Earbits (YC W11) Brings A Twist: Online Radio Where Bands Can Pay For Playtime | Hacker News Reader

Earbits (YC W11) Brings A Twist: Online Radio Where Bands Can Pay For Playtime

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84 pointspitdesi54 comments

How is that an advantage for listeners? Payola was made illegal for a good reason. Pay to play live venues are treated with derision by music fans. I really don't see why any music fan would choose this over a model where music is chosen based on merit alone.

In case you're wondering what 9999 is talking about (like I was) check this wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

Hey 9999...I understand your skepticism. The advantage for listeners is no commercials or fees, and flexibility and features that are prohibited when you rely on statutory licenses. We haven't seen that current outlets rely on merit alone, and we're tired of seeing bands waste money on fliers just hoping someone goes home and listens to them online. I think you'll see that the artists on our platform are incredibly talented and high quality, and when you get your first free album by hitting one of our site's triggers, you'll see how working direct with artists benefits listeners.

Ironically one of the few services I happily pay for is Pandora in order to listen ad free. I don't really find the earbits model any better.

Users, he explains, will be exposed to high quality music they haven’t heard yet, and bands obviously get the exposure they’re fighting so hard to find.

But the richest bands don't guarantee high quality music. In fact, as mainstream music suggests, often it's the contrary. Similar situation with low budget vs. high budget movies.

Hey Sev,

Our algorithm, much like Adwords, will be a combination of ratings, relevancy to a particular user, and only after those things help determine a fit would their bid affect anything. Also, a band who spends more may be introduced to more people, but will not necessarily saturate the experience for a single user, as is the case in regular radio. Also, we don't sell pipe dreams to artists with low quality material. Everybody has to be approved, and I think you'll find that even if you don't love everything you hear on Earbits, it is all high quality, professional-grade music.

That sounds good. It's just that it's easy to get carried away with an algorithm you own which produces money by "selling out" and doing what your highest bidders want you to do in this kind of business. As long as it's monitored and done in such a way to make money and be appealing to non-mainstream as well as mainstream styles, this will be very useful.

Yeah...we're forcing ourselves to focus on quality by not charging the band until someone has listened to 30 seconds. If we get a lot of skips, we lose money, so we're forced to focus on the right matches and high quality music. We want to do this right.

Is there any permissions/information you guys don't request on Facebook Connect? The long list scared me off.

Most of it sounds like we do more than we do, but all of it is necessary up front for the things we enable after you connect. I can assure you that we don't do anything that isn't about making your music experience better.

I understand the hesitation, we try to avoid asking for anything that we don't need to make the user experience better. We don't post anything without you explicitly performing a "share to facebook" action, so you can rest easy on that front. And we ask for your profile info so that we can see what bands you already like.

That's good to know. I still wish Facebook offered a feature where you could explain why you need a permission, or better yet, let you pick which ones you agree to instead of all or nothing.

As an old guitar player I really have a gut aversion to this whole idea.

I find trying to wring cash out of, what are likely, struggling indie artists sucks.

As a consumer I do not want crappy music by the bands that paid the most in my stream.

Hey Mike, I hear you...my partner and I spent thousands of dollars trying "traditional" music marketing tactics - fliers, ads in the LA Weekly, and all of the normal social media that bands use now. What I am sure you know is that nothing sells an artist more than hearing their music and deciding for yourself if you like it. If a good artists gets into rotation enough on radio, they will build a fan base. We can play a band to a targeted user for $0.01 and that's plenty for what we need to operate. That's 1/15th the cost of a flier. We're so committed to treating artists right that, if that user skips you in the first 30 seconds, you're not charged.

And in terms of the quality, we also don't sell pipe dreams to bands who will not benefit. We focus just as much on listeners as bands. Fire up a channel. You may not like everything you hear, but there is no "crappy music" on Earbits.

Isn't this exactly what we already have with Clear Channel?

Nah. Clear Channel has a very complex legal system to maneuver so they don't look like they're accepting Payola. Earbits simplifies the payola scheme quite a bit.

Agreed. With personalized streams for every listener, bands with a $10 budget can have the same (albeit scaled down) opportunity as someone with $1000. With terrestrial markets there's no way to start small. Additionally, anyone with a split focus on advertisers and an attempt at this model are not going to compete with someone who has 100% focus on treating artists like clients.

You realize that's not a compliment, right? Payola was terrible for music and terrible for musicians. On behalf of myself and all the other musicians I promote: You're hurting music.

It is not true. Distribution and promotion is broken at the moment. By helping find the right audience and right sound $10 at a time, you don't have to be 50cent to evolve your music in the street.

If you are promoting music, is there any reason why you wouldn't use earbits to test new audiences?

Because pay-for-play is the very worst of the music industry and I won't support it in any form.

On one hand, pay-for-play is repulsive because it allows deep pocketed promoters to promote bands ahead of others. Is this why it is repugnant?

Playing the devil's advocate here:

From a business sense, pay-for-play is like advertising, isn't it? It is a way of building an audience.

In the end, there are audiences that radio stations have built up, and pay-for-play may be cheaper than plastering the streets with posters, or paying promoters, or touring, which is just as expensive.

One equivalent in the search engine world is SEO vs PPC listings. Each has its cost. If you didn't know the people looking for a particular genre of music, but somebody did, and they did it as a business - i.e. quit their jobs, put in risk capital, why wouldn't you pay them for the information?

Thanks. As someone who managed $48M in performance marketing, I was destroyed to see what musicians go through when I started promoting my album. I used to drop $2 CD's off at head shops because I thought stoners would like our music. People can complain about this all they want, but we believe this will be the PPC of music, and if I can play someone's music to 200 people for the same $2 that we spent giving it to one person, I will sleep very well at night.

Congratulations. It is an unintuitive solution to a persistent problem. Is it serendipity that you were doing PPC and making music at the same time? Most broke artists wouldn't have thought about spending money this way to get exposure, but this can really solve a very fundamental problem.

I didn't mean it either way. Payola existed and still exists in various forms; It's ingrained in the music business as a form of promotion. I would, however, like to see it be a bit more transparent, though.

Payola wasn't terrible for the musicians who got played. We're making it a model that a brand new band with no following can buy into. For $10 we can play a band 1000 times. They usually get less than 100 fliers for that, most of which go into the garbage. People should protest Kinko's....not us.

Rape isn't terrible for the people who do the raping. Thanks for making the industry just a little bit worse.

Only one category for singer-songwriter? and only three (two of which are quite similar) for electronic? How does the genre-list expand? How big (and who!) is your editorial staff? Also, are online sales through Amazon only?

I'm not complaining as a listener, because my listening needs are already very well met. But as a musician and somebody who would really like to recommend Earbits to other musicians, this information is very important to me.

Hey grncdr! As you can imagine, when you are building a catalog from scratch and working with every label and artist directly, you can't just fast forward to a massive selection. We wish we could! Almost every artist has been directly recruited, and every album is classified by our team. You can read all about them on http://www.earbits.com/play/#/about_us

This has THE best sharing flow of any site I have ever seen. If you actually like making money check their site out. I'm absolutely rolling it out across our products in the next whack of updates.

Bar at the bottom showing friends' faces, filter to find someone in particular, requiring like to share, posting to wall instead of Newsfeed- perfection.

Thanks! Note: You are liking the band when you do that, not us. Bands are going to LOVE us. ;)

Congrats guys. I have been very impressed with the quality of the music. Going in I figured the music was going to be crap but you do a great job of filtering. Goes to show how much good music is out there that doesn't get played through the typical channels.

Thanks! You will definitely hear music you know, though. I think you'll be surprised who is trusting us to deliver them value.

I don't know that I honestly would have given much weight to this idea if I'd heard it pitched to me, but as they've already got 1300 artists across 90 labels, I'd say it's obvious that I'd have been in the wrong.

I don't know if they'll ever get the bigger labels, and for my money, I hope they don't. I mean, I'd love to see that nut get cracked, because honestly, something like this COULD (I don't think it will) be the end of the RIAA. But if that happens, then I'll be just as sad as I was when eMusic turned coat and started bringing in bigger fish.

They've got 1300 artists... but so far no one is paying. So that part of the model remains to be seen.

If they can build a huge audience, I'm sure some artists will pay... will certainly be interesting to see how it all plays out (and if any major bands get discovered through Earbits)!

I'm just kind of unclear as to how they'll build a huge audience, given that any pay-for-play scheme, as a rule, is not going to be playing the music that I most want to hear.

I guess I'm wondering, where's the filter? What will make the music that I hear at this site better, on average, than the music at any other site?

Because it sure as hell isn't the fact that artists will be able to pay for exposure. IMO there's just no way around it, pay-for-play is a listener-hostile dynamic, there's absolutely no way it could improve the quality of what I listen to.

Actually, maybe that's a lie, there's one tiny way it can help: if pay-for-play is limited only to the acts that have not had enough exposure for the "market" to figure out whether they're any good, then it can improve what I hear by letting the artists pay to make sure that they've actually been listened to by enough people to be fairly judged. The real problem with payola schemes is when artists that have already had plenty of exposure can use money to make sure that they have more exposure than even the organically successful acts - this is something that Earbits needs to make sure it avoids, and if it is successful, this will mean some tough decisions, because they'll have to start turning down money that their biggest customers want to give them ("What's that, Mr. Combs? You want to buy up 90% of our play time for the next two months and fill it with your label's shitty music, and you'll pay us six times what we made last year? No thanks, that would be unfair.").

In any case, I think more needs to be done to figure out a compelling pitch to users. The payola side of it is not the right thing to emphasize - it's going to offend musicians, and it's not going to attract users.

Hey Bermanoid... We understand all of these dynamics and we know that we have to prove we're not going to go down that route. What you're describing would be very short-sighted of us. Look at it this way, what we're proposing is very much like Google Adwords. You wouldn't put an irrelevant product next to a keyword for the money because nobody will click on it. To enforce the right incentives on us, we're making 30 seconds the "click" for our artists. If someone skips your music within the first 30 seconds, you don't pay, and we lose money. Further, if we do what you're describing, we kill our audience. We're in this for the long haul. We understand there will be skepticism. We look forward to proving ourselves and I think if you check out our credentials, you'll see that this isn't our first rodeo.

Wow, I would invest in this. It is an excellent idea, and it will further disrupt the existing music industry for the better.

One of the few good things about the existing music business is that you technically can't just buy your way onto the airwaves.

Am I just blind or is there no volume control?

What kind of computer do you have? It's either on the front or the side.

But seriously, I told the team we needed one and they were like, we have more important things to worry about. Haha! We're on it asap! Thanks for the ammo!

Ha! Thanks. Always prefer to do it in software if I can. I guess my computer has a hardware control, somewhere, but I never use it.

I am on a 1024x768 laptop and apart from the horizontal scrollbar being a little annoying, I can only see "Ch" something link in the top-right of the screen.

Its your choice as to what screen sizes you support, but it seems possible to accommodate dinosaurs like me with little extra effort.

Nice site otherwise, listening now.

The design is headed in a good direction but there are definitely quite a few little things like this that could be improved. The top bar can still be fixed position at the top without requiring an enormous minimum width. Similarly, the idea of showing only the portion of the image that will fit on the visible page is good, but the calculations are a bit off I think so it ends up looking a bit like a mistake.

I just sent my friends in Stellarondo over there. If you're into great indie folk music you should check them out: http://stellarondo.bandcamp.com/

Your friends in Stellarondo remind me of Albert Castiglia, and I can't think of many things more complimentary than that.

Thanks for the link.

Edit: Still, thanks for the link, but I'd apparently had another tab behind that one that I was actually listening to when I turned my sound on.

They sound absolutely nothing like Albert Castiglia, however, I'm still really enjoying it, just in a completely different way.

I'v been in many original bands and I can tell you as a fellow musician and band leader that this will not work. If your business model is based on the bands paying you...good luck. We're broke from day 1!

I hear where you're coming from but bands spend money on fliers that cost $0.15 a piece, just hoping you'll go home and listen to their music online. We know, because we have done all of that stuff for our own band.

For $0.15, we can play you for 15 people who love your genre of music and put links to your show's box office right there on the homepage. That means for $15, we can play you for 1,500. You won't find better value anywhere, and if you can't sell one $15 concert ticket with the links to the box office right there, God help us all!

I see what your trying to do but I just don't think it will work. Your tapping the wrong stone. There's always going to be more fans then bands. You should be finding a way to bring new music to your fans and bringing new fans to your bands. Figure that out and you will have something no one else has. That has value.

But labels aren't. The promotional reach is the whole point of signing away your music to a record deal. What will be interesting is if Earbits can turn payola into actual record sales. In radio or elsewhere paid music promotion exists, the evidence of conversion rates has always been fuzzy.

No title tag at http://earbits.com/ ?

Looks great though and I listened to a fair few songs. Quality is pretty decent for a random music feed.

Seems like you all have quite a few employees! I was under the assumption that YC accepted groups of 2 - 4 founders...

It's easy to build an awesome team when you have a vision people can get behind. Look at our advisors...they are some serious heavy hitters. ;)

Congrats! Wish there was an alternate to FB connect to save songs...

There will be soon. Thanks for the feedback.

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