Earbits (YC W11) Snags $605K From Charles River Ventures And Others | Hacker News Reader

Earbits (YC W11) Snags $605K From Charles River Ventures And Others

techcrunch.com

68 pointsearbitscom8 comments

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong (I've only read the TechCrunch summary for this company) but doesn't this just sound like the online equivalent of pay-for-play? What value is there for the end-user if artists can just pay their way onto the airwaves? I feel like I must be missing something, because this company just seems like a perfect candidate to be gamed by the big labels and artists who happen to be fortunate enough to have money to burn. I'm always interested in small companies that give individuals the opportunity to bypass the larger companies that exploit their influence, but in all honesty, I just fail to see how this company is offering the artist anything valuable. As I stated earlier, please correct me if I'm misunderstanding their model.

As with other ads, the difference between ads that hurt the UX and ads that help it is relevancy. I certainly wouldn't mind hearing sponsored songs that Earbits can algorithmically determine I am likely to like based on my tastes and use of the service. A well-targeted system would also make it more viable for small artists, who could target small niches of customers that had a higher probability of converting to sales of merchandise, concert tickets, etc. This is what happened with AdWords. One might have expected AdWords to be a mechanism for large content sites with money to spend advertising to get a lot more traffic, but as it turned out AdWords was a boon for niche but profitable businesses.

It's ad-words for the music industry.

Which is great, because it means both the little guy and the big guy are on a level playing field. I may be a little band with only a $20 to spend a month on promoting myself, but I can still reach an engaged audience to come to shows.

And like ad-words there's an inherent feedback loop which keeps all parties in check. Fans will only listen if they hear music they like and band will only pay if they have listeners to promote to. The dynamics work out that its in the company's incentive to do the best job they can matching bands with fans.

Bands are like any business, the band is the brand, the song is the advertisement. I've got countless friends who spend all day outside of clubs handing out 10 cent fliers that just end up in the trash. Fan discovery and exposure for a fraction of the cost would be a god send.

Sure it's only going to bring value if the product is good, but that's the nature of the music business. I for one think it's genius.

I'm glad you mentioned Adwords, because that was my first impression. The thing is… I'm not convinced that it's a translatable metaphor. With Adwords there is a much deeper reach that benefits small businesses. If I'm a small, niche specific business, I know I can benefit from targeting a long-tail keyword because someone out there has a specific problem that they need a solution to and my business is built to address that problem.

I think that searches for music are fundamentally different. I'm not looking for a solution to a particular problem, In fact I don't really know WHAT I'm looking for- I just need options to sort through so I can find one that I like. The issue that arrises here is that 9 times out of 10, I'm going to start that search with something I know. This is where Pandora shines (to some degree) because I can say "I want to hear bands in the tradition of Black Sabbath" and BAM, I have a playlist of possibly good options. The problem I see with Earbits is that people are naturally going to start their search the same way, with bands they know. This means that popular bands/artists/genres will be the musical equivalent of keywords like "credit cards" in AdWords- Expensive and only cost effective to large companies with money to burn. All that being said, lets say I DID happen to give Earbits a specific search, do I really want the band that PAID to be here as opposed to the one that earned it by gaining natural momentum and fanfare? Am I getting value for this? More specifically (and importantly), is this a USEFUL method for me to find music I like?

Furthermore, what about the implications for small artists who blow their money on Earbits campaigns? Anyone familiar with the hype surrounding affiliate marketing would know that many a newb has blown their savings on unprofitable Adwords campaigns due to ignorance. Would you expect most artists to have the savvy it takes to run a profitable campaign under what is, essentially, the same business model?

Anyhow… These are just some thoughts. Who knows, maybe these guys will rock this idea and I'll be back here with my head between my legs. I'm just a concerned musician, that's all.

I think these are all very legitimate concerns. We specifically switched from a "Type an Artist" search to a channel-based music selection process because people were not getting what they expected. That being said, the reason why Adwords has proven pointless for bands (a HUGE small business market) is because nobody is searching for band names they have never heard before. But, people search for good "speed metal" all of the time. We may not end up in a place where we can play Black Sabbath for people who search for it, but we meet the needs of people looking for "Southern Hip Hop" every day.

As for making sure artists don't fall victim to bad campaigns, we aren't expecting them to be SEM experts. Our team puts them in the right channels - so poor keyword selection is not an option (as in first time Adwords users). Additionally, we intend to provide not just reports, but optimization recommendations that will make it easy for an artist to turn off an underperforming song, and so on. And, for the sake of our listeners, we'll be deactivating songs that are performing very poorly on our own. We hope to avoid that by screening for quality, but sometimes a song does end up in the wrong channel. At the end of the day, we'll be benefiting from the understanding of search marketing, but be building a tool that serves artists.

As an aside, I have had zero luck on Pandora building me a good Black Sabbath station! And don't try to build one based on Blind Melon either. ;)

Earbits is the only one of these music services where I've actually learned about new bands. Nice work on the fundraising!

I dig your service, keep up the good work!

+1. I ended up downloading Opera and turning it into a "native Linux Earbits client": runs full screen in its own virtual desktop in the background all the time.

It's a mystery to me why Amazon/Google music services are grabbing all the spotlight. The story of label-free music playing on real radio is way more interesting. Not only there's none of that piracy nonsense, but best of all, the risk of being accidently hit in the ear by a manufactured retro-mutants like Beiber is zero.

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