Ask HN: Please Review My New Social Music Website

Clicking the "Browse" link takes me to "Browse Random Files". First, I don't believe that the uploaded songs should be thought of as "files." People want music, tunes, and tracks. "Files" almost makes me weary of having to download something. Second, there needs to be some structure to browsing - by artist, genre, year, popularity, etc. Presenting a person with a few random tracks when your database has 1000s of them makes it difficult for users to find anything specific.

On profiles, the url pattern needs some work. You mention in your blog that you would like bands to say "check us out on Tune To Us." However, if they're uploading their songs and want people to hit their profile they'd have to say, "Check us out at Tune To Us slash profile slash view slash 2934." Perhaps adjusting to something shorter with more significance. A band/user should be more than just a number.

I believe your site's has potential, but it also needs some work to make it useful to the masses. Good luck with it. I'll keep an eye on where it goes.

Your idea seems solid, and the site looks fairly good, considering only 5 days of work.

That said, I found the UI to be a bit cluttered. In particular, the landing page seems a bit unordered, with variable spacing between the various textual lines, and really, just too much there.

If I were you, I'd go a bit more minimalist on the front page. Just my 2¢. Good luck!

You need some sort of search function right on the front page.

I agree using YouTube for sharing music is a bit overkill, but it's nice to be able to just get to YouTube, search for some obscure band, and find random tracks immediately.

By not focusing around search you're forcing your users towards functionality in which they personally upload tracks to send to their friends. I find myself less wanting to upload tracks to share, but rather wanting to share links of stuff that already exists in the system with my friends.

Make that piece of functionality prominent and you're letting visitors easily leverage the work of the people that actually want to be a part of the system, as most users probably just want to be casual users.

I like the idea and it looks really clean and professional. But if your purpose is to allow people to simply listen to things that are otherwise uploaded to YouTube, why not just create an application where you can type in the URL/GUID of a YouTube video (except on your site) and it plays back the audio from that YouTube video, rather than making people upload things to both YouTube and your site.

(Keep in mind I'm not familiar at all with YouTube's API, so I'm not sure if this is either possible or in compliance with their TOS, so if it's not possible, then I say great job, looks good!)

Like what others have said, improve the UI... even with so few songs it was hard to navigate and see the artist/song title...

Also, the ability to que songs

Perhaps you could add a radio stream like Pandora where you can select your preferred genres and have it randomly pick tracks. Once the library grows it would be good way to keep older uploads from being buried.

You're going to get a LOT of copyright infringing uploads, so be sure to cover your ass and put a few safeguards in place.

I like the idea, getting the audio only off videos could be really useful.

However, I agree with unignorant, the UI needs work. When you get more tracks it could become hard to browse.

Plus, have fun when you start getting hit by DMCA notices every day!!

It looks like you require a user to create a login that is specific to tuneto.us in order to use it. If the goal is to share music via social networks, why not provide a way to use Twitter or Facebook to authenticate?

Youtube costs two million dollars a day to run. If you are planning on hosting music, better sites like www.grooveshark.com already exist. Furthermore, everyone is fine with uploading their audio files to Youtube. All the lectures I listen to are through iTunes U along with all other audio files. Indie bands can distribute their music through iTunes using sites like www.cdbaby.com.

The url is horrible.

You want to be Youtube for lectures and music and have a social media aspect and be last.fm with a radio functionality and twitter integration. Your idea is too broad.

Apologies for being overtly negative. You seem to have your idea thought out so I thought I'd give you some perspective.