sound very similar, except Bandcamp does it all (well, almost all) for free. Plus a lot of artists and consumers are already familiar with Bandcamp, it's pretty much the go-to website unsigned indie artists put their stuff up (either as a free download or paid download).
- hartleybrody 14y ago
  I'd be lying if I told you that I thought Bandcamp was a bad service. In fact, they've been a big influence on what we've decided to build. Them and Soundcloud. How will we ever compete? We obviously won't be able to match them feature for feature at this point -- we're just two guys working on this in our spare time. But I think our positioning is a little different. Plus, both of us have years of experience music blogging so we'll lean on our networks of artists we're in contact with to hopefully drive some initial sing-ups and get some momentum. We have dreams of being the go-to service for this kind of stuff, but we know it's going to be awhile before we get there.
- brianlovin 14y ago
  Hartley and I are on the same page - Bandcamp and Soundcloud are awesome. We just think there's room for a different angle. For example, Bandcamp makes their revenue by taking a % off of all music sales. For this reason, they only let artists give away a certain number of tracks for free (at which point they make artists pay to give away their music for free). That makes sense for Bandcamp, we understand. For Mvsic, we think that free music is a lot more valuable to indie artists who are looking to get their foot in the door, and we're all about supporting unlimited downloading (and selling!) Thanks for your feedback though, we'll keep working!
snsr 14y ago
I understand that you're targeting musicians, but to whom will you sell and distribute their music? The site doesn't currently mention or appeal to listeners. You probably don't (yet) have a lot of music to promote, but a quick visit to Beatport shows what type of attention is paid to audience and content. Some initial feedback on the site's layout: - The layout breaks at medium and narrow widths, particularly the home and FAQ pages - Looks enough like Rdio that I feel compelled to mention it here Good luck!
- hartleybrody 14y ago
  Yah, we're definitely hoping to become a portal for fans discover music. At this early stage though, we can't promise that we'll be able to drive traffic to artists since we're not there yet, so we'd be relying on artists to drive their following to us. Once our content library starts to build up, we'll hopefully transition to a more listener-driven public site. Thanks for the feedback!
- brianlovin 14y ago
  Thanks for the initial feedback (and Rdio comment...weird, hadn't really noticed that). As we move forward, we do plan on using Mvsic as a way for listeners to not only download, but also discover, new music. Hartley and I are both in the music blogging scene, and we're really excited to work with bloggers to figure out how they can use our service and players to make their sites even better.
evmar 14y ago
Here's what your site looks like to me: http://i.imgur.com/frnJd.png http://i.imgur.com/frnJd.png Google Chrome 23.0.1262.0 (Official Build 155673) dev / OS Linux
- brianlovin 14y ago
  Is that on mobile? Looking into it now, thanks for the heads up! This is how it should look, by the way: http://imgur.com/wt9kC http://imgur.com/wt9kC
  - suhastech 14y ago
    Same issue as evmar, Chrome, OS X Mountain Lion
    - DanielStraight 14y ago
      Same. Firefox 15, XP.
      - brianlovin 14y ago
        Thanks for the heads up - we'll work on fixing this mobile view issue. Is the site looking (more) normal when you're viewing on a wider browser?
        hackmiester 14y ago
        These people clearly stated they were using desktop browsers... So am I, and here is what I see: http://puu.sh/161Xi http://puu.sh/161Xi Firefox 16 edit: Maybe it is a font issue. I am not loading the fonts I see in your screenshot.
        brianlovin 14y ago
        Yeah, that's a fallback issue on our end - thanks for the screenshot.
jonathanjaeger 14y ago
The misspelling and the .co URL instead of .com is going to hurt you so bad. When consumers choose a brand to trust, a lot goes in the name. You might be able to prove out an MVP of a product but you won't go big on that domain name.
- hartleybrody 14y ago
  We're actually pretty happy with the name choice. Mvsic should be an easy term to rank for, while also having connotations of "music" to a human reader. Plus, we think it's simple and elegant, which describes the service. See also: http://svbtle.com http://svbtle.com and http://svpply.com http://svpply.com
  - hackmiester 14y ago
    Maybe the name is okay, but this is gonna kill you: http://www.mvsic.com/ http://www.mvsic.com/
    - brianlovin 14y ago
      It'll be a hurdle, for sure, but not too much different than The Hype Machine being at hypem.com
      - hackmiester 14y ago
        Not quite the same. "Hey, this site is music but with a V instead of a U. Check it out." I go to http://www.mvsic.com/ http://www.mvsic.com/ and it's a Go Daddy parking page. Oh well. User lost. You and I don't think like this, but many users do.
  - eclipxe 14y ago
    Yeah, no. The "u" as a "v" thing is stupid and cliché
WiseWeasel 14y ago
I have a hard time believing that many indie artists are willing to pay $15/mo for access to a distribution platform with no traction with music purchasers or listeners. That's putting all the risk on them. I'd structure it more like "we get the first $15 of your earnings on our service each month". That said, welcome competitor! I admire you guys taking a stab at this problem; it is one that needs solving.
- brianlovin 14y ago
  Thanks for the feedback :) Hartley and I actually have some good connections in the music blogging space, and we're working on building some tools that we think will help artists and bloggers work together. For example, right now bloggers either: a) use an artist's embeddable player in order to post a song. They can't track plays/downloads coming from their site or their impact on an artist (I contributed 20% of their downloads, for example). b) upload their own versions of audio files so that they can track plays/downloads. But now the artist can't see the reach of their music. I think we can fix this.
  - WiseWeasel 14y ago
    So does that mean that you would sell access to the analytics data for a song listing to both the artist and the blogger? Would the blogger's data be limited to traffic on their own site? Does the artist control who gets access to their data?
    - brianlovin 14y ago
      Those are good questions, and ones we're also working through at the moment!
bdunn 14y ago
Some thoughts about your pricing... The relatively minor jump in pricing from manager -> label really confuses me. I'd think a label should be paying in the thousands per month, not just 6x more than an individual artist.
- brianlovin 14y ago
  Really good point. Right now we're figuring out what prices make the most sense, and we're talking to different artists/managers/label owners about how we can meet their needs.
jmathai 14y ago
CASH Music: http://cashmusic.org/ http://cashmusic.org/ CASH Music is a nonprofit organization that builds open source digital tools for musicians and labels.
_hiss 14y ago
As a musician and owner of a record label, I closed out immediately once I saw the generic site design. Not saying it has to be super hip or whatever, but, trivial as it is, I'd like to see some semblance of taste or creative spirit for lack of anything else to go on.

27 points by hartleybrody 14y ago

As someone who started a music blog several years ago, I've worked with tons of artists and used many different "file sharing" websites to distribute music. And they all felt a little lacking. Soundcloud is probably the closest, but their focus on "sounds" as opposed to "music" left much to be desired. We're offering real time stats, geolocation analytics, and a whole bunch more to help artists distribute music and watch it spread. Let me know what you think!

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
lewisflude 14y ago
Looks great. As a band member, active new-music-finder and song-downloader, I fit within your demographic. If you'd like some feedback and stuff I'd be happy to take a look!
- brianlovin 14y ago
  Thank you! We'd love some feedback, especially from the artist's perspective as far as our feature set and pricing.
  - lewisflude 14y ago
    As far as the branding goes, MVSIC reminds me of a minimal Bandcamp and I assume the whole V thing is taken directly from Svpply? Now, I'm sure this will resonate with the artist, but the problem you have is the same problem faced by many sites I've seen before. It's partly a branding issue (on the front page, all I see is a globe) and a distribution issue. Do I have to post a link to mvsic somewhere in order to get people in the door? If so, what are the benefits of sending them to mvsic rather than somewhere like Bandcamp? I'm not saying that Bandcamp does what you guys do, better (I'm sure mvsic is awesome, and I'm going to delve into it further after work), but it's not clear what value it actually brings to me as an artist. So, here's some things you can do now. * Make the front page friendlier. Pictures of the product in action. Keep it minimal, that's a great thing you have there, but just take a think about what someone wants to see when they visit mvsic.co. * What IS your USP? Give me it in plain english. (It's definitely a SP but not sure how U it is!). * Maybe think about offering a free tier. I know you've put a reason as to why there isn't one, but I'd urge you to experiment with offering a free trial for a certain amount of downloads, restrictive features etc. For instance, make your account FOR FREE , after first 50 downloads prompt the user to subscribe to your service.
    - hartleybrody 14y ago
      Thanks for the feedback. To answer some of your points: I think our goal is to one day drive our own traffic to an artist's music. Have people coming to the site and clicking around to find stuff. But in the near term, we can't promise we'll drive any of our own traffic to the artist, so we're relying on the artist to spread it. The other thing people have seemed to love is the concept of real-time stats similar to Google analytics. When an artist posts a new release, there's that "moment of truth" where they blast it out to their fans and then wait for a reaction. But it's hard to really get insights into what's happening. Who is listening right now? Where did they come from (referrer)? Where are they located geographically? And then eventually being able to do cool things with all that data to follow up with the right fans with the right message at the right time. We're also aiming to take a lot of things other sites have done (ie, charging money for a download) and making is simpler for the artist to manage. We'll deposit money directly into an artist's stripe account, for example, rather than holding it until they hit a threshold. And we've gone back and forth about offering a free tier dozens of times. Our current solution is to allow anyone to sign up and get their hands on the software for free, but then they have to pay before they can publish a track. Among other things, we're hoping this cuts down on the risk of DMCA violations we have to worry about :) Screenshots coming soon!
      - lewisflude 14y ago
        Sounds awesome! I'll talk to the rest of the band about signing up with you guys.
        brianlovin 14y ago
        Thank you! We'll definitely be posting updates on our blog (blog.mvsic.co) in the coming month or two as the service continues to be built.
- hartleybrody 14y ago
  Definitely! Shoot either of us an email: (hartley and/or brian) at mvsic.co
prezjordan 14y ago
Hey Hartley, what blog? (If you don't mind me asking). I built ilictronix, but abandoned it when I started college a few years ago. Now I'm rebranding it [1]. Regardless, I imagine we've crossed paths, I've chatted with many many other music bloggers. Great community, I miss it. [1]: http://ilictronix.herokuapp.com http://ilictronix.herokuapp.com
- hartleybrody 14y ago
  I started Fresh on Campus[1] during my sophomore year of college, but moved on from that over a year ago. I also unified The College Cartel[2]. We probably have crossed paths! It's a great community to work in -- straddling the line between technology and pop culture. [1] http://www.freshoncampus.com/ http://www.freshoncampus.com/ [2] http://www.thecollegecartel.com/ http://www.thecollegecartel.com/

dclaysmith 14y ago

I don't know if SEO will be a priority for your company--you might be relying on a different source of traffic. If you need SEO, you are hurting yourself by not having "music" in your domain name. Using the "v" might be cool but it isn't going to help your effort.

hartleybrody 14y ago
Do you think that "music" is a keyword that people normally use when searching for music? It sounds like a rhetorical question, but I'd argue that it's actually not that important. We're planning on having really SEO-friendly link structure: mvsic.co/artist-name/track-name/ But the majority of search rankings are determined by off-site factors, like how many inbound links a site has. We're definitely hoping to rank well for branded search times (ie, someone looking for a particular artist or song) but we know it'll take awhile before that traffic becomes meaningful to the artist, so we're not advertising it yet.

waxjar 14y ago

I couldn't find an example of an artist page, so it's hard for me to evaluate. I have a question though. How are you ever going to compete to Bandcamp? From what I read, the services sound very similar, except Bandcamp does it all (well, almost all) for free. Plus a lot of artists and consumers are already familiar with Bandcamp, it's pretty much the go-to website unsigned indie artists put their stuff up (either as a free download or paid download).

hartleybrody 14y ago
I'd be lying if I told you that I thought Bandcamp was a bad service. In fact, they've been a big influence on what we've decided to build. Them and Soundcloud. How will we ever compete? We obviously won't be able to match them feature for feature at this point -- we're just two guys working on this in our spare time. But I think our positioning is a little different. Plus, both of us have years of experience music blogging so we'll lean on our networks of artists we're in contact with to hopefully drive some initial sing-ups and get some momentum. We have dreams of being the go-to service for this kind of stuff, but we know it's going to be awhile before we get there.
brianlovin 14y ago
Hartley and I are on the same page - Bandcamp and Soundcloud are awesome. We just think there's room for a different angle. For example, Bandcamp makes their revenue by taking a % off of all music sales. For this reason, they only let artists give away a certain number of tracks for free (at which point they make artists pay to give away their music for free). That makes sense for Bandcamp, we understand. For Mvsic, we think that free music is a lot more valuable to indie artists who are looking to get their foot in the door, and we're all about supporting unlimited downloading (and selling!) Thanks for your feedback though, we'll keep working!

snsr 14y ago

I understand that you're targeting musicians, but to whom will you sell and distribute their music? The site doesn't currently mention or appeal to listeners. You probably don't (yet) have a lot of music to promote, but a quick visit to Beatport shows what type of attention is paid to audience and content. Some initial feedback on the site's layout: - The layout breaks at medium and narrow widths, particularly the home and FAQ pages - Looks enough like Rdio that I feel compelled to mention it here Good luck!

hartleybrody 14y ago
Yah, we're definitely hoping to become a portal for fans discover music. At this early stage though, we can't promise that we'll be able to drive traffic to artists since we're not there yet, so we'd be relying on artists to drive their following to us. Once our content library starts to build up, we'll hopefully transition to a more listener-driven public site. Thanks for the feedback!
brianlovin 14y ago
Thanks for the initial feedback (and Rdio comment...weird, hadn't really noticed that). As we move forward, we do plan on using Mvsic as a way for listeners to not only download, but also discover, new music. Hartley and I are both in the music blogging scene, and we're really excited to work with bloggers to figure out how they can use our service and players to make their sites even better.

evmar 14y ago

Here's what your site looks like to me: http://i.imgur.com/frnJd.png http://i.imgur.com/frnJd.png Google Chrome 23.0.1262.0 (Official Build 155673) dev / OS Linux

brianlovin 14y ago
Is that on mobile? Looking into it now, thanks for the heads up! This is how it should look, by the way: http://imgur.com/wt9kC http://imgur.com/wt9kC
- suhastech 14y ago
  Same issue as evmar, Chrome, OS X Mountain Lion
  - DanielStraight 14y ago
    Same. Firefox 15, XP.
    - brianlovin 14y ago
      Thanks for the heads up - we'll work on fixing this mobile view issue. Is the site looking (more) normal when you're viewing on a wider browser?
      - hackmiester 14y ago
        These people clearly stated they were using desktop browsers... So am I, and here is what I see: http://puu.sh/161Xi http://puu.sh/161Xi Firefox 16 edit: Maybe it is a font issue. I am not loading the fonts I see in your screenshot.
        brianlovin 14y ago
        Yeah, that's a fallback issue on our end - thanks for the screenshot.

jonathanjaeger 14y ago

The misspelling and the .co URL instead of .com is going to hurt you so bad. When consumers choose a brand to trust, a lot goes in the name. You might be able to prove out an MVP of a product but you won't go big on that domain name.

hartleybrody 14y ago
We're actually pretty happy with the name choice. Mvsic should be an easy term to rank for, while also having connotations of "music" to a human reader. Plus, we think it's simple and elegant, which describes the service. See also: http://svbtle.com http://svbtle.com and http://svpply.com http://svpply.com
- hackmiester 14y ago
  Maybe the name is okay, but this is gonna kill you: http://www.mvsic.com/ http://www.mvsic.com/
  - brianlovin 14y ago
    It'll be a hurdle, for sure, but not too much different than The Hype Machine being at hypem.com
    - hackmiester 14y ago
      Not quite the same. "Hey, this site is music but with a V instead of a U. Check it out." I go to http://www.mvsic.com/ http://www.mvsic.com/ and it's a Go Daddy parking page. Oh well. User lost. You and I don't think like this, but many users do.
- eclipxe 14y ago
  Yeah, no. The "u" as a "v" thing is stupid and cliché

WiseWeasel 14y ago

I have a hard time believing that many indie artists are willing to pay $15/mo for access to a distribution platform with no traction with music purchasers or listeners. That's putting all the risk on them. I'd structure it more like "we get the first $15 of your earnings on our service each month". That said, welcome competitor! I admire you guys taking a stab at this problem; it is one that needs solving.

brianlovin 14y ago
Thanks for the feedback :) Hartley and I actually have some good connections in the music blogging space, and we're working on building some tools that we think will help artists and bloggers work together. For example, right now bloggers either: a) use an artist's embeddable player in order to post a song. They can't track plays/downloads coming from their site or their impact on an artist (I contributed 20% of their downloads, for example). b) upload their own versions of audio files so that they can track plays/downloads. But now the artist can't see the reach of their music. I think we can fix this.
- WiseWeasel 14y ago
  So does that mean that you would sell access to the analytics data for a song listing to both the artist and the blogger? Would the blogger's data be limited to traffic on their own site? Does the artist control who gets access to their data?
  - brianlovin 14y ago
    Those are good questions, and ones we're also working through at the moment!

bdunn 14y ago

Some thoughts about your pricing... The relatively minor jump in pricing from manager -> label really confuses me. I'd think a label should be paying in the thousands per month, not just 6x more than an individual artist.

brianlovin 14y ago
Really good point. Right now we're figuring out what prices make the most sense, and we're talking to different artists/managers/label owners about how we can meet their needs.

jmathai 14y ago

CASH Music: http://cashmusic.org/ http://cashmusic.org/ CASH Music is a nonprofit organization that builds open source digital tools for musicians and labels.

_hiss 14y ago

As a musician and owner of a record label, I closed out immediately once I saw the generic site design. Not saying it has to be super hip or whatever, but, trivial as it is, I'd like to see some semblance of taste or creative spirit for lack of anything else to go on.