I've built up a list of 14,000 subscribers to the free web app over the past year and also had a journalist at LifeHacker who wrote about the project before. I offered the journalist an exclusive write up and then sent an email blast to the 14,000 subscribers all within an hour (starting today at Noon) and the app shot up the app store within a couple hours.
Still don't know launch day numbers since app store reports don't update until later tonight.
For further coverage, I'm reaching out to app review sites and any journalists who have covered similar apps in the past.
This is not the first time I've heard of this strategy, and it seems to be quite profitable: "hook" a large number of users with a no-strings-attached free app or web app and get their contact info. Then create an app in the same niche, but charge for it, and email blast them all on launch day.
The last time I heard of someone doing this, they did it with a game. They released an ad-free, excellent game for free and popped up a dialog after a few starts saying "Enter your email here if you want to be notified when I release <App Name> 2!". After a year or so, he had tens of thousands of email addresses. Then he released a $2 sequel and did an "email blast" on launch day. Similarly, he shot up the charts very quickly.
It's hard to say, but it typically is easier to get the first article written if you offer exclusivity. It's kind of a 'better to be safe than sorry' approach when going to the journalists. If you don't have a huge announcement, there's a chance you dont get any coverage and then you're screwed, so 1 exclusive is better than none.
So the newsletter is for the web version of Noon Pacific. I send out a weekly music mixtape every Monday at Noon (Pacific Time) with a link to the mixtape (with a pretty* album cover picture) and the tracklist.
Good job! It's on the App Store, so treat yourself to a full version number ;)
(I wonder if people would be less likely to buy it having "0.0.2", thinking it may not yet be worth buying. In any case, why not just call it 1.0.2, etc?)
It was my first ever app, so I admittedly wasn't 100% sure what I was doing in xcode. I agree with you though, it would have looked better to have a full release number. I'll bump it up next version.
for some reason this makes my aurora+bunch of extensions lock up and crash
edit: extension-free version of aurora also spikes cpu and starts eating all ram.
Must be somewhere within the 8tracks embed, if i block 8tracks with requestpolicy nothing happens.
Loved the first song I heard on web version, +1 for Android.
Good example of non-technical value creation - can't fake good curation. That your project has done so well tells me that the streaming music players have not cracked the code yet.
Appreciate it. People seem to love the simplicity of having the music delivered to them instead of trying to search/browse through tons of artists. Huge fan of Spotify, 8tracks, etc. but I think you're right that the music discovery aspect is still lacking.
How are you handling issues related to copyright? I don't have an iOS device so I can't tell if the app simply streams the music from sources that have legal access or if its locally caching the music.
I don't make the songs available to download so it is only streaming the songs via 8tracks API. All songs are legally acquired through various blogs and sites like Soundcloud.
I figured as much based on the web player, but wanted to double check anyways. Thanks for answering my question.
I'd love to see an Android version of this. I'm an Android dev, so if you're looking to port this over at any time in the future please feel free to hit me up with any questions you have.
The concept and screenshots look great! Do you have last.fm support? Because (for me): If it doesn't scrobble it's not a music player :-)
Edit: Just downloaded the app. It doesn't scrobble but otherwise the app works as advertised. Thanks for posting here on HN! Not only music discovery but also app discovery is hard sometimes.
Congratulations! Just trying this out now and I love the mix I've had so far.
It's so easy to make music these days that it can be difficult to find the gems in all the noise. For me, having places you can trust to do some curation/filtering for you is really important.
This is an awesome app! Really nice unknown (at least for me) music!
If I can give you some feedback, the UI need some tweaks. the whole screen bounces when you touch it. Would be nice to have more details about the songs. A progress bar would be nice.
Thank you! It took about a week of QA to feel comfortable with it going live. It's a pretty simple app, but wanted to make sure everything would work great, especially since it was not a free app.
I'm actually a big fan of Hype Machine (and love their app), but I'm attempting to do something different with Noon Pacific. It's considered more of a music newsletter with hand curated tunes and hopefully more of a personal touch.
It seems like discovery has always been a huge problem for app developers.