Business idea: Musician's own website as definitive source of all info | Hacker News Reader

Business idea: Musician's own website as definitive source of all info

sivers.org

13 pointssivers12 comments

This is the future of all websites. People now use facebook or myspace for themselves, why? Because storing that data on their own website is tough when trying to incorporate it with everyone else as well. The companies retain ownership of your data as plan b when the advertising dollars dry up. Once that happens, they start selling your data, some do it anyway.

It's gross.

But vistaprint doesn't own the data on your business card or the brochures you create for your company. In the future, we are all going to migrate into "companies of one" and everyone will have their own personal web page that isn't owned by myspace or facebook or artistdata.

I built Bandzoogle.com, which is currently the leading band website host.

We have explored this idea at length. The problem is, 9/10 sites for bands just don't let you share data (some examples: Virb, PureVolume, Reverbnation, Sonicbids). And they are extremely protective of the data they have.

Derek does mention the idea of customer support logging into Facebook accounts to update the content manually. That is fine for a few dozen sites, but to scale that you would need a huge staff. We're not just talking about entering NEW shows, but also being able to modify them at the last minute when data changes. That is very hard with 10,000+ bands.

The end result is, until all these sites create an open platform to share info, it just is not possible to make a cost-effective solution to make one step entry happen. I wish it was.

In the meantime, we are integrating with all the sites that DO offer open solutions (Twitter, Eventful, etc)

I've always wondered why this wasn't already the case. I mean, getting a unique domain for your band and using that as the storefront for your music, concerts, and merchandise would make things so much easier. As it stands, half the time the whole thing is in Flash (which is cool, but barely functional as an informative medium).

What I like most about this idea is approaching it as a web hosting provider -- in which the user retains ownership and control over their data -- vs. a web application, in which the ownership and control of data is ... nebulous.

I'd like to see more web hosts adopt this model of "services-added" for their customers. In part because I think this could be new market for software (specifically open source) on web hosts, which has traditionally just been the nerd-ware ("and you get PHPMyAdmin for free!")

We're trying to do something similar at Flooha. Anyone can create a free website, which they own, using the software of their choosing. We will open it up very soon so that developers can upload their own apps which users can then use to create sites. It's only PHP apps right now, but we'll add rails apps very soon.

Sites like Weebly and Yola are great and really easy to use, but can you move that site to a different host? Maybe you can export to html (I haven't checked), but you sure can't keep all the drag and drop / site building functionality if you want to move to a different host and you can't host it on your own server.

Also, you're limited to the addons and "apps" (photo gallery, eCommerce, etc...) that they develop for their platform. If your site is built or hosted by Flooha, you can take it anywhere at any time and use any app or addon you want. Even if an app isn't available on Flooha, you can still install it like you would on any other web host.

We're trying to make apps "user-ware" instead of "nerd-ware".

Sounds good ... I got tired fast of sites that insist on 'helping' you with your HTML.

I think the overhead of paying people to manually update stuff is somewhat under-rated in the article...and what happens when the artist changes their facebook/twitter/myspace/etc... password and you can't get in? How do you convince other sites to use your API? How do you convince artists to switch to your hosting, especially without any existing users?

Not a bad strategy if you are HostBaby or a similar existing site, but there are big hurdles for a newbie...unless you have some kind of "in" in the music world.

Since I sold HostBaby, and signed a non-compete, I'm not allowed to do this anymore, but I hope someone does. :-)

So...

1. You shouldn't leave it up to some third party to keep your information up to date across multiple websites. Therefore;

2. You should delegate your ISP (a third party) to keep your information up to date across multiple websites.

Decent idea, but sounds like a music site API dilemma waiting to happen. Will they mesh? Dont know. And the manual labor aspect posting to social sites like facebook does not sound fun at all. Tedious and inefficient. Keep it in house. Build the right site, with rich featues and a great name, and compete directly with the musician's own site. Make them begin to leave their own and only deal with you. ie, such as many major label artists have begun to do with using Myspacemusic instead of their own site. Eventhough it lacks usability, and in my opinion is worthless. If they can accomplish it, you can demolish what they've ATTEMPTED to do.

Garry Tan and YC have come up with something similar to this way of posting information, with http://www.posterous.com. Similar idea, but specific to music artists and their website info.

We've tried to get that going with http://daz.com/ but unfortunately it seems they can't be bothered. So we ended up turning it loose and now the fans take care of it, seems to work ok so far.

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