

Popcuts (YC summer 08) Pays You To Find Good New Music - auston
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/06/y-combinators-popcuts-pays-you-to-find-good-new-music/

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mattmaroon
Indie Music + Pyramid Scheme = Popcuts.

Awesome! It's like Amway for mp3 bloggers.

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tesseract
It seems to me that Popcuts is not so much a pyramid scheme itself, more of a
platform which makes it trivially easy to start one if you are so inclined. It
will be interesting to see whether that becomes the typical use pattern, or
whether the discovery and reward process ends up being more organic than
pyramid-like.

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anewaccountname
It seems to me that Amway is not so much a pyramid scheme itself, more of a
platform which makes it trivially easy to start one if you are so inclined. It
will be interesting to see whether that becomes the typical use pattern, or
whether the discovery and reward process ends up being more organic than
pyramid-like.

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mattmaroon
Classic.

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mwerty
I just wanted to give a shoutout to thesixtyone which I got hooked on to
recently. It seems to be a somewhat similar approach: the user is rewarded
with karma points for speculating correctly on the future popularity of a
song. I suppose step 2 could be to make points redeemable.

FYI: I am not affiliated with thesixtyone nor do I know the founders.

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13ren
It might work better with karma (and games) instead of money.

All those accounting figures seem out of place with cool new music... but I
don't know the profiles of indie music lovers - maybe they like numbers :)

 _EDIT_ I think startup founders (myself included) are comfortable reasoning
in financial terms - but many people don't, and don't want to. They can even
be offended and upset by it. I think this startup might need to find a niche
market that _is_ comfortable with it.

It might be better to disguise/hide the money somehow (but that defeats the
pitch)... or, possibly extend the underlying microtransaction technology to
other subject matter that is already financial oriented (or, has a
financially-oriented audience).

These are just my opinions. What works, works.

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brandonkm
I think that this is without a doubt one of the more promising models for
music. The whole concept of the listener and artist getting paid is pretty
innovative and forward thinking.

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redorb
it seems tc coverage for yc startups is 'a fair bet', another perk of yc ? ;)

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tesseract
I liked the comment which suggested the yc startups always try to get tc
converage, since tc stories are likely to be upvoted on hn, leading to hn
coverage. :)

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jmorin007
Already passed it on to some artists I know.

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joshwa
User "curation" is the new UGC.

c.f. Muxtape, etsy's treasury, the rise of linkblogging, etc.

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thedob
The whole key to this idea will end up being the music, and not the 'getting
paid for downloading the music.' If the site does a good job of promoting
quality artists who you may have never discovered otherwise, then that's
reason alone to buy Popcuts. When a band gets big, people will buy the music
off of ITunes anyway, but if Popcuts identifies a quality band early, then it
saves hours of internet search and digging to find good new stuff. And that's
something worth paying .99 for.

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peakok
direct link : <http://www.popcuts.com/>

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schtono
I think getting cool artists on the page is one of the key factors of success.
Therefore I'd suggest you'd outline the process for artists a bit better -
simply give the "artist signup" page a little more love (e.g. mentioning how
payment works etc), everyone who's about to sign up knows exactly what
happened.

Awesome idea anyways, already passed it on!

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ryanb
This is a neat idea, but it will be interesting to see how quality artists can
be convinced that they should try this business model.

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ycsn
nice, just bought some music

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abless
Might be the next big hit

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LukeG
Iz niice work guys.

