Show HN: Wavo.me - A social network for music to take on Spotify and iTunes. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Wavo.me - A social network for music to take on Spotify and iTunes.

wavo.me

44 pointsglesperance48 comments

This looks really interesting, but to be completely honest, I lost all interest once I saw that there was no other option but to sign up with Facebook.

As a developer, I understand the business and UX need for it, but it still manages to turn me away from really interesting services. It looks like you're looking to improve on this pain-point, so I'll definitely check this out later. :)

I'd also love it if the About page was on your own site as well. Linking to the Facebook app page feels like you were a little rushed.

Hey borgopants -- I'm one of the devs at wavo.

We've gotten the same feedback from several people, and we know it's a priority. Artists and labels, in particular, have asked for non-Facebook login methods. It's on its way, promise. We just haven't quite made it there yet.

No problem. As I said, looks like a really interesting service and I've saved it so that I'll check it out once you guys add separate account options.

Great UI on the homepage though! Keep up the good work.

This is my hold up too. I left Spotify to get away from Facebook.

You can share to just yourself on facebook or turn it off completely (within spotify's preferences, or within facebook's preferences)

I’m one of the co-founders and just wanted to give a bit more info on what we’re trying to do with wavo.me. We’re artists, bloggers, event organizers and fans. We’ve felt for some time that existing services are missing key parts of the music experience. A truly excellent music service should connect artists, bloggers, labels and fans together. It should create a community that encourages discovery and dialogue. Wavo.me is our attempt to create a social network for music.

We’ve started with a service similar to Pinterest -- A simple and beautiful way to discover, collect and share music with friends.

It’s a big project. We’re at the very beginning and we’d love your feedback.

(FYI, you can only sign up with Facebook right now... We know, we know... alternative ways of signing in are coming, along with a mobile version)

I think it's a bit disingenuous to compare yourself to Spotify (at least on HN). I think a big part of Spotify's business is that they have agreements with the big 4 record companies for each country, and they're rolling out their service as they get the deals signed in each country. So if I use Spotify, I'm listening to music legally, and a lot of music is available.

You are using Youtube, so you're limited by what's on Youtube, and various other strings attached.

Anyway, I think the site is a lot of fun, rock on! =)

Yes, you're 100% right. When you look at it from a business model point of view, we're not at all the same as spotify - at least not yet. What I was trying to get at, though, is that we're really trying to fix what's broken about the existing experience - Spotify has some social elements, but it's not their DNA. iTunes had ping, but that didn't last. What we want to do with wavo is really connect artists, labels and fans together in a meaningful way to create a shared experience that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Just as an aside: its not clear in the Uex but you can also search Soundcloud.

FYI for anyone else running Ghostery: you have to disable it to get the site to load at all. Seems to get stuck in a permanent "loading" loop if it doesn't detect the FB social plugin script.

Developers: if you care about privacy-conscious users, you may want to fix that.

Ah, interesting! Thanks for letting us know, we're looking into that right now.

Regarding Facebook, we do require Facebook to login (as mentioned elsewhere, we're going to add other ways to log in soon) and we require the Facebook SDK for some of our social stuff. That said, we should handle this better - we shouldn't get stuck in a permanent loading loop!

... but you can only turn off social "for 4 hours".

Oh, no, don't worry, you can turn social sharing off permanently. Hit the 'preferences' item in the menu at the top right. In there, you've got all kinds of social features to turn off. And they'll stay off.

It's amazing how much I miss out on because I don't have a Facebook account. I accept that this is a choice I made, but it's amazing how much of a second-class citizen it makes you feel like these days.

Really? What else have you missed out on that you'd otherwise want to use?

Plenty of sites have a prominent Facebook sign-in button they steer you towards, but will reluctantly give you a username/password, if you insist. Songkick, for instance, or the very cool 2u.fm site that another HNer posted here recently. Others accept Facebook or Twitter, or Facebook or Google.

But Facebook-only seems pretty uncommon. All I can think of are TechCrunch comments, and the Scoble-beloved Highlight app for iOS. Most developers seem to avoid going Facebook-only because they face a backlash (as the devs behind this site have acknowledged already).

Spotify was a big one, but it looks as though they added non-facebook signups back in recently.

I disabled Ghostery but still needed to unblock requests to Facebook and Google that Disconnect was blocking.

I like wavo but before I tell you why I like it let me tell you what I don’t like. I simply hate the whole facebook sign in option… (looks like I’m not the only one) Therefore it’s been a long time since I had checked my wavo profile. I don’t hate facebook but sometimes you don’t want to share every single thing.

Now what I like: the UI is great.

Let me dig deeper and share with you my experience with wavo. Like I said I never sign in but every week I receive an e-mail from them. In that e-mail I have links to a playlist. The playlist is what’s popular at the moment on wavo.

This is the single feature that I love because I am able to discover new artists and new songs. Some songs are mainstream but the vast majority is not.

Of course I would love to tell you that there are more features on wavo but I simply don’t bother to sign in.

We recently added clearer ways to turn seamless sharing off with Facebook. You can either disable it for four hours by clicking on the switch in the top right or by going into your preferences and disabling it permanently.

Right now Facebook makes life easy in certain ways and is obviously an effective way to acquire users but we're getting to the point where we've got most of the basic user experience figured out so a secondary way of signing in is moving up in our priority list. Really glad you like the emails and hope we can get you on-boarded into the full experience soon.

The UI is phenomenal, the overemphasis on Facebook sharing (not login) annoyed me though. I really, really don't want you auto-posting what I'm listening to/doing to Facebook. Spotify & Songza do it and it drives me insane.

It's actually the main reason why I stopped using SocialCam & Viddy. I couldn't trust the service. "Normals" probably don't have the same problem with it, but I personally hate it.

(As a side-note, I have no problem posting great songs I listen to on Hype Machine to Facebook & Twitter. I just want to be in control of what is posted.)

Hey Andrew, wavo co-founder here.

We definitely understand that some of our users prefer not to use the social sharing features of our app ; hence we added the capability to turn those off, either temporarily with the use of the "social-sharing" switch at the top of the interface --or-- permanently via the preference dialog that you can find in the top left menu.

My own opinion is that people should begin with total control over their sharing, instead of default auto share, and eventually chose to share automatically if they want.

I think just based on the title of the HN submission is that this site is built from the ground up to encourage social sharing, so Facebook sharing seems like a sensible default based on that.

Thanks for the response. I fully get why you're doing it and appreciate the options to turn them off. With that said, it's really just a band-aid to appease the vocal opponents.

My mental model of sharing (and I'd bet it's shared by many others as well) is that there needs to be an explicit "sharing action" taken. I should know exactly what happens when I do something - I don't on your site. As a result, I never get to the "aha" moment because I'm afraid to click on anything.

You are definitely right and we'll be continually looking at better ways to integrate seamless sharing into the app.

Seamless sharing is also a "band-aid." It gets users sharing your app at the beginning but there's definitely some users who are turned off by it.

So although this is where a lot of our referral traffic comes from at the moment there are undoubtedly better ways to do this and we're working on it. These are early iterations on the product and we'll be circling back very soon.

Very much dislike having to use Facebook account...lame... If users want to integrate Facebook give that option to them, but dont exclusively require a FB login...laame

UI is a little confusing and could be overwhelming for alot of folks.

However...This is a nice idea here. I have found several really great songs I had never heard of before in minutes! Perfect for people at work wanting to find new tunes.

What happens if a video that is on the popular list is deleted at some point by the source?

If the source video is deleted, Wavo simply skips that video and moves on to the next in the playlist.

And yeah, when we have the username/password pair sign-up, we'll simply have an option in the app preferences that will allow the user to additionally connect their facebook account if they like. If not - no problem.

I would've loved to try it and I don't mind the Connect with Facebook option like some folks do (I prefer it). But I didn't try it because it said that you required access to my email address. No thanks. My email isn't hidden or special (it's in my profile, for example) but I have a real problem with giving it up in exchange for registration without a clear reason ("We need your email to do x, y, and z") and without a clear sense of whether you're going to sell my info.

Hi Scott,

To answer your question here: we use your email to send you notifications of likes/comments/follows as well as three emails a week of trending music on wavo. Eventually this email will be personalized to you. As for why it's not clear up front - we made a conscious effort to keep the landing page as clean as possible. Ideally, our explanation should be part of the facebook connect dialog, but that's not actually possible. Probably when we add multiple signin options, we'll add more explanatory text there.

Hi guys,

Great app. Awesome UI.

Two things: 1 - Typo I noticed straight away: "Refer someone to wavo and increate your reach by +20." increate --> increase. 2 - On that note, how DO i refer someone? As in, how can the application know that it was I who referred them?

Sorry, I meant to reply earlier, but got distracted by a bug.

Thanks for pointing out the typo! That's probably been kicking around there for awhile now. :-)

Wavo detects a referral by checking for referral tokens in the url's querystring. When you share a song, share a playlist, etc, from within the app itself (with one of the share buttons, for example), Wavo crafts a url with this referral token. When a user follows that url and signs up, that referral is credited to you. Obviously, this doesn't catch everything (if you simply copy the url from the browser bar and share it with a friend, you won't get reach points), but it gets us part of the way there.

Great site! I'm listening to "Slow Dancing in a burning room" while writing this comment.

You can even listen to "lisp programming" ;-) https://wavo.me/search/yt/lisp%20programming

Yeah, we're kind of relying on context within the UI here to keep Wavo focused on music. That said, there's nothing technically stopping you from creating a playlist of any youtube or soundcloud content you like. :-)

This looks very similar to the new MySpace: http://new.myspace.com, except it features Facebook integration where new.MySpace has much richer features for content producers.

very cool stuff. It was a little confusing for me to get which things were actually the "playlists" versus the tracks versus the charts.

do you have a bug-report system or anything set up? after clicking on a chart, under the div "influencers" the tooltip isn't displaying properly. (background of the tooltip might be transparent or something, I'll look into it more to figure out exactly what the problem is)

Otherwise, cool site. I'm actually working on a company that might be an interesting partnership for you. my email should be on my profile if you are interested.

Turned off by the tacky as heck (and surely unlicensed) Ryan Gosling/Kate Upton posters I have seen all over Montreal promoting this. Not to mention the misleading hubris.

You're going to have a hard time competing with Soundcloud. Soundcloud is where the artists are, and thus it's where the fans go.

Well done! This is awesome - such a nice UX :)

After sharing on Twitter it suggests me to follow @https http://d.pr/i/dyHM

Well, THAT is odd. I'll look into it right now. Thanks for the heads up!

I actually said "Very Beautiful" out loud, alone, in my office. Really, really great UI & UX - Well done!

The UI is gorgeous; well done there.

Thanks, really glad you like it! We've spent a ton of time on the interface. (You would not believe the amount of UI we've designed, thrown away, redesigned, and thrown away again)

First thought I had was that UI would look awesome on a TV screen. I just stopped using spotify and I'm now using wavo. Any chance of a desktop app? I like app responsiveness.

Our first priority, I think, is probably to make a mobile version of the site available. Personally, I'd love to be able to use wavo on an ipad.

That said, you're right, a desktop app would be great! It would be nice to be able to pause/play/skip tracks using the hardware buttons on my laptop, too.

Seems cool but I noticed a problem with Chrome on OSX (I assume this affects all browsers).

The right scroll arrow is blocked by the page scroll bar: http://i.imgur.com/YfVUf.png

It is very difficult/frustrating to click on that arrow.

Chrome on Windows doesn't "hover" the scrollbar over the content, so it's much easier to click there.

How do you pronounce wavo.me?

Way - vo - me

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