Show HN: We're building a better music distribution platform

by hartleybrody • 14 years ago

27 42 14 years ago

As someone who started a music blog several years ago, I've worked with tons of artists and used many different "file sharing" websites to distribute music. And they all felt a little lacking. Soundcloud is probably the closest, but their focus on "sounds" as opposed to "music" left much to be desired.

We're offering real time stats, geolocation analytics, and a whole bunch more to help artists distribute music and watch it spread. Let me know what you think!

lewisflude3• 14 years ago

Looks great. As a band member, active new-music-finder and song-downloader, I fit within your demographic.

If you'd like some feedback and stuff I'd be happy to take a look!

brianlovin11• 14 years ago

Thank you! We'd love some feedback, especially from the artist's perspective as far as our feature set and pricing.

hartleybrody8• 14 years ago

Definitely! Shoot either of us an email:

(hartley and/or brian) at mvsic.co

prezjordan• 14 years ago

Hey Hartley, what blog? (If you don't mind me asking). I built ilictronix, but abandoned it when I started college a few years ago. Now I'm rebranding it [1]. Regardless, I imagine we've crossed paths, I've chatted with many many other music bloggers. Great community, I miss it.

[1] http://ilictronix.herokuapp.com

hartleybrody8• 14 years ago

I started Fresh on Campus[1] during my sophomore year of college, but moved on from that over a year ago. I also unified The College Cartel[2].

We probably have crossed paths! It's a great community to work in -- straddling the line between technology and pop culture.

[1] http://www.freshoncampus.com/ [2] http://www.thecollegecartel.com/

dclaysmith• 14 years ago

I don't know if SEO will be a priority for your company--you might be relying on a different source of traffic. If you need SEO, you are hurting yourself by not having "music" in your domain name. Using the "v" might be cool but it isn't going to help your effort.

hartleybrody8• 14 years ago

Do you think that "music" is a keyword that people normally use when searching for music? It sounds like a rhetorical question, but I'd argue that it's actually not that important.

We're planning on having really SEO-friendly link structure:

    mvsic.co/artist-name/track-name/

But the majority of search rankings are determined by off-site factors, like how many inbound links a site has. We're definitely hoping to rank well for branded search times (ie, someone looking for a particular artist or song) but we know it'll take awhile before that traffic becomes meaningful to the artist, so we're not advertising it yet.

waxjar• 14 years ago

I couldn't find an example of an artist page, so it's hard for me to evaluate.

I have a question though. How are you ever going to compete to Bandcamp? From what I read, the services sound very similar, except Bandcamp does it all (well, almost all) for free. Plus a lot of artists and consumers are already familiar with Bandcamp, it's pretty much the go-to website unsigned indie artists put their stuff up (either as a free download or paid download).

hartleybrody8• 14 years ago

I'd be lying if I told you that I thought Bandcamp was a bad service. In fact, they've been a big influence on what we've decided to build. Them and Soundcloud.

How will we ever compete? We obviously won't be able to match them feature for feature at this point -- we're just two guys working on this in our spare time.

But I think our positioning is a little different. Plus, both of us have years of experience music blogging so we'll lean on our networks of artists we're in contact with to hopefully drive some initial sing-ups and get some momentum.

We have dreams of being the go-to service for this kind of stuff, but we know it's going to be awhile before we get there.

brianlovin11• 14 years ago

Hartley and I are on the same page - Bandcamp and Soundcloud are awesome. We just think there's room for a different angle.

For example, Bandcamp makes their revenue by taking a % off of all music sales. For this reason, they only let artists give away a certain number of tracks for free (at which point they make artists pay to give away their music for free).

That makes sense for Bandcamp, we understand. For Mvsic, we think that free music is a lot more valuable to indie artists who are looking to get their foot in the door, and we're all about supporting unlimited downloading (and selling!)

Thanks for your feedback though, we'll keep working!

snsr• 14 years ago

I understand that you're targeting musicians, but to whom will you sell and distribute their music? The site doesn't currently mention or appeal to listeners. You probably don't (yet) have a lot of music to promote, but a quick visit to Beatport shows what type of attention is paid to audience and content.

Some initial feedback on the site's layout:

- The layout breaks at medium and narrow widths, particularly the home and FAQ pages

- Looks enough like Rdio that I feel compelled to mention it here

Good luck!

hartleybrody8• 14 years ago

Yah, we're definitely hoping to become a portal for fans discover music. At this early stage though, we can't promise that we'll be able to drive traffic to artists since we're not there yet, so we'd be relying on artists to drive their following to us.

Once our content library starts to build up, we'll hopefully transition to a more listener-driven public site. Thanks for the feedback!

brianlovin11• 14 years ago

Thanks for the initial feedback (and Rdio comment...weird, hadn't really noticed that).

As we move forward, we do plan on using Mvsic as a way for listeners to not only download, but also discover, new music. Hartley and I are both in the music blogging scene, and we're really excited to work with bloggers to figure out how they can use our service and players to make their sites even better.

evmar• 14 years ago

Here's what your site looks like to me:

http://i.imgur.com/frnJd.png

Google Chrome 23.0.1262.0 (Official Build 155673) dev / OS Linux

brianlovin11• 14 years ago

Is that on mobile? Looking into it now, thanks for the heads up!

This is how it should look, by the way: http://imgur.com/wt9kC

suhastech• 14 years ago

Same issue as evmar,

Chrome, OS X Mountain Lion

tgrass• 14 years ago

Just delete the 'span-4' on the p class.

jonathanjaeger• 14 years ago

The misspelling and the .co URL instead of .com is going to hurt you so bad. When consumers choose a brand to trust, a lot goes in the name. You might be able to prove out an MVP of a product but you won't go big on that domain name.

hartleybrody8• 14 years ago

We're actually pretty happy with the name choice. Mvsic should be an easy term to rank for, while also having connotations of "music" to a human reader.

Plus, we think it's simple and elegant, which describes the service. See also: http://svbtle.com and http://svpply.com

hackmiester3• 14 years ago

Maybe the name is okay, but this is gonna kill you: http://www.mvsic.com/

eclipxe• 14 years ago

Yeah, no. The "u" as a "v" thing is stupid and cliché

WiseWeasel2• 14 years ago

I have a hard time believing that many indie artists are willing to pay $15/mo for access to a distribution platform with no traction with music purchasers or listeners. That's putting all the risk on them. I'd structure it more like "we get the first $15 of your earnings on our service each month".

That said, welcome competitor! I admire you guys taking a stab at this problem; it is one that needs solving.

brianlovin11• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback :)

Hartley and I actually have some good connections in the music blogging space, and we're working on building some tools that we think will help artists and bloggers work together.

For example, right now bloggers either:

a) use an artist's embeddable player in order to post a song. They can't track plays/downloads coming from their site or their impact on an artist (I contributed 20% of their downloads, for example).

b) upload their own versions of audio files so that they can track plays/downloads. But now the artist can't see the reach of their music.

I think we can fix this.

WiseWeasel2• 14 years ago

So does that mean that you would sell access to the analytics data for a song listing to both the artist and the blogger? Would the blogger's data be limited to traffic on their own site? Does the artist control who gets access to their data?

bdunn• 14 years ago

Some thoughts about your pricing...

The relatively minor jump in pricing from manager -> label really confuses me. I'd think a label should be paying in the thousands per month, not just 6x more than an individual artist.

brianlovin11• 14 years ago

Really good point. Right now we're figuring out what prices make the most sense, and we're talking to different artists/managers/label owners about how we can meet their needs.

jmathai• 14 years ago

CASH Music: http://cashmusic.org/

CASH Music is a nonprofit organization that builds open source digital tools for musicians and labels.

_hiss• 14 years ago

As a musician and owner of a record label, I closed out immediately once I saw the generic site design. Not saying it has to be super hip or whatever, but, trivial as it is, I'd like to see some semblance of taste or creative spirit for lack of anything else to go on.

Show HN: We're building a better music distribution platform

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