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The problem with these "never heard before" apps (there was one prior... I can't recall the name) is that they effectively end up just playing musical spam. If

The problem with these "never heard before" apps (there was one prior... I can't recall the name) is that they effectively end up just playing musical spam. If you look around at the bottom of the barrel you have all these horrible companies that have either purchased rights to songs, or recorded cover versions, all under the guise of being the real thing. It's basically the Walmart DVD bin, or the "Just like CK One" perfume. If there was something that played only legit, small label stuff by artists who are trying to make great music (not a company trying to make a quick buck), then that would be fantastic.

Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
shameless plug time We're not an all-you-can-eat type of service, but with BoomboxFM[1] we've been working on something like this. Every week we send you 3 songs from 3 different independent / undiscovered artists, personalized to your genre preferences. Songs are free to download. That's it, nice and easy. We're one week from demo day in our accelerator (TSF in N.C.) and actually use the "4mm songs have never been played on Spotify" in the opening of our pitch. What a lot of people are missing right now - amidst all the fighting about crappy payouts from streaming services and still shady labels - is that even if the payouts were amazing the lesser-known artists still need fans to know about them in order to get plays. As David Foster Wallace said (paraphrasing), "without gatekeepers/curators, we're all gonna be bodysurfing through shit 95% of the time online." [1] http://www.boombox.fm/ http://www.boombox.fm/
- quinndupont 11y ago
  Looks awesome. I'm signing up now. (Unsolicited advice: the green "Click here to join!" call to action has a kind of "spammy" feel to it... I can't quite put my finger on it, but I feel like between the color and the font and the generic wording I feel like I'm about about to sign up with a spam service. The orange call to action below it is much better. My 2c.)
  - petejodo 11y ago
    I agree. I think it's also because the button is a non-flat design on a rather flat designed page and sticks out
  - Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
    I can't argue with that! And appreciate the feedback. The site is actually built on a template service (Strikingly), so we're a bit hindered right now. Working on that, though. LOTS of things we'd like to improve upon with the site and overall product, but we're tackling things in our wheelhouse first (I'm a marketing/BD guy, non tech). Enjoy the tunes!
- realusername 11y ago
  Thanks for putting this here ! It looks really good and it's exactly the kind of service I was looking for, I'm subscribing ! (If I can provide some feedback, the Join button looks a bit strange, it looks a bit like some advertising so I did not even see it first)
- Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
  TIL - our join button sucks. Good to know, will get on that! Thanks guys.
tjr 11y ago
Maybe a better approach would be, instead of the songs that nobody has listened to at all, show us the songs that have been played 1-10 times, or 1-20, or 10-20, or... Might help weed out the worst of the worst, while still helping to discover something that is mostly unknown.
IanCal 11y ago
Not necessarily small labels but the subreddit "listentothis" has been my source of interesting music for a while now. Its aim is new / overlooked artists. There is a "radio" like station as well which plays each submission in turn. https://www.reddit.com/r/listentothis https://www.reddit.com/r/listentothis http://radd.it/r/listentothis/music http://radd.it/r/listentothis/music
- dkurth 11y ago
  Since Bandcamp does not have a "random song" feature, I built a page that will let you hear a randomly selected album. I have a scraper that runs nightly to pull newly added albums, although it's not perfect (e.g., I never clean up deleted albums, but that's hardly ever been a problem). I call it Randcamp: http://dx3x.com/randcamp/ http://dx3x.com/randcamp/
Joeri 11y ago
I just tried it. The first song was obscure normandic trumpet music, the second was indian pop, and the third was an opera. Didn't come across any musical spam, unless the indian song was a cover.

Disruptive_Dave 11y ago

shameless plug time We're not an all-you-can-eat type of service, but with BoomboxFM[1] we've been working on something like this. Every week we send you 3 songs from 3 different independent / undiscovered artists, personalized to your genre preferences. Songs are free to download. That's it, nice and easy. We're one week from demo day in our accelerator (TSF in N.C.) and actually use the "4mm songs have never been played on Spotify" in the opening of our pitch. What a lot of people are missing right now - amidst all the fighting about crappy payouts from streaming services and still shady labels - is that even if the payouts were amazing the lesser-known artists still need fans to know about them in order to get plays. As David Foster Wallace said (paraphrasing), "without gatekeepers/curators, we're all gonna be bodysurfing through shit 95% of the time online." [1] http://www.boombox.fm/ http://www.boombox.fm/

quinndupont 11y ago
Looks awesome. I'm signing up now. (Unsolicited advice: the green "Click here to join!" call to action has a kind of "spammy" feel to it... I can't quite put my finger on it, but I feel like between the color and the font and the generic wording I feel like I'm about about to sign up with a spam service. The orange call to action below it is much better. My 2c.)
- petejodo 11y ago
  I agree. I think it's also because the button is a non-flat design on a rather flat designed page and sticks out
- Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
  I can't argue with that! And appreciate the feedback. The site is actually built on a template service (Strikingly), so we're a bit hindered right now. Working on that, though. LOTS of things we'd like to improve upon with the site and overall product, but we're tackling things in our wheelhouse first (I'm a marketing/BD guy, non tech). Enjoy the tunes!
realusername 11y ago
Thanks for putting this here ! It looks really good and it's exactly the kind of service I was looking for, I'm subscribing ! (If I can provide some feedback, the Join button looks a bit strange, it looks a bit like some advertising so I did not even see it first)
Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
TIL - our join button sucks. Good to know, will get on that! Thanks guys.

tjr 11y ago

Maybe a better approach would be, instead of the songs that nobody has listened to at all, show us the songs that have been played 1-10 times, or 1-20, or 10-20, or... Might help weed out the worst of the worst, while still helping to discover something that is mostly unknown.

IanCal 11y ago

Not necessarily small labels but the subreddit "listentothis" has been my source of interesting music for a while now. Its aim is new / overlooked artists. There is a "radio" like station as well which plays each submission in turn. https://www.reddit.com/r/listentothis https://www.reddit.com/r/listentothis http://radd.it/r/listentothis/music http://radd.it/r/listentothis/music

dkurth 11y ago
Since Bandcamp does not have a "random song" feature, I built a page that will let you hear a randomly selected album. I have a scraper that runs nightly to pull newly added albums, although it's not perfect (e.g., I never clean up deleted albums, but that's hardly ever been a problem). I call it Randcamp: http://dx3x.com/randcamp/ http://dx3x.com/randcamp/

Joeri 11y ago

I just tried it. The first song was obscure normandic trumpet music, the second was indian pop, and the third was an opera. Didn't come across any musical spam, unless the indian song was a cover.