New Service (by me, solo) Lets Musicians Sell On Itunes For Cheap | Hacker News Reader

New Service (by me, solo) Lets Musicians Sell On Itunes For Cheap

forbes.com

14 pointspud12 comments

This is an unusual occurrence. Congrats, pud!

Here's a link to the product's website: http://www.distrokid.com/

Very cool and beneficial for indy musicians. Takes an actual need and provides an easy, inexpensive solution. I wish your venture much success!

If anyone cares, feel free to Ask Me Anything :)

How are you so goddamned productive?

I don't feel productive. For example, it's 10:37am and I'm still in bed, tapping this out on my iPhone.

I do launch a lot of stuff though. I think most of it is fairly MVP (Minimum Viable Product, as the kids say...:) and not super complicated. If/when one of my projects becomes popular, then I tack on the complicated stuff.

Also, when I'm building things, I have this irrational fear that some competitor (real or imagined) is building the exact same thing. So I work as fast as I can, as late into the night as I can. So I can beat them to launch.

Cosigned - a post about your processes from taking an idea to shipping it, with anything that helps you do it easier, better, or faster would be an interesting read.

That would be fun to write. Maybe it should be my first Medium.com post.

Do you worry about spam? e.g. people using your service to upload typo-squatted songs, or stolen music. It seems like it would be difficult to police 10 bad actors with the revenue from 5000.

It seems iTunes already has this problem. See "Time of your Life" by Greedy. LOL.

I am worried a little. Right now I keep an eye on the users who upload the most stuff daily. If I suddenly see one person upload 500 songs in a row (which I did once), I'll investigate.

As the service (hopefully) grows, I may need to come up with other ways to police it. Fortunately Apple and Spotify and Google and Amazon have systems to detect spam as well.

You still using coldfusion for everything?

The main backend code is ColdFusion. There's a lot of Javascript in the front end, and some PHP also in the backend. And some Applescript (seriously). And some Bash scripts.

Hi Pud, I actually worked with Gary Burke on an early-early version of TuneCore. I just... could never imagine how it would make money back then. Maybe I simply underestimated the number of artists willing to pay for this (probably). I guess my #1 question has always been: How on earth did you get access rights to the API to do this... and how on earth did Gary do that way back when (if you have any idea)? Thanks!

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