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Show HN: Product Hunt for Music
- staplers 2y agoWhile a nice idea, there's just so much more music made than SaaS products and this will eventually need to turn into a curated list ala spotify/apple music to keep users from drowning in static. I think highlighting a specific type of music and finding your niche audience will be the best way towards a happy userbase.
- Modified3019 2y agoI’m big into Doom/stoner rock/space rock/etc, so I subscribe to Weedian which has a fire hose of download codes for new releases/artists. Even for this fairly niche group of genres, the free codes I get have filled my bandcamp artist list to the point of it no longer being useable for its intended purpose. It was already getting unwieldy with just my classicly paid purchases (which I still do a lot of), I have to resort to manually create artist playlists to navigate now. Even just the Weedian compilation albums are so full of tracks, I just don’t have the time to listen through them to evaluate and brutally curate which songs/artists I love before the next one comes out. The lasted album, “Trip to California” is like 99 songs and over 8 hours. I think people vastly underestimate how much music is out there and is being newly released. Part of this, is the Doom genre tends to be 5-15 minute songs, which is absolutely what I want, but also makes listening a significant time investment. Fortunately the majority of songs are easy to say “yeah nope” to and cull. Definitely suffering from success here. On the plus side, I’ve come across a lot of gems that can deserve to sit next to Yob on my playlist, that I wouldn’t have come across otherwise. I really need figure out solution that lets me stream from a self-hosted archive, rate songs on a 5 star scale, genre tag, and share playlists with family members. The 5 star rating seems to most troublesome to fulfill. A tool to automatically produce a public facing playlist that links to bandcamp, YouTube and perhaps other places as a last resort would also be amazing. The best way to discover music, is finding and following people like me who make exploring and curation into a hobby. “What music do I like? Here’s my 5 star list”
- ewhicher 2y agoSome very interesting stuff in here, love the playlist idea. Thanks for the insight!
- ewhicher 2y agoCouldn't agree more. We are actually already saving genre against any track submission so when we have a big enough bank of music we will switch on the genre filters :)
- cageface 2y agoI've been predicting a return to manual content curation for a while. Algos are not going to be able to keep up with the flood of new content. Record labels are going to be more important than ever.
- ewhicher 2y agoI definitely think humans will always be the best to recommend things to humans who want to remain human.
- pacomerh 2y agoWould be great if you could narrow down to sub-genres. Music is not like apps where you can just post a general list in the home page. Can't expect someone that likes hip hop to like experimental. Maybe also get inspiration from Product Hunt's ability to have sub categories.
- ewhicher 2y agoGreat feedback! I'm pleased to say genres are coming, all tracks are tagged by genre already so it's just a matter of waiting till we have enough to show them by genre.
- hailpixel 2y agoAmazing, history does repeat itself. One of the companies in my batch (S07) was iJigg (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ijigg https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ijigg), which had the 2007's version of this interface: single upvote, player, and all. It did well and then petered out as many hyper-niche apps did at that time. Best of luck with this version!
- twiss 2y agoThere is also https://hypem.com/ https://hypem.com/, which focuses on music posted by blogs but is otherwise fairly similar. It helped me discover a lot of cool music back in the day :) Nowadays Spotify's music discovery algorithm is often "good enough", though.
- lordswork 2y agoTiming is everything. Maybe now is the right time for a music discovery app to take off.
- janalsncm 2y agoIf we think about the technology available around 2007, a crowd-sourced music recommendation system is basically what I would expect. No offense, that’s just what we had at the time. The Netflix prize wouldn’t come out until 2008. Pandora’s Music Genome project was perhaps ahead of its time but mostly manual (20-30 minutes per song!). Today, we would usually use automatic song similarity technologies to recommend songs. The reason is pretty clear: popularity-based systems don’t know anything about the songs they recommend. They don’t know anything about you. They only know metadata about the song, that a certain number of people liked a song, essentially throwing away half of the information in a user-song tuple.
- solardev 2y agoDoesn't this work better in the context of personalized recommendations? Pandora is scarily good at this because it's an offshoot of the Music Genome Project, which analyzes the constituent parts of music (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project?wprov=sfl... ) It combines that with your personal things up and listening history and predicts what other songs you yourself are likely to enjoy. By contrast, up votes from strangers across genres seems unlikely to match your personal tastes.
- ewhicher 2y agoGenre filters are coming, once we have enough tracks live. What we want to do it give artists and music lovers a place to discover talent outside of what might be served up for them by algos. If the community likes a track enough it will rise to the top and get in-front of more ears that might not have discovered it otherwise.
- hahajk 2y agoI don't think you'll be able to compete with Spotify for personal recommendations. But there's a fatigue that comes with being kept in your recommendation bubble. I want to hear something new and good and different! And not corporate-approved like Pitchfork (rip). Through the grace of god Hype Machine is still running and still highlighting some solid tracks. Strangers' preferences can be better than a personalized recommendation, if they are cool strangers. Last edit: I seem to remember a study that concluded that people who listened to a wider range of music types spent more money, or were more lucrative advertising targets. However, there are fewer of those kinds of listeners.
- soco 2y agoMaybe because by "wider range" many people understand whatever the trendy stations will feed them - from rap to dad rock, r&b or pop, so they behave as a captive audience? My Spotify must have a reason for always trying to feed me Coldplay although I swear I never (actively) listened to anything from them.
- mavhc 2y ago
- 4d4m 2y agoNice UI! I tried to verify an artist using the Bio verification code but it didn't work, any tips
- janalsncm 2y agoThe implicit assumption here is that popularity is a good heuristic for relevance. Typically music recommendation systems will take popularity into consideration, but it is not the primary ranking factor.
- stanislavb 2y agoSomething similar but with a different angle - Urban DJ https://urbanpoll.com/dj https://urbanpoll.com/dj Every day people order the top 5 songs and nominate one another song and a new topic. That way, we always have songs on the same topic. When there are more than 5 songs nominated on the same topic - people filter them out with one extra step. It's fun, and it's been running since Nov 2022 https://urbanpoll.com/dj/rounds https://urbanpoll.com/dj/rounds. I'd be happy if more people joined. I'm the "founder" of this little side project.
- illegalmemory 2y ago> popularity is a good heuristic for relevance , but it is not the primary factor. Is the statement not valid for products too ?
- pmdfgy 2y agoIt totally is. Take Notion for example.
- pg5 2y agoI built something just like this, but I found everyone would drop there tracks and never look at anybody else's stuff. I shut it down as it ended up being kidn of pointless.
- esafak 2y agoIt doesn't make sense because artistic tastes are idiosyncratic, making popularity as the sole criterion worthless, and the volume of art work overwhelms anyone's ability to even superficially consider. The only scalable solution is to use machine learning, as all the big players do. They're never going to be much better than Spotify. I'd be surprised if they got even close. I suppose there might be a use case for A&R types who are on the hunt for new material, rather than casual listeners.
- ewhicher 2y agoGood points here. What we want to achieve is something akin to the 'support' act before a headline set. Where a more successful artist champions a smaller artist because they like what they are doing. With this site the goal is for artists to share fans to help grow their fan base. This version is the first step towards that. If that makes any sense :)
- esafak 2y agoSo it's a site for musicians. Then say so, and lean into it. As I said before tastes are idiosyncratic so it makes no sense to have a single leaderboard. I would multi-tag each track by genre and language so users can rank by the subsets of tags that interest them. Ask musicians what other features they would value.
- ewhicher 2y agoYou are spot on, we don’t yet say enough that this is primarily an artist centred platform. We want this to be a place that artists share fans and get discovered by industry and playlisters so I think making this clear is key. Thanks for the input! We are already collect genre data so will switch it on and have leaderboards when there is enough tracks of each genre. Just need to build up the pool of tracks and active artists first and prove the concept.
- maz1b 2y agoBest of luck! We tried this with Songfari back in the day around 2015-2017, and while it was promising, it just didn't work out.
- ewhicher 2y agoThanks!
- webprofusion 2y agoFirst problem is that such systems are typically easy to game with a script to trigger /listen from multiple IPs etc. I once demonstrated this when a telecoms giant ran a very similar music popularity contest (around 24 yrs ago) and they were not amused. Everyone else was most bemused at my mid-paced metal instrumental No.1.
- stevekemp 2y agoKinda like product hunt, where nothing is real and posts live or die by how many people you pay to vouch for your submissions. "Product Hunt for ..." is a bad tagline for selling anything, it's been gamed to hell, and back.
- ewhicher 2y agoWe definitely need to be cautious of people gamifying the system. Humans are smart though and they will always find a way! We will do our best and hopefully can always find a positive way to turn any bad acting on its head and make it benefit the whole community… wish me luck!! XD
- ephaeton 2y agoAs a small artist living in quite a tiny niche - didgeridoo music - I have to say that the requirement for having your music on spotify is a no-go. Artists like myself don't benefit from spotify, I don't think, it's a net loss and you join the ranks of people with questionable actions (cf., e.g., spotify-AI-generated content). BC and/or YT would be viable alternatives for those who actually need discovery IMO. E.g., here's some unexpected percussive organic trance for you that my collaborators and I put on BC: https://dojorich.bandcamp.com/album/tubecolab https://dojorich.bandcamp.com/album/tubecolab (I'm Freddie Veggie, btw). Music of that scope doesn't "perform" on spotify, so I won't invest in having it there.
- mg 2y agoHey, I run two somewhat popular music recommendation websites, the Music-Map and Gnoosic. I currently experiment with the ability to feature the music of artists, so I have put your music up on Gnoosic: https://www.gnoosic.com/artist/freddie+veggie https://www.gnoosic.com/artist/freddie+veggie And put you on the map next to some other didgeridoo artists: https://www.music-map.com/freddie+veggie https://www.music-map.com/freddie+veggie I'm not yet sure when I will turn the signup into a public feature. Currently, I'm interested in feedback from artists. If you like, shoot me an email. The two sites have a pretty big audience, and I would like to find out how I can use it to help small artists.
- ephaeton 2y agoawesome, thanks! And thank you for the invitation to a conversation, I'll take it up!
- ewhicher 2y agoI love your music! Thanks for sharing your insight. I'm happy to say that verifying and posting from other services is coming... we just chose to start with Spotify. We are a small team of two working on this as a passion project so have to build little by little. We will keep you updated :)
- ephaeton 2y ago
- Rodeoclash 2y agoOut of all the ways discovering music, surprisingly Soundcloud has been the best. Being able to curate a list of DJs in various genres means that I'm constantly finding new music by being exposed to what they're putting in their sets. It's kind of a meta music discovery, I can piggy back off others who have tastes that I like. The biggest benefit of this is that I don't necessarily get recommendations of music that's adjacent to what I already like. In other words, if I like Depeche Mode, I don't want to listen to bands that sound vaguely like them. What I've yet to see someone do, is track what music someone listens to after listening to a song. Often when I hear a piece of music, it makes me want to listen to something else that feels the same way or reminds me of being in similar place in time. A music recommendation engine based of this concept would be interesting.
- ewhicher 2y agoLove this, I totally agree. That's why we want to find a way to make this work without algorithms. We know what hits us in the same way as something else. I'd love to build this site to achieve close to what you suggest.
- ljlolel 2y agoYou're wanting https://hangout.fm/ https://hangout.fm/
- ewhicher 2y agoOooo, interesting! Are you involved in this project at all?
- buss_jan 2y agoThis looks great! What are your plans around community and content, I feel like Pitchfork could use some competition. Best of success!
- ewhicher 2y agoThanks for the comment! We are working through what exactly that will look like at the moment. First thing we think we want to add is comments to tracks. Following this I want artists to meet other artists and to start sharing their fan base. Some kind of ‘connect’ feature that allows artists to chat and shows they support each other. Also if an artist shares a track they get mentioned on the home feed in some way. Finally we want to add a full forum type thing like indie hackers as well as a blog for artist tips and advice. Little by little for now though!
- rocky_raccoon 2y agoTangential question: What is the best Pandora-adjacent service these days? In other words, where can I plug in "Artist X" and get a great platter of recommendations? Spotify doesn't cut it for me -- the recommendations are either hyper-generic or songs that I've listened to many times in the past. Last.fm doesn't seem to have many lights on these days. Pandora, in its early days, was a great place to discover new music because it would find songs that were roughly similar to what you requested but by often unheard-of artists.
- n4r9 2y agoBandcamp has a "if you like this, you may also like" feature which seems to be unbiased by listening history and allows unheard-of artists to crop up. I've found a few good recs that way although it can be hit-or-miss.
- Backing5890 2y agoI haven't personally used it, but I do know that ListenBrainz offers a Last.FM-esque experience, and I see it does have a "similar artists" section. I'm in a similar boat as you though. Most of the Spotify-generated stuff is just repeats of songs I've already liked or just generic songs. I've been diving into the past about artists I've been meaning to check out and also using Rate Your Music to stay semi-conscious of what's popular today.
- flanbiscuit 2y agoI use a site called https://www.queup.net https://www.queup.net which is a successor to turntable.fm. You find a "room" with a genre of music you like and just sit back and listen to people DJ using soundcloud and youtube videos. I have it on all day in a room that is majority electronic/chill/lounge and mostly non-vocal. I've learned about so many artists this way but you need to find an active room you like, and sites like these tend to skew towards the many different electronic subgenres
- mukti 2y agoListenBrainz Radio can be decent - https://listenbrainz.org/explore/lb-radio/ https://listenbrainz.org/explore/lb-radio/ This is made by the MetaBrainz folks, the same people behind the MusicBrainz database (which is used by ListenBrainz).
- havefunbesafe 2y agoI'm a lifelong touring musician. This has all of the great things that BIRP.FM and others provided for so long, without the foolish gatekeeping that has plagued the music industry forever. Bravo. I hope this takes off in a massive way.
- ewhicher 2y agoThanks so much! I’d love to hear about your experience and what ways this sort of community might benefit you. Send us an email hello@tracklist.it if you fancy :)
- MuffinFlavored 2y agoReminds me of https://hypem.com/ https://hypem.com/
- bploetz 2y agoOne bit of feedback after submitting a track: The list of genres to select from is too course-grained IMHO. There's a gazillion sub-genres of electronic dance music for example, but "Electronic" was as close as I could get. Genres like metal have the same issue. It doesn't matter so much now given the current UX, but if you consider others' suggestions on adding genre/sub-genre specific lists (which I agree with 100%), then I think you'll want to allow people to get as fine-grained as they want to (sub-genre lists could all bubble up to a parent genre list, and all of the steps in between). Submit Hub does this very well, if you're looking for examples/inspiration. My two pennies. Good luck with the site!
- ewhicher 2y agoGreat advice. I’ve used submit hub for many years, it is a great product. The issue with have with genre is you really can have any genre, and new ones are being made up all the time. We won’t be able to have competitive lists for all of these so decided to approach it from as few genres as possible, then will Implement a tagging system that an artist can write anything in. We will then offer search by tag so they can be found. It’s a slow process as this is a part time project but hopefully we will get there!
- 7ero 2y agoThis reminds of me https://hypem.com https://hypem.com, similar concept, except music is aggregated by popular online blogs.
- superultra 2y agoI'm someone who's been in the music industry for many, many years. This reminds me a bit of a platform called mixtape (I think) that was in this vein. Here are a few thoughts and hopefully helpful feedback: - your net is too broad. genre is meaningless in 2024 but what's the heuristic for inclusion here? You're up against some very powerful recommendation algos. We can complain about those algos all day but functionally and practically, the Spotify algo is pretty good or good enough. So what's the leg up here? - I'm having a hard time understanding what's different about this site from any other previous incarnation of music blog - which applied a level of curation that was reliable. What if instead of just dumping tracks on the front page, you used curators to present new music, and those curators were expressed as personalities with tastes? - It looks like the heuristic here isn't curation or subjectivity, it's just whoever can send the most fans to the page to upvote new music. I don't see how that gains users. At best, it turns into one of those sites you see on Facebook where people ask for votes for contests. - There isn't a lot of differentiation in your information presentation from Spotify. It'd be great to see more about the band and the song when clicking on it. Spotify has been moving into this direction for a while but their issue is scaling metadata; not a problem at your scale right now. Why not ask for more info, or something exclusive to your site? At this point you're really just rehashing spotify links. Small technical feedback - the play button on the track listings should turn into a pause button. I have to hit play, but in order to pause it, I have to find and then move to a separate button. Shouldn't it be the same button?
- pspitzer 2y agoAlong these lines, a few friends and I built https://www.faves.fm https://www.faves.fm, a simple and streamlined way to get human-curated song recommendations. You can see my faves at my profile: https://www.faves.fm/spitza https://www.faves.fm/spitza Or Rivers Cuomo's profile for any Weezer fans out there! https://www.faves.fm/rcuomo https://www.faves.fm/rcuomo Would love any feedback yall have :)