Feast Your Ears On Fresh Jams From Musicians You Love At Hipset (YC S12) | Hacker News Reader

Feast Your Ears On Fresh Jams From Musicians You Love At Hipset (YC S12)

techcrunch.com

58 pointsschlichtm34 comments

I have huge amounts of respect for the Mazy + the Tracks.by team and believe they can do big things, but...

This is disappointing. I would normally not have signed up for this service given that it requires facebook login, but I was just about to pop open pandora and figured I could use some new music. So I gave Hipset a shot. A few seconds later I see this:

http://imgur.com/UvB9s

Music discovery? What? They just pulled in a bunch of status updates (ie noise) from musicians/bands I already follow on facebook and laid them out pinterest style. Really? This is music discovery? Well, it turns out their site doesn't even mention music discovery... Techcrunch added that bit of editorial magic.

Hmmm... so no discovery... but at least music.. right? Nope. There's no music on that screen. There are some tabs, though: recent posts, photos, videos, statuses. Nothing mentioning music. I don't really care about any of that. I came for music. And I'm gone as quickly as I came.

This is just the beginning and it will get better. There is SO much still to do.

For now, to discover new music you can go to a couple sections of Hipset:

1) New Videos from artists all around the world http://hipset.com/all/videos/

2) New Videos from artists you follow http://hipset.com/following/videos/

3) New Videos from artists in different genres Hip Hop: http://hipset.com/genre:hiphop/videos/ Rock: http://hipset.com/genre:rock/videos/ Indie: http://hipset.com/genre:indie/videos/ Electronic: http://hipset.com/genre:electronic/videos/ Country: http://hipset.com/genre:country/videos/ Pop: http://hipset.com/genre:pop/videos/

Cool, thanks for pointing this out. Wish it was more obvious :)

Keep up the hustle.

guynamedloren, you might want to have a look at this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4396747

Well, to be fair, nobody has cracked the discovery nut yet. Pandora is passable, but it's still impossible to beat discovery curated by humans at your local record store (if you're lucky enough to still have a local).

I agree about the human curation. Try 8tracks, they're perfect for this.

I know this has been discussed a million times here, but: "Connect with Facebook". No thanks, tab closed. Sorry!

Agreed. I got rid of my FB account years ago.. and can't use it. What a shame.. least they can do is add a link below to sign up the regular way. Don't give me "we don't got time" excuse.. this isn't like building an iPhone app but not an Android version

No offense but the crowd they're targeting is less the HN crowd. Almost all of the people I know (18 - 25) still spend a lot of time on Facebook and most of their time on the internet is spent on Facebook. They have all of their likes on the service so as a launch strategy it makes a lot of sense to target FB rather than just email so the user doesn't have to input hundreds of likes.

If only there was an online service to automatically log music I listen to and perhaps tracks I particularly love.

Hey Jarek, Using last.fm is a great idea! We'll add that as an option for users signing up without Facebook and use it to pre-populate the artists you follow based on your most scrobbled artists on Last.fm.

Other ways to sign up are coming very soon, we just wanted to get this out the door as soon as it was usable.

I hear you! We've heard this from others as well. We will definitely be adding more ways to login than just Facebook.

The integral dependency on FaceBook for this service makes me wonder if this is built with the goal of eventually being acquired by FB.

I think it's more to do with wanting to use Facebook's API to go viral.

That + Helping artist's content go viral as well (most artists don't understand viral Facebook integrations - so with Hipset we're automatically doing it for all of them)

This is just version 1. We launched with Facebook connect only because that was the fastest way we could launch it in a usable way. When you connect, we grab the artists you like on Facebook to generate your personal feed. There will be other ways to sign up soon!

So if you sign up with another method, then you can manage which bands you like on the service itself? Will we also manage relationships with other users on the service? From the way the TechCrunch piece was worded, it almost seemed like FB integration was central to the value offered to users and artists.

Yes you'll be able to manage it yourself. We are working on a tool to let you search for artists to follow and to suggest you similar artists to follow.

OK, that changes my impression of the service quite a bit. Do you guys have a blog? You might want to make more such information available there and put a link to your blog or about page on the landing page. Relying on third parties like TechCrunch for communication might be problematic. Rock on!

Do you have any plans to integrate with services that track a users's music listening history, such as last.fm?

I used to list a set of my favorite artists on Facebook, but I stopped doing this after facebook made a number of changes around pages and activity. I can see value in a service that gives me a dedicated place to view aggregated and deduplicated social media updates from artists I like.

Using last.fm is a great idea! We'll add that as an option for users signing up without Facebook and use it to pre-populate the artists you follow based on your most scrobbled artists on Last.fm.

Link to Hipset: http://hipset.com

BTW: For those wondering, we have not yet turned on the Facebook Open Graph Actions. It will not auto share with your friends when you look at content right now (and when we do turn that on you will have the ability to easily turn it off).

"Uncaught The Javascript Facebook SDK must be loaded before calling init.". I have Facebook Disconnect installed and all i see is a big blank page. http://i.imgur.com/KlK8n.png

It is shocking how many pages break because of this (usually, you check the console and it has thrown an exception because FB is not defined)

I don't have Facebook Disconnect and all I see is a blank page too. I'm using a recent browser (Firefox 10.0.6), and JavaScript is enabled.

Anyway I wouldn't have tried the service since it requires connecting with Facebook.

Looks very slick guys! How do I specify the artists I want to follow? As great as it is pulling the data from Facebook it's outdated and I'd like to add more.

Hey Chris,

We're working on a page that suggests people to follow based on your interests, and a way to search for specific artists.

For now, you can follow artists from the all page - http://hipset.com/all/ and any of the genre pages under Popular.

You can also go to a specific's artist page and follow them there, like http://hipset.com/lilwayne

I love the idea, congrats to Mazy and team!

Only complaint is that it looks blurry on the Retina MBP. All of the text and images, mostly the posts rather than the menu bar. I like the product but would love more discovery features as other users have said.

What is it with every startup these days being named /Hip[a-z]+/?

I'd love to check it out, but it's crashing the page in both Chrome 22.0.1229.6 dev and Safari 6 on Mountain Lion.

The execution here is excellent, well done Tracks.by

I use a chrome extension called disconnect, that blocks tracking from facebook, google, twitter, etc.

When I open hipset it looks like this: http://imgur.com/9hEX5

Nada, nothing.

When I allow facebook I can see the site.

This and the facebook only login, made me instantly close the site and forget it. Btw, I work two jobs: Programmer and musician. And that site was just disappointing on all fronts.

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