Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

It's a cool site, and an amazing accomplishment for a side project, but I really, really have to ask: why did you spend your time building something to add to the hyper-saturated, money black hole that is the music listening/discovery app market? I mean, there are, and have been so many sites like this that have either survived on the border of illegality or have been shut down. And we've got a whole host of above-board legal streaming sites now that are dirt cheap and have a wide variety of music to listen to. What's new here and why should I consider using it? Why will this be around in 6 months and not just die after you run out of money to keep it up or get sued? I'm not asking this to be a dick but I really don't understand why I see a new one of these sites get released every few months that seems to do the same thing as all the others except is free (and probably illegal) or thinks that slightly better music recommendations or "social listening" is a sustainable competitive advantage.

edit: Ok, read your blog post, but I guess my question still stands. The improvements you list are fairly marginal improvements over existing stuff IMHO and it seems mildly crazy to put in so much effort to replicate existing sites but add things like responsive design or slightly better Facebook integration. Good luck and I hope you end up turning this into an amazing success so if you can turn me into a believer I am listening :)

Sideprojects are usually about learning new things + following your passion.

I absolutely LOVE music. Its like air to me. I dont go more than 10 minutse without a song on my stereo or headphones. I also absolutely love to code, and constantly want to find new ways to get excited about learning how to code.

I think a passion for music correlates w/ the coder mentality pretty frequently. Thats why you see so many efforts aligned with that trend if you ask me.

I've paid for LastFM, Spotify, Rdio and Slacker Radio throughout the years and used all types of various other free services. I still try every single new music discovery app out there because, guess what, there's always more music to discover and more ways to do it. Each of these services have introduced me to new music I wouldn't have found without it, and that's all that matters to me. The different UIs make us think about how we search for and navigate through this data, so if we were to make our own, we know what works and what doesn't.

I don't understand the mindset that someone built someone that "has already been done". If this is the type of tool that motivated OP to build this and continue working on it, that's all that matters. There's always room to improve these services and hone your skills.

I get what you're saying but I don't feel like there are a lot of websites to discover music.

Besides hypem, pitchfork and sixtyone do you anymore? And I think they could greatly be improved. Music Discovery is a new thing, before we just had the radio, and it's still not as good as it could be.

I pay for and use MOG and their recommendations are pretty good. Certainly this could be the case that "everything sucks I am going to execute better than everyone" but it's a sexy problem (not a schlep) and everyone seems to be working on it.

Their recommendations use Echonest, and as far as I know so do Rdio and Spotify. You can access those recommendations via an API for free!

Spotify does not use Echonest for recommendations.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/16/echo-nest-is-the-man-behi...

Not true anymore?

For recommendations, we use our own algorithms. For radio, we use Echonest in some cases, but mostly our own stuff.

There are several sites for music discovery (Boss.dj, Earbits, Beastmode.fm, ex.fm, We Are Hunted to name a few)

Agreed there are a lot of holes in the music discovery experience, I've yet to see a solution that really nails it

Out of curiosity, how do you find out about these sites? Up until now the only one I knew about was Indie-specific (Mixest) and Grooveshark

I think that what we're seeing is actually just one service being repackaged as many. Echonest provides the data supporting all of these services, so it makes sense that they all look very similar and that there is no remarkable difference in quality from one to the next. However, even with this saturation there actually are a lot of successful music discovery services, so not really a money black hole. http://musicmachinery.com/2012/12/02/music_discovery_is_not_...

This is just plain wrong... the only thing I get from echonest is artist genres, nothing else.

Oh interesting, did you build your own collaborative filtering engine? or are the artist recommendations from somewhere else?

I'm sorry if I came off as a snob, I intended that to be really a direct reply to gfodor and not as an attack on 2u.fm.

more than that, it appears to just be a copy of ex.fm (http://ex.fm) - i can't see much of a difference

I've responded to one of your 4 other comments on ex.fm with a bunch of reasons why it's different, despite the trolling.

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