Show HN: Spotify for Independent Music | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Spotify for Independent Music

musicfellas.com

114 pointssakbhatn82 comments

Hello HN, we are Musicfellas, an independent music discovery platform. In one line, we are spotify + iTunes for independent music. You can not only discover new music everyday but also support the artists you like by buying their music. Very soon, we have an iPhone app and some premium features coming out. Looking forward to your feedback.

PS: Music startups are hard. We are looking for mentors/advisors/investors/music-enthusiasts who can guide us through. Please feel free to email us [hello AT musicfellas.com]. Cheers!

I really like the design. Your logo is especially nice. There are a lot of buttons, but the interface seems to be well organized.

I got a good selection of music just from the front page. Would you consider adding a radio option that's based on a song or an artist, like Pandora and Spotify do?

Have you considered doing a variable pricing model like Amie Street did back in the day? The more popular a track or album is, the more expensive it gets. I think this is a really good model for selling independent music because it rewards all the right people in the right way. If you get an album for an inexpensive price that means you helped 'discover' that artist and you helped them gain popularity (i.e. their price goes up a little). And if you buy an album for the going market price ($9.99 or whatever) that means a lot of other people have already validated that it's good and you know you're getting a good deal. Just a thought.

Thanks for the nice feedback :)

Radio based on artist is already under the works, we should have that out soon.

Variable pricing does seem like a good option. We'll have to explore this further & see how that goes well with the artists. Because they and they alone control the pricing for now. We however do a have a "pay what you want" feature right now, something people have used more often than not.

Again, thanks for the great feedback. I have your email, would like to send you free invite to preemium features once we have them out.

That'd be awesome. Feel free to keep me in the loop.

Two points of feedback;

1. No one I know wants to browse "independent music" as an amorphous blob of everything lumped together. On the initial "Hot Songs" page, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to get by clicking on the Play button for each song. I went from a weird electronica song to an "alternative" song to an acoustic guitar song.

2. Also, there seems to be quite a lot of stuff on there. As a new user, I don't want to listen to lots of rubbish to find good songs. Give me a clue about what other people have listened to a lot, favourited, and so on. If I find some things I like I'll probably explore the site a bit further. If I don't find anything within the first few plays, I'll leave and I won't come back. (The data could be fake - just things you like - but regardless, give me some sort of opinion to work from.)

>> No one I know wants to browse "independent music" as an amorphous blob of everything lumped together

I do agree, can you help me understand what distinguishes independent music from regular music? It isn't hard to be added to Spotify, so why would you have any music Spotify doesn't? Or is it simply that the compensation model is different.

I think one thing that's nice about this is a much smaller inventory to sort through that gives some front page exposure specifically to indie artists.

I played around with this for a bit and found 3-4 aritsts I liked just by hitting play on a dozen or so songs, and then exploring further.

Big fan of this.

Wow, thanks :)

Independent music isn't on a major label (or often a label at all). That's it.

Thanks for your feedback. Hot songs is nothing but a bunch of songs other users have favorited and played the most in the last 3 days. So what you are getting is indeed a curated collection, not necessarily from a genre but across alternative, electronica etc. If you are interested in a particular genre you can use the radio or explore section. You can also signup and follow people to see what they've favorited, commented on etc. I hope this helps.

Thanks again for trying out.

Agreed, why isn't there something for genre? I searched for 'techno' and got 4 results from some electro-acoustic band with a female vocalist, which is about the exact opposite <:-/

It's interesting to me that you see yourself as spotify + itunes, as the comparison that immediately struck me is Bandcamp + recommendations and the ability to queue up tracks. It certainly seems like the value you bring to artists is very similar to bandcamp - I suppose your differentiator here is discovery? Are you planning to allow sales of physical items as well? I'm a big fan of buying the vinyl release + immediate download - and anecdotally it seems like the independent music crowd would be more interested in this than perhaps other music demographics.

I'm keen not to make any comments about recommendations or the breadth of music available, as I'm aware that the latter is a chicken-and-egg situation, and the former is hard to judge without giving the site a chance to learn my tastes. I'm going to give it a try for sure.

And now for some classic hn nitpicks:

* Please stop your site links from opening pages in new tabs. Whilst looking about for more information, I ended up with 7 tabs open. Please no.

* I clicked on the feedback tab on the right side and was presented not with a feedback form, but a login form. If I can listen to music without signing up/in, surely I can leave feedback?

They should definitely add FLAC downloads like bandcamp.

Physical items is not in the plan for now. If more people show interest in that, something we can consider. Our differentiator is certainly discovery.

About the nitpicks: 1. This was to avoid user accidentally clicking and losing the music queue. Now that we've added a js check, we should certainly remove it. 2. We had to shut it down because of the spam. I know we could do captcha, but then we realized most of the feedback anyway came from signed up users.

Could you not do a captcha for non signed in users?

Nice work.

FYI the flash blocker in chrome doesn't register that there's flash content on the site. I had to click around quite a bit in order to get an option to enable flash.

Better yet, you should use the Web Audio API and fallback to flash for unsupported browsers :)

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webaudio/intro/

We do have a html5 fallback, I'll get that looked into.

Edit: Are you on firefox by any chance? Apparently mp3 is not supported there. If not, which browser are you using?

For Mozilla platforms, MP3 is supported on Firefox OS, some Android devices and Desktop on Windows Vista and up. Support for Windows XP is coming in Firefox 26. It is available on Linux with custom builds and should be in by default soon. For a list of supported audio and video formats in Firefox see http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2013/08/21/html-media-support-in-fi....

I suspect browser doesn’t matter much here. Console yields a TypeError until Flash is enabled (whitelisted) for the page.

I just came here to mention it wasn't working for me either. Same problem, probably.

Awesome.

One important improvement: If you're going to use a "metal hand" as the icon for your Like button, you really need to add a :hover{margin-top:-2px;} to it so that pumps up and down as expected when you mouse over it.

Like the example here:

http://www.blogabond.com/Photos/PhotoView.aspx?imageID=21691

Brilliant idea. Thanks!

It's great that musicfellas is supporting the pay-what-you-want model. It's not so great that they pretty much lifted the slider from the album pages on http://www.loudr.fm

(according to their blog post 3 days ago at http://blog.musicfellas.com/post/59478848137/generosity, musicfellas implemented PWYW "a few weeks back" - Loudr has had its current slider design since we launched in February of this year).

Although on the plus side, it means that our slider is cool enough to copy! (Ours even allows artists to bundle multiple albums together, to reward their fans for paying more).

Your slider is definitely cool :) We did take the design inspiration for that from you.

I'd love to have a chat with you guys. Feel free to write to us. Cheers!

Sorry, but it's not exactly "inspiration" if you copy the design exactly. You guys have a good thing going - design features in your own way and it'll help the consistency of your whole site!

We're available at info@loudr.fm if you want to get in touch.

AFAIK, there is independent music on Spotify. I've seen a lot of small artists on it and the platform has a lot of visibility so most of these artists will try to go there. So I was wondering how you can manage to get your "contracts". It seems also there are only english songs. The problem is that we often look for the artists of our country when we are looking for indies. Is it something which will change or do you aim mostly for US and UK market for now? Otherwise, nice website !

Certainly, they do have independent music, but mostly procured through "independent" labels. We are truly indie and all our music is directly uploaded by the artists here http://musicfellas.com/artist

In addition to this, we make discovery super simple and you can also support the artists by buying their music.

We do have non-english music, unfortunately there is no easy way to search by language right now. We should have that up soon.

Does this mean you have chosen not to work with labels (indie or otherwise) or just that the majority of takeup has been from unsigned artists?

We have only chosen not to work with non-indie labels. We are all about independent music only. We've approached and been approached by indie labels too, however most of them demand a minimum upfront payment, which isn't the best thing to do for us. So as of now 90% of the music has been procured directly from the artists (not necessarily unsigned but signed with non-exclusive deal).

I really like the design, it's much cleaner than Spotify or Rdio. A few things though:

- I have an error icon next to my name in the sidebar, that says I need to complete my profile. I really don't think not having a bio should warrant a this kind of warning. (Maybe a notification instead?)

- I logged in with Facebook, and my country and profile url weren't auto filled out. That's a little weird.

- No last.fm (or libre.fm) support. For me this is a deal breaker. If it doesn't scrobble, I don't listen to it. I'm sure there are other people out there who feel the same.

What formats are the downloads available in?

it's much cleaner than Spotify or Rdio I can't tell you how happy that makes us :)

1,2. Fair enough. 3. That is definitely on our to-do list. Should be out soon.

Downloads by default are in 320kbps mp3 for now. For any other format, you can make a purchase & shoot us an email.

Curation is key on a project like this. Don't just dump a bunch of random bands on the screen. Give us a reason to want to explore them.

I cannot seem to figure out how an Indian startup has mostly foreign artists. I am asking because couple of years back, I tried to do the same thing and licensing was the biggest issue. Have you got funding in India?

Moreover, most of the artists and songs I see up there are just at bandcamp.com and no where else. Are you just scrapping Bandcamp and reselling their music. E.g. googling for the album "Creatures" on homepage (https://www.google.com/search?q=creatures+new+campaigns&oq=c...) loads up only from Bancamp and other albums too.

We don't scrape anything from any of the sites. All the music that comes in, comes directly only from the artist through musicfellas.com/artist

8tracks.com boiled down to single tag?

Feedback: the player panel, instead having tabs for Now Playing / Queue, why not move the tabs below the player buttons, and have Comments / Queue tabs.

That's how we had started initially. Both the tabs were below the player, however for most people browsing on laptops, they could hardly see a song or two in the queue. So we moved it to a separate tab on the top.

Amazing. I just signed up my music project, and while I'm really glad to see you've made the path for artists to get on the service easy, I'm curious what sort of gatekeeping / curation will help maintain the signal-to-noise ratio. Ideally, you have something somewhere in between the hard-to-crack-unless-you're–with-a-major label of Pandora and the total free-for-all of some past services like Amie Street, but that's a notoriously difficult line to walk.

We do have manual curation in place. We are not very strict with the filtering but we ensure nothing bad comes in. After the great, good and average comes in, we let the algorithms take over and decide based on user activity, what kind of music to let surface.

Loving it! Keep doing what you're doing. One thing I just noticed-- I clicked the Like button which then prompted me to sign up. After doing that I was returned to the same page, but had to click the like button. It's a small thing but applying the action that prompted the signup automatically instead of having to redo it would be a bit of a usability enhancement. Also, an edit button on an already submitted review would be good instead of having to delete and retype.

Nice catch, noted.

I see my song was approved today, but for some reason it's showing a broken image in the listings. It's the first listing in electronic (http://musicfellas.com/aband_nthecar). I've uploaded a photo for both my profile and the album, but I can't seem to re-upload an album image to check if that's the issue.

Thanks, and good luck on the site! :)

Sorry about that, should be fine now :)

Awesome, thanks!

Hm, I get no music and no indication why.

Any chance that you would add free music aka music by people who want their art listened without anyone having to pay?

If you could tell me your usrername, I'll have that looked into.

Looks like you can just set your price to 0 and it becomes free.

Sorry, I meant music under free licenses like creative commons. Free means at least free to share to me, not free to download for personal use.

Honest question: Would you consider reaching out to foreign artists? I ask because it's damned difficult as anyone not in Japan to compensate those of the Doujin music scene in Japan- their music is traditionally sold at conventions(and then, in limited quantities), but not online, so you really only have access via piracy.

Giving their fans a way to compensate would be amazing.

http://musicfellas.com/ryoutasato and http://musicfellas.com/nicotone

We do :) I know of at least these 2 artists from Japan.

Shameless plug: A friend of mine down here in Charlottesville, VA is doing a related project ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302124 ). It's Pandora-like internet radio for local bands and bands coming to town for upcoming gigs. Thought it might be of interest.

The little thumbnail image next to someone's name ("Somebody liked this track") is huge: http://s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/musicfellas.entertain...

Make that smaller.

Dude! This is awesome. Outside of the idea. I love how simple and amazing your UI is. Its light and brilliantly intuitive. I have been using everything from grooveshark, new myspace and spotify , rdio but i seriously like your UI the best. It has almost all the features and its so very well thought out. Good on you sir!

You sir, have made our day!

I see on the tab it gives the timer for currently playing song. Nice attention to detail there and good luck.

Really like this. Now a few songs in from the hot recommendations on your homepage and already hooked. I have a small side venture that could be a nice integration point for your artists (free as well). If interested, email is in my profile.

mailed!

I understand that if I disable plugins in my browser some pages are going to break, but a friendly warning to whitelist your site would be better than silence and Object #<error> has no method 'play' in the console :)

Sorry about that :) We'll get this done.

Very clean design and the UI is really nice to use - great site and great music :) I would suggest however to show genre on the "What's Hot" list or add filtering by genre like on the "Explore" list.

Thanks :) Genre on what's hot seems to be a popular demand.

Just wanted to chime in and say this is awesome. I'm already finding some great new music.

One question - are artists paid for streams or just track / album purchases? I'd likely pay a monthly sub if so!

Thanks!

Currently they are paid only for music purchases since we don't make any money off streaming. Eventually if and when we make money off streaming, artists would definitely be compensated.

The design looks good, and I've been playing the music for half an hour (/hot/) and it seems to be excellent so far. Good job.

I hope there's an API or a mobile app plan in the future.

We do have an iPhone app coming out soon. However we plan to release that as a premium feature. If you had to pay 99 cents per week for the premium version, would you still be interested? Of course there will be more premium features included.

1. Is it 99c/wk for ad-free listening? (sounds reasonable) 2. Does that also provide API access so I can mess with it for personal use? (would be good)

Yes, 99 c/wk for :

1. ad-free listening 2. iPhone app (to start with) 3. weekly curated playlists 4. higher quality streaming

API not right now, but maybe later.

Ha, I think I remember you guys from TLabs. Good going!

Love the design, btw. Although I feel there should be a "list view" to go along with the Album-cover-thumbnail view.

How long do artist song approvals take? I submitted a second one about an hour ago, but the first took until the next day. Just curious :)

They usually take a day. To maintain quality, we curate all the music that comes in, being that we are not just a store but a discovery platform and user experience is very important to us. We just have too much music coming in and we are way behind on curation.

Cool cool, good to know! :)

nice design. been looking for something like this for a while - always end up listening to the same tracks on spotify even though they have some decent discovery apps. seems like a good idea to completely separate out indie music, eliminating the chance of users like myself always going back to their starred spotify playlists.

Thanks.

This looks cool! Is there or will there be an API at some point so I could potentially build native clients?

We don't have a public api yet, but we do have a messy one that we use internally. Shoot us a mail, maybe we can work something out :)

Good work so far. I just uploaded my band's album and hoping for the best :)

cool design! the images load quite slow tho, inspecting them shows that they are fullsize images even when used as mini-icons. quite noticable on all pages...

Good job, buy why Spotify rather than just a music player?

thumbnail those images! you'll drastically cut page speed. other than that, site looks good!

Definitely. Although there is a bit of hn effect too :)

very nice. I am working on something similar for independent movies. Good UI

I like like this, and I want to support independent artists, but consider grouping similar songs together like Songza does. My .02.

Congrats on the great site and what seems like a successful launch!

Thank you! Grouping songs like Songza seems like a great idea.

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