
Apply HN: Hillside.fm - listen to music with other people in rooms - hillsidefm
Hillside.fm lets you listen to music with other people in rooms. You can open private rooms to listen with friends, or join public rooms to discover new songs together with a reddit-like community. Whereas existing services have focused on the party&#x2F;club&#x2F;dj aspect of shared music, Hillside is quiet listening rooms for introverts. We&#x27;re not a video game.<p>The shared music market is confirmed to exist. The problem is, no one&#x27;s figured out how to run such a service cheaply. But a music room service is fundamentally a node.js&#x2F;socket.io app, which is super cheap; and if you get the music elsewhere, bandwidth costs round down to zero. So all the money problems people are encountering must be self-created, from e.g. hiring too fast, or buying users.<p>We plan to keep the team small, write small, efficient software, and grow organically. We&#x27;ll write everything in Clojure, letting us execute a million times faster than the competition. Thanks to ClojureScript, React, and Electron, we can use the same code across our web, mobile, and desktop apps, which will make us even faster.<p>Ads won&#x27;t work; we&#x27;ll have to have subscriptions. One intriguing idea is to cap the number of people per room, and charge companies for team rooms.<p>We&#x27;ll stream the music from YouTube initially. Hopefully that&#x27;s legal. Genius and plug.dj do&#x2F;did it. If this ends up being a problem, by the time anyone complains we&#x27;ll be out of the seed stage, and making deals should be easier.<p>I can answer questions.
======
nkzednan
Good idea, but sounds a lot like how turntable.fm started out and then they
ended up changing direction a few years back:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turntable.fm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turntable.fm)

------
6stringmerc
> _We 're going to stream the music from YouTube initially. Hopefully this is
> legal. Genius and plug.dj both do/did it. If this ends up being a problem,
> by the time anyone complains we'll have made it out of the seed stage, and
> making deals should be easier._

In considering the goal is to be helpful in this process I'd like to point out
the story of Aurous does not bode well for this mentality or business
model[1], as that concept didn't even entail a subscription revenue. Avoid
negotiating licenses at your own peril, I believe.

[1] [http://aurous.me/](http://aurous.me/)

------
buss
So this is subscription streaming radio?

Spotify lets you share playlists with friends. What would make somebody use
your service instead of that? Is it the live listening feature?

~~~
hillsidefm
Yes, listening to the same music simultaneously. The users control what music
plays in the rooms, as opposed to simply a shared stream. And there are public
rooms in addition to private ones.

Think turntable.fm/plug.dj for the closest analogy.

------
goeric
First of all, congrats on the venture and I wish you the best of luck.

For the streaming portion - you can use YouTube but you can't hide the video
(it violates their terms), so be careful.

