Show HN: I made a tool to turn a Spotify artist profile into a website

by ahmdyassr • 3 years ago

66 54 3 years ago

Hey! I wanted to share Noise with you, a tool that allows musicians and artists to create a free website from their Spotify profile.

You don’t have to be an artist to try it out! You can play with it (for free) and for fun by making a Noise for your favorite artist. Feedback is really appreciated!

greenie_beans• 3 years ago

neat idea. i clicked on the link expecting to be able to do this as a consumer. my bet is most people seeing this on HN are consumers and not producers. would be cool to do this with a spotify user's listening history etc. tbh i don't really see the musicians i know being interested in this.

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

Thx! it doesn't hurt to have non-artists just trying it out for fun. I'm not the best developer so it helps me figure out dev/ux issues real-time and pushes me to improve the platform.

The product is quite simple, it's a (unique artist website) x (link-in-bio) that uses Spotify as a starting point for the artist data. I'm pretty sure there is a huge market for it, just need to focus on keeping it simple and build the right features. Time will only tell! but thx for the feedback.

seeingnature• 3 years ago

While it doesn't hurt you, it was a frustrating waste of time. If you're showcasing something, you should be specific to your target market.

"Show HN: I made a tool to turn your Spotify artist profile into a website" would have been accurate.

Shame on me for not reading further, but someone using my Spotify profile data has so often paid off with exciting ways to see how I listen, I fell succumb.

Good luck on your site! Maybe it's useful to artists.

dylan6042• 3 years ago

I'm guessing you're thinking smaller independent artists would "need" this?

Most artist's websites are created by their management/label/etc. They'll want to have tour information, and lots of other stuff than what Spotify might know about them. There's no way to add concert images/media and personalize it. This is just a reskinning of Spotify and drastically limits usability

This seems like a nice experiment of "can I use a 3rd party API to create a new thing" which is a valid thing to be able to do. And you've made a nice little thing with it. Is it practical? If you're goal was to learn and hack together something, then mission accomplished. Job well done. Is it practical for the artist? Sorry, but I don't think it is.

alexanderdavide• 3 years ago

If you're interested in something for consumers, I recommend you try https://stats.fm/.

marcomourao• 3 years ago

Why does it need access to my google account?

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

Just for basic authentication, nothing else. I'm planning on adding Email as another sign up method as some people don't wanna use their Google account!

millzlane• 3 years ago

I appreciate the Google sign in as time goes on. I know the risks and downsides, but it's nice to just quickly sign in and GTD. Last nice I set up a cheap wyze door bell cam and shared it with my mom (signed her up to wyze using sign in with google) It took longer to unpack and mount the camera with the VHB tape than it did to create and log into her account to accept the sharing request.

whalesalad2• 3 years ago

why auth to google? wouldn't auth to spotify be more appropriate?

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

Of course, you have a point!

First, the best case scenario is that I display a sign-in with Spotify button that I use to get artist information from Spotify! but the problem is that this has zero value from a technical standpoint as there is no such thing as Spotify Artist User. The artist profile can be managed by multiple places, some complicated sh*t, not as straightforward I imagined!

The second reason is that I don't wanna lock my self into Spotify's API too much because they can revoke my access anytime they want, and although everything is going fine for now, they don't seem to be very developer-friendly. For example, I need to wait 6 weeks to get a bigger limit rate for their API usage.

So, if I use something more reliable for auth like Google or normal email/password, I can easily switch from relying on Spotify easily (think "turn your apple music/sound cloud etc.." to a website).

I don't need Google specifically, it's just an auth method but I get the confusion, I was planning to use Spotify's login button to just avoid all this but used Google for the reasons above. I'll probably add Email as another signing up method next to Google to mitigate some of the confusion.

whalesalad2• 3 years ago

I realize now this is more for artists, and not to create a fun website for someone like myself who just happens to use spotify a lot.

Thanks for taking the time to explain, makes sense!

ssttoo• 3 years ago

Yeah, would be nice if Spotify offered API to auth artists. Otherwise anyone can create https://noise.site/taylorswift and you have to deal with giving/transferring access to the correct person

Update: ok, bad example as TS already exists but you know what I mean, impersonating artists who have not claimed their profile yet

interleave• 3 years ago

Congratulation on shipping! What I love most about this is your "inner monologue" component at the bottom.

You're an artist.
A good one.
Nope, a great one.
But you have a sh*tty site.
You wanna make it better.
You call the guy.
Never replies.
...

IF this is true (I can't say as I'm not an artist on Spotify), then this alone can sell your product.

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

Appreciate it!!!

fsto2• 3 years ago

Completely agree. I know a few artists and that conversation applies to most of them.

YounoYouno• 3 years ago

Like a few others, perhaps due to the title, I was expecting a tool to turn your personal profile into a website as a fun way to share your interests in real-time.

Maybe this could be a cool feature for you to add in the future, there's also a bigger market share and perhaps bigger interest for personal versus corporate use.

Add value to people their lives, maybe go the extra mile and offer certain features for a premium.

Also, Google Auth? As the only authentication? No thanks, and I think think this could be the biggest leakage in your funnel, losing many potential (future) customers.

Perhaps it could be a good move to add simple email sign-ups and read up on the Spotify API rate limits and such in the meantime.

Cool idea man, good luck!

bluetidepro• 3 years ago

This seems neat. I will sign up once there is a non Google sign up available. Also, it would be useful to have a demo site of an example, not just a screenshot. Anyone have links to a demo?

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

Will add email as a signup method soon, I launched the product a week ago so it's at its early stages! here is a quick example: https://noise.site/kalume

noahjk• 3 years ago

I haven't gone through the registration & creation process, so maybe there's something that I'm missing, but it seems like this is just scraping data from Spotify anyway?

or maybe the "about" section and socials links are user-inputted?

Anyway it would be neat if you were able to auto-generate the page on your end rather than require a user to log in and do it, and then for already generated pages let the artist "claim" it somehow, maybe based on spotify auth where the logged in account matches the artist page, or something?

The nice thing then would be that we (as users) could visit a page for a band who you haven't generated yet, and we could be presented with a page like "(artist) page hasn't been created yet. Generate?" and then you could queue a background job that would put together a skeleton page. that's when the "claim" process could come in to allow bands who haven't created their own page to claim it and add details.

I could see the main use of this being consumers and not bands, as others have said, so this flow would make more sense IMO - you'd have way more band pages populated, and you wouldn't need one big scraping job (could still auto-generate the top X artists each month), so you could semi-organically build your DB and then start doing recommendations and features yourself.

willquack• 3 years ago

Reminds me of all the great lastfm music visualization sites...

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

Thx! Fun fact, I still use last.fm counting over 100k scrobbles!

DreaminDani• 3 years ago

Same! I even wrote a thing that prints out my latest listens on my website: https://dreamindani.com/iam/

KomoD• 3 years ago

I thought this would be for users not artists

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

:( Sorry about that!

dang• 3 years ago

Ok we'll wedge an artist in there. Thanks!

zoklet-enjoyer• 3 years ago

Domain squatting is my hobby. Very cool

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

You bet!

basseq• 3 years ago

Not an artist, but seems like a neat idea.

Killer marketing function: when I clicked through, I was immediately looking for a live example. You've got the carousel of screenshots, but show me what the actual output looks like.

Heck, add this as an opt-in in the signup process (or better, as a later opt-in once you've shown value), then showcase 4–5 artists. What artist wouldn't want a little free publicity?

I saw your example in the comments below (https://noise.site/kalume)—yes!

(Other enhancement: auto-link URLs in bio. E.g., on the Kalume page, www.kalume.in/press-kit should be a link.)

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

Totally right! Thx a lot for the feedback!

Retr0id• 3 years ago

This is a really slick landing page, but please don't change my cursor into a lollipop without a good reason! Maybe I'm an outlier here, but I find it about as jarring as something like an auto-playing video popup.

On a much more superficial note, I think the font choice in the Kelsy Lu example is questionable - I just don't think it has the right vibes.

Other than that, this is a neat concept.

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

I know :) The lollipop cursor was a bad idea from a previous concept that I actually forgot to change! and yeah need to work on the themes/designs a bit more, I was too quick with my font choices! Thx for the feedback!

winternett2• 3 years ago

Spotify does all kinds of tricky things to their music preview player. If you're not a logged in user, it only plays a preview of the tune, which of course does not count towards plays for artists. They also steer listeners away from independent artist links by playing completely different songs on shared links.

I'm thoroughly convinced the platform is against independent music, and actively working to suppress the discovery of new and independent musicians unless they pay a lot of money in ads on Spotify and social media (even before making a dime), especially now since they have set a minimum stream threshold for unknown artists. Their corporate practices are terrible behind the scenes.

troupo2• 3 years ago

If you're not a logged in user, it only plays a preview of the tune, which of course does not count towards plays for artists.

Have you considered that's because of music licensing? Playing music costs Spotify money

Disclaimer: I work at Spotify, but this is true for anything streaming. If you stream anything beyond the preview, you have to pay the rights holder. Worse still, even previews often cost money (IIRC this is true in audiobooks). So Spotify really has no choice but only play previews for the non-logged-in users. And that's before we start with the usual problems of gaming the system, bots etc. if you count plays by non-logged in users towards artist plays.

winternett2• 3 years ago

I appreciate the honest intent response, but for an artist that has had zero traction (~7-20 monthly listeners) on Spotify since about 2018 {But solid growth on YouTube and other platforms}, it's disheartening that embedded players don't play full tracks and count those plays. As I am not a popular artist on the platform, the minute a user clicks on my embedded Spotify player, almost every action they take thereafter steers them away from my music, making it extra hard to build a Spotify following, when even my first preview song may have been what brought them to the Spotify site/app.

YouTube, soundcloud, audiomack, pretty much every other audio platform allows embedded players and playlists that allow non-logged-in users to preview full songs. Spotify used to, but quietly changed over time in the past 2 years. As a rights holder, I get paid more from TikTok and youtube for even clips of my songs being played. I have to disagree with the ideal that Spotify doesn't limit artists in this way... Somehow major artists can also on twitter and other sites share full preview songs from Spotify to even non-logged-in users via links, highlighting a deep contradiction in the policies you cite.

If you go to any artist page and navigate to the embed menu item, the embed playlist function on profiles shows/plays full songs as an example for the embed code, which is also quite misleading to artists that want to share their own Spotify music list. When using a single track link on social media sites, on mobile most times clicks don't even play the correct artist song, and on desktop, as soon as an independent artist's song is played, the next song is one by another artist, instead of logical behavior of playing another track by the original (linked) artist... These behaviors are different than many other sites, and there really aren't logical reasons behind that behavior other than to steer listeners towards popular artists and advertising artists as my best guess.

Embedding spotify music player only serves to steer listeners away from the artist sites the music players are embedded on, as they work within an iframe, even when I'm logged in, the embedded player plays only clips of full tunes, so I'm compelled to see it as a shortcut to only promoting what Spotify wants people to hear, rather than all music by unsuspecting artists that embed the player that assume it behaves normally and usefully as a music promotion tool.

zwieback• 3 years ago

Very cool. Side note: the self-bios of lesser known artists are 99% painful to read. It would be great to use some kind of AI to suggest improvements.

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

100% Already wanted to do that but just wanna keep it simple and take it step by step!

sim7c00• 3 years ago

really nice. am an artist, not on spotify, but i know my fellow artists often lack sites and the knowhow to make one even if theyd like to decouple from the big platforms like spotify to refer people to if they share their stuff to friends and fans. great idea really. perhaps you can implement it also to support other platforms than spotify as enhancement? (this is already totally cool tho as is!)

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

For sure! Spotify is only a starting point but as you already know the amount of musicians on Spotify is huge so If I get the product right with them, it'll be easy to integrate with other platforms too. Also, focusing on only Spotify now makes it technically easy for me to develop and makes the value prop really easy to understand and market!

pier25• 3 years ago

It's a cool idea.

There's absolutely a need of a tool to generate artist profiles and manage its content. I'm not sure if basing that on Spotify is the right move for the target audience.

Small artists are extremely unhappy with the current situation and they all blame it on Spotify. It doesn't help that Spotify is implementing a new policy which removes money from very small artists [1].

I'm building something in the audio/music industry and I'm in contact with dozens of small artists. From what I've seen, most use Spotify as a necessity but they hate it. Many even have removed their tracks from Spotify or directly refuse to upload it there. Bandcamp seems to be what these artists use (although personally I'm not sure how long it will last).

[1] https://artists.spotify.com/en/blog/modernizing-our-royalty-...

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

I hear you! what I can say is that although Noise gets the artist music from Spotify, it's pretty much because (like you said) it's the most popular and dominant platform for artists. Of course, I'm planning to give artists the ability to integrate with different services (like Bandcamp and even Soundcloud) so they can show off their music from their favorite platforma. But for now, as I'm trying to get the product right, I'm focusing on Spotify only!

fsto2• 3 years ago

Great job! Really think there’s a need for this.

Most artist have a pretty similar looking site map:

- Portfolio - by you Spotify integration. You could let the artist promote / highlight certain songs or albums.

- Live gigs - Could be done through a bandcamp or similar integration.

- Contact - Could be just a simple email or in the pro plan you could have a proxy email which is [username]@noise.site

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

100%

joenot443• 3 years ago

Nicely done!

I just created noise.site/joecrozier for the piano albums I recorded in college. I liked the onboarding process, straightforward and streamlined.

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

Nice! Noticed it earlier! love the artworks too, who designed them?

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

Example link?

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

- https://noise.site/thereubenbrothers - https://noise.site/no3z

boredemployee• 3 years ago

weird enough, that someone tried to hack my facebook account just a few minutes after I use my gmail account to use your service. I hope it's just a tragic coincidence

ahmdyassr21• 3 years ago

:) would love to joke about this but I can't because I understand why people are afraid of new projects! Of course, this is a coincidence! Also, I wanna note that I display my personal information (who is behind Noise) on the FAQ page (noise.site/faq) of the website so you can know that there is a real person behind the project. Thx for letting me know though!

Show HN: I made a tool to turn a Spotify artist profile into a website

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