

Show HN: Spotify for Independent Music - sakbhatn
http://musicfellas.com/hot

======
sakbhatn
Hello HN, we are Musicfellas, an independent music discovery platform. In one
line, we are spotify + iTunes for independent music. You can not only discover
new music everyday but also support the artists you like by buying their
music. Very soon, we have an iPhone app and some premium features coming out.
Looking forward to your feedback.

PS: Music startups are hard. We are looking for
mentors/advisors/investors/music-enthusiasts who can guide us through. Please
feel free to email us [hello AT musicfellas.com]. Cheers!

------
ollerac
I really like the design. Your logo is especially nice. There are a lot of
buttons, but the interface seems to be well organized.

I got a good selection of music just from the front page. Would you consider
adding a radio option that's based on a song or an artist, like Pandora and
Spotify do?

Have you considered doing a variable pricing model like Amie Street did back
in the day? The more popular a track or album is, the more expensive it gets.
I think this is a really good model for selling independent music because it
rewards all the right people in the right way. If you get an album for an
inexpensive price that means you helped 'discover' that artist and you helped
them gain popularity (i.e. their price goes up a little). And if you buy an
album for the going market price ($9.99 or whatever) that means a lot of other
people have already validated that it's good and you know you're getting a
good deal. Just a thought.

~~~
sakbhatn
Thanks for the nice feedback :)

Radio based on artist is already under the works, we should have that out
soon.

Variable pricing does seem like a good option. We'll have to explore this
further & see how that goes well with the artists. Because they and they alone
control the pricing for now. We however do a have a "pay what you want"
feature right now, something people have used more often than not.

Again, thanks for the great feedback. I have your email, would like to send
you free invite to preemium features once we have them out.

~~~
ollerac
That'd be awesome. Feel free to keep me in the loop.

------
onion2k
Two points of feedback;

1\. No one I know wants to browse "independent music" as an amorphous blob of
everything lumped together. On the initial "Hot Songs" page, I had absolutely
no idea what I was going to get by clicking on the Play button for each song.
I went from a weird electronica song to an "alternative" song to an acoustic
guitar song.

2\. Also, there seems to be quite a lot of stuff on there. As a new user, I
don't want to listen to lots of rubbish to find good songs. Give me a clue
about what other people have listened to a lot, favourited, and so on. If I
find some things I like I'll probably explore the site a bit further. If I
don't find anything within the first few plays, I'll leave and I won't come
back. (The data could be fake - just things you like - but regardless, give me
some sort of opinion to work from.)

~~~
whiddershins
>> No one I know wants to browse "independent music" as an amorphous blob of
everything lumped together

I do agree, can you help me understand what distinguishes independent music
from regular music? It isn't hard to be added to Spotify, so why would you
have any music Spotify doesn't? Or is it simply that the compensation model is
different.

~~~
sharkweek
I think one thing that's nice about this is a much smaller inventory to sort
through that gives some front page exposure specifically to indie artists.

I played around with this for a bit and found 3-4 aritsts I liked just by
hitting play on a dozen or so songs, and then exploring further.

Big fan of this.

~~~
gshahlot
Wow, thanks :)

------
tfinch
It's interesting to me that you see yourself as spotify + itunes, as the
comparison that immediately struck me is Bandcamp + recommendations and the
ability to queue up tracks. It certainly seems like the value you bring to
artists is very similar to bandcamp - I suppose your differentiator here is
discovery? Are you planning to allow sales of physical items as well? I'm a
big fan of buying the vinyl release + immediate download - and anecdotally it
seems like the independent music crowd would be more interested in this than
perhaps other music demographics.

I'm keen not to make any comments about recommendations or the breadth of
music available, as I'm aware that the latter is a chicken-and-egg situation,
and the former is hard to judge without giving the site a chance to learn my
tastes. I'm going to give it a try for sure.

And now for some classic hn nitpicks:

* Please stop your site links from opening pages in new tabs. Whilst looking about for more information, I ended up with 7 tabs open. Please no.

* I clicked on the feedback tab on the right side and was presented not with a feedback form, but a login form. If I can listen to music without signing up/in, surely I can leave feedback?

~~~
sakbhatn
Physical items is not in the plan for now. If more people show interest in
that, something we can consider. Our differentiator is certainly discovery.

About the nitpicks: 1\. This was to avoid user accidentally clicking and
losing the music queue. Now that we've added a js check, we should certainly
remove it. 2\. We had to shut it down because of the spam. I know we could do
captcha, but then we realized most of the feedback anyway came from signed up
users.

~~~
glomph
Could you not do a captcha for non signed in users?

------
Sym3tri
Nice work.

FYI the flash blocker in chrome doesn't register that there's flash content on
the site. I had to click around quite a bit in order to get an option to
enable flash.

Better yet, you should use the Web Audio API and fallback to flash for
unsupported browsers :)

[http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webaudio/intro/](http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webaudio/intro/)

~~~
gshahlot
We do have a html5 fallback, I'll get that looked into.

Edit: Are you on firefox by any chance? Apparently mp3 is not supported there.
If not, which browser are you using?

~~~
doublec
For Mozilla platforms, MP3 is supported on Firefox OS, some Android devices
and Desktop on Windows Vista and up. Support for Windows XP is coming in
Firefox 26. It is available on Linux with custom builds and should be in by
default soon. For a list of supported audio and video formats in Firefox see
[http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2013/08/21/html-media-support-in-
fi...](http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2013/08/21/html-media-support-in-
firefox.html).

------
jasonkester
Awesome.

One important improvement: If you're going to use a "metal hand" as the icon
for your Like button, you really need to add a :hover{margin-top:-2px;} to it
so that pumps up and down as expected when you mouse over it.

Like the example here:

[http://www.blogabond.com/Photos/PhotoView.aspx?imageID=21691](http://www.blogabond.com/Photos/PhotoView.aspx?imageID=21691)

~~~
sakbhatn
Brilliant idea. Thanks!

------
Loudr
It's great that musicfellas is supporting the pay-what-you-want model. It's
not so great that they pretty much lifted the slider from the album pages on
[http://www.loudr.fm](http://www.loudr.fm)

(according to their blog post 3 days ago at
[http://blog.musicfellas.com/post/59478848137/generosity](http://blog.musicfellas.com/post/59478848137/generosity),
musicfellas implemented PWYW "a few weeks back" \- Loudr has had its current
slider design since we launched in February of this year).

Although on the plus side, it means that our slider is cool enough to copy!
(Ours even allows artists to bundle multiple albums together, to reward their
fans for paying more).

~~~
gshahlot
Your slider is definitely cool :) We did take the design inspiration for that
from you.

I'd love to have a chat with you guys. Feel free to write to us. Cheers!

~~~
Loudr
Sorry, but it's not exactly "inspiration" if you copy the design exactly. You
guys have a good thing going - design features in your own way and it'll help
the consistency of your whole site!

We're available at info@loudr.fm if you want to get in touch.

------
louhike
AFAIK, there is independent music on Spotify. I've seen a lot of small artists
on it and the platform has a lot of visibility so most of these artists will
try to go there. So I was wondering how you can manage to get your
"contracts". It seems also there are only english songs. The problem is that
we often look for the artists of our country when we are looking for indies.
Is it something which will change or do you aim mostly for US and UK market
for now? Otherwise, nice website !

~~~
sakbhatn
Certainly, they do have independent music, but mostly procured through
"independent" labels. We are truly indie and all our music is directly
uploaded by the artists here
[http://musicfellas.com/artist](http://musicfellas.com/artist)

In addition to this, we make discovery super simple and you can also support
the artists by buying their music.

We do have non-english music, unfortunately there is no easy way to search by
language right now. We should have that up soon.

~~~
burrokeet
Does this mean you have chosen not to work with labels (indie or otherwise) or
just that the majority of takeup has been from unsigned artists?

~~~
gshahlot
We have only chosen not to work with _non-indie_ labels. We are all about
independent music only. We've approached and been approached by indie labels
too, however most of them demand a minimum upfront payment, which isn't the
best thing to do for us. So as of now 90% of the music has been procured
directly from the artists (not necessarily unsigned but signed with non-
exclusive deal).

------
randomchars
I really like the design, it's much cleaner than Spotify or Rdio. A few things
though:

\- I have an error icon next to my name in the sidebar, that says I need to
complete my profile. I really don't think not having a bio should warrant a
this kind of warning. (Maybe a notification instead?)

\- I logged in with Facebook, and my country and profile url weren't auto
filled out. That's a little weird.

\- No last.fm (or libre.fm) support. For me this is a deal breaker. If it
doesn't scrobble, I don't listen to it. I'm sure there are other people out
there who feel the same.

What formats are the downloads available in?

~~~
gshahlot
_it 's much cleaner than Spotify or Rdio_ I can't tell you how happy that
makes us :)

1,2. Fair enough. 3\. That is definitely on our to-do list. Should be out
soon.

Downloads by default are in 320kbps mp3 for now. For any other format, you can
make a purchase & shoot us an email.

------
chasing
Curation is key on a project like this. Don't just dump a bunch of random
bands on the screen. Give us a reason to want to explore them.

------
acidity
I cannot seem to figure out how an Indian startup has mostly foreign artists.
I am asking because couple of years back, I tried to do the same thing and
licensing was the biggest issue. Have you got funding in India?

Moreover, most of the artists and songs I see up there are just at
bandcamp.com and no where else. Are you just scrapping Bandcamp and reselling
their music. E.g. googling for the album "Creatures" on homepage
([https://www.google.com/search?q=creatures+new+campaigns&oq=c...](https://www.google.com/search?q=creatures+new+campaigns&oq=creatures+new+camp&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l2j69i62l3.3007j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8))
loads up only from Bancamp and other albums too.

~~~
sakbhatn
We don't scrape anything from any of the sites. All the music that comes in,
comes directly only from the artist through musicfellas.com/artist

------
soemarko
8tracks.com boiled down to single tag?

Feedback: the player panel, instead having tabs for Now Playing / Queue, why
not move the tabs below the player buttons, and have Comments / Queue tabs.

~~~
gshahlot
That's how we had started initially. Both the tabs were below the player,
however for most people browsing on laptops, they could hardly see a song or
two in the queue. So we moved it to a separate tab on the top.

------
mortenjorck
Amazing. I just signed up my music project, and while I'm really glad to see
you've made the path for artists to get on the service easy, I'm curious what
sort of gatekeeping / curation will help maintain the signal-to-noise ratio.
Ideally, you have something somewhere in between the hard-to-crack-unless-
you're–with-a-major label of Pandora and the total free-for-all of some past
services like Amie Street, but that's a notoriously difficult line to walk.

~~~
gshahlot
We do have manual curation in place. We are not very strict with the filtering
but we ensure nothing bad comes in. After the great, good and average comes
in, we let the algorithms take over and decide based on user activity, what
kind of music to let surface.

------
codonaut
Loving it! Keep doing what you're doing. One thing I just noticed-- I clicked
the Like button which then prompted me to sign up. After doing that I was
returned to the same page, but had to click the like button. It's a small
thing but applying the action that prompted the signup automatically instead
of having to redo it would be a bit of a usability enhancement. Also, an edit
button on an already submitted review would be good instead of having to
delete and retype.

~~~
gshahlot
Nice catch, noted.

------
lux
I see my song was approved today, but for some reason it's showing a broken
image in the listings. It's the first listing in electronic
([http://musicfellas.com/aband_nthecar](http://musicfellas.com/aband_nthecar)).
I've uploaded a photo for both my profile and the album, but I can't seem to
re-upload an album image to check if that's the issue.

Thanks, and good luck on the site! :)

~~~
sakbhatn
Sorry about that, should be fine now :)

~~~
lux
Awesome, thanks!

------
Sprint
Hm, I get no music and no indication why.

Any chance that you would add free music aka music by people who want their
art listened without anyone having to pay?

~~~
lux
Looks like you can just set your price to 0 and it becomes free.

~~~
Sprint
Sorry, I meant music under free licenses like creative commons. Free means at
least free to share to me, not free to download for personal use.

------
quaunaut
Honest question: Would you consider reaching out to foreign artists? I ask
because it's damned difficult as anyone not in Japan to compensate those of
the Doujin music scene in Japan- their music is traditionally sold at
conventions(and then, in limited quantities), but not online, so you really
only have access via piracy.

Giving their fans a way to compensate would be amazing.

~~~
sakbhatn
[http://musicfellas.com/ryoutasato](http://musicfellas.com/ryoutasato) and
[http://musicfellas.com/nicotone](http://musicfellas.com/nicotone)

We do :) I know of at least these 2 artists from Japan.

------
cornflakies
Shameless plug: A friend of mine down here in Charlottesville, VA is doing a
related project (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302124](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302124)
). It's Pandora-like internet radio for local bands and bands coming to town
for upcoming gigs. Thought it might be of interest.

------
joejohnson
The little thumbnail image next to someone's name ("Somebody liked this
track") is huge: [http://s3-ap-
southeast-1.amazonaws.com/musicfellas.entertain...](http://s3-ap-
southeast-1.amazonaws.com/musicfellas.entertainment/images/user/250/IMG_7021_copy.jpg?1356030513)

Make that smaller.

------
phusuke
Dude! This is awesome. Outside of the idea. I love how simple and amazing your
UI is. Its light and brilliantly intuitive. I have been using everything from
grooveshark, new myspace and spotify , rdio but i seriously like your UI the
best. It has almost all the features and its so very well thought out. Good on
you sir!

~~~
gshahlot
You sir, have made our day!

------
bender80
I see on the tab it gives the timer for currently playing song. Nice attention
to detail there and good luck.

------
noinput
Really like this. Now a few songs in from the hot recommendations on your
homepage and already hooked. I have a small side venture that could be a nice
integration point for your artists (free as well). If interested, email is in
my profile.

~~~
gshahlot
mailed!

------
martinml
I understand that if I disable plugins in my browser some pages are going to
break, but a friendly warning to whitelist your site would be better than
silence and _Object # <error> has no method 'play'_ in the console :)

~~~
sakbhatn
Sorry about that :) We'll get this done.

------
pkorzeniewski
Very clean design and the UI is really nice to use - great site and great
music :) I would suggest however to show genre on the "What's Hot" list or add
filtering by genre like on the "Explore" list.

~~~
sakbhatn
Thanks :) Genre on what's hot seems to be a popular demand.

------
twanlass
Just wanted to chime in and say this is awesome. I'm already finding some
great new music.

One question - are artists paid for streams or just track / album purchases?
I'd likely pay a monthly sub if so!

~~~
gshahlot
Thanks!

Currently they are paid only for music purchases since we don't make any money
off streaming. Eventually if and when we make money off streaming, artists
would definitely be compensated.

------
alphakappa
The design looks good, and I've been playing the music for half an hour
(/hot/) and it seems to be excellent so far. Good job.

I hope there's an API or a mobile app plan in the future.

~~~
sakbhatn
We do have an iPhone app coming out soon. However we plan to release that as a
premium feature. If you had to pay 99 cents per week for the premium version,
would you still be interested? Of course there will be more premium features
included.

~~~
alphakappa
1\. Is it 99c/wk for ad-free listening? (sounds reasonable) 2\. Does that also
provide API access so I can mess with it for personal use? (would be good)

~~~
gshahlot
Yes, 99 c/wk for :

1\. ad-free listening 2\. iPhone app (to start with) 3\. weekly curated
playlists 4\. higher quality streaming

API not right now, but maybe later.

------
manish_gill
Ha, I think I remember you guys from TLabs. Good going!

Love the design, btw. Although I feel there should be a "list view" to go
along with the Album-cover-thumbnail view.

------
lux
How long do artist song approvals take? I submitted a second one about an hour
ago, but the first took until the next day. Just curious :)

~~~
sakbhatn
They usually take a day. To maintain quality, we curate all the music that
comes in, being that we are not just a store but a discovery platform and user
experience is very important to us. We just have too much music coming in and
we are way behind on curation.

~~~
lux
Cool cool, good to know! :)

------
dannyolinsky
nice design. been looking for something like this for a while - always end up
listening to the same tracks on spotify even though they have some decent
discovery apps. seems like a good idea to completely separate out indie music,
eliminating the chance of users like myself always going back to their starred
spotify playlists.

~~~
gshahlot
Thanks.

------
jurre
This looks cool! Is there or will there be an API at some point so I could
potentially build native clients?

~~~
sakbhatn
We don't have a public api yet, but we do have a messy one that we use
internally. Shoot us a mail, maybe we can work something out :)

------
krisc
Good work so far. I just uploaded my band's album and hoping for the best :)

------
alternize
cool design! the images load quite slow tho, inspecting them shows that they
are fullsize images even when used as mini-icons. quite noticable on all
pages...

------
nicklovescode
Good job, buy why Spotify rather than just a music player?

------
lowkaseo
thumbnail those images! you'll drastically cut page speed. other than that,
site looks good!

~~~
sakbhatn
Definitely. Although there is a bit of hn effect too :)

------
vishalzone2002
very nice. I am working on something similar for independent movies. Good UI

------
selfexperiments
I like like this, and I want to support independent artists, but consider
grouping similar songs together like Songza does. My .02.

Congrats on the great site and what seems like a successful launch!

~~~
sakbhatn
Thank you! Grouping songs like Songza seems like a great idea.

