

Show HN: We're building a better music distribution platform - hartleybrody
http://mvsic.co/

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jonathanjaeger
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.

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hartleybrody
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>

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

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brianlovin
It'll be a hurdle, for sure, but not too much different than The Hype Machine
being at hypem.com

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hackmiester
Not quite the same. "Hey, this site is music but with a V instead of a U.
Check it out." I go to <http://www.mvsic.com/> and it's a Go Daddy parking
page. Oh well. User lost.

You and I don't think like this, but many users do.

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dclaysmith
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.

~~~
hartleybrody
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.

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hartleybrody
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!

~~~
lewisflude
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!

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

~~~
lewisflude
As far as the branding goes, MVSIC reminds me of a minimal Bandcamp and I
assume the whole V thing is taken directly from Svpply?

Now, I'm sure this will resonate with the artist, but the problem you have is
the same problem faced by many sites I've seen before. It's partly a branding
issue (on the front page, all I see is a globe) and a distribution issue. Do I
have to post a link to mvsic somewhere in order to get people in the door? If
so, what are the benefits of sending them to mvsic rather than somewhere like
Bandcamp?

I'm not saying that Bandcamp does what you guys do, better (I'm sure mvsic is
awesome, and I'm going to delve into it further after work), but it's not
clear what value it actually brings to me as an artist.

So, here's some things you can do now.

* Make the front page friendlier. Pictures of the product in action. Keep it minimal, that's a great thing you have there, but just take a think about what someone wants to see when they visit mvsic.co.

* What IS your USP? Give me it in plain english. (It's definitely a SP but not sure how U it is!).

* Maybe think about offering a free tier. I know you've put a reason as to why there isn't one, but I'd urge you to experiment with offering a free trial for a certain amount of downloads, restrictive features etc. For instance, make your account FOR FREE , after first 50 downloads prompt the user to subscribe to your service.

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hartleybrody
Thanks for the feedback. To answer some of your points:

I think our goal is to one day drive our own traffic to an artist's music.
Have people coming to the site and clicking around to find stuff. But in the
near term, we can't promise we'll drive any of our own traffic to the artist,
so we're relying on the artist to spread it.

The other thing people have seemed to love is the concept of real-time stats
similar to Google analytics. When an artist posts a new release, there's that
"moment of truth" where they blast it out to their fans and then wait for a
reaction. But it's hard to really get insights into what's happening. Who is
listening right now? Where did they come from (referrer)? Where are they
located geographically?

And then eventually being able to do cool things with all that data to follow
up with the right fans with the right message at the right time.

We're also aiming to take a lot of things other sites have done (ie, charging
money for a download) and making is simpler for the artist to manage. We'll
deposit money directly into an artist's stripe account, for example, rather
than holding it until they hit a threshold.

And we've gone back and forth about offering a free tier dozens of times. Our
current solution is to allow anyone to sign up and get their hands on the
software for free, but then they have to pay before they can publish a track.
Among other things, we're hoping this cuts down on the risk of DMCA violations
we have to worry about :)

Screenshots coming soon!

~~~
lewisflude
Sounds awesome! I'll talk to the rest of the band about signing up with you
guys.

~~~
brianlovin
Thank you! We'll definitely be posting updates on our blog (blog.mvsic.co) in
the coming month or two as the service continues to be built.

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waxjar
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).

~~~
hartleybrody
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.

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WiseWeasel
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.

~~~
brianlovin
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.

~~~
WiseWeasel
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?

~~~
brianlovin
Those are good questions, and ones we're also working through at the moment!

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bdunn
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.

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brianlovin
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.

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evmar
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

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brianlovin
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>

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suhastech
Same issue as evmar,

Chrome, OS X Mountain Lion

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DanielStraight
Same. Firefox 15, XP.

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brianlovin
Thanks for the heads up - we'll work on fixing this mobile view issue. Is the
site looking (more) normal when you're viewing on a wider browser?

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hackmiester
These people clearly stated they were using desktop browsers...

So am I, and here is what I see: <http://puu.sh/161Xi>

Firefox 16

edit: Maybe it is a font issue. I am not loading the fonts I see in your
screenshot.

~~~
brianlovin
Yeah, that's a fallback issue on our end - thanks for the screenshot.

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snsr
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!

~~~
hartleybrody
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!

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_hiss
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.

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jmathai
CASH Music: <http://cashmusic.org/>

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

