[HN Gopher] Show HN: Product Hunt for Music
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Product Hunt for Music
Author : ewhicher
Score : 144 points
Date : 2024-07-17 19:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tracklist.it)
(TXT) w3m dump (tracklist.it)
| staplers wrote:
| While a nice idea, there's just _so much more_ music made than
| SaaS products and this will eventually need to turn into a
| curated list ala spotify /apple music to keep users from drowning
| in static.
|
| I think highlighting a specific type of music and finding your
| niche audience will be the best way towards a happy userbase.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| I'm big into Doom/stoner rock/space rock/etc, so I subscribe to
| Weedian which has a fire hose of download codes for new
| releases/artists.
|
| Even for this fairly niche group of genres, the free codes I
| get have filled my bandcamp artist list to the point of it no
| longer being useable for its intended purpose.
|
| It was already getting unwieldy with just my classicly paid
| purchases (which I still do a lot of), I have to resort to
| manually create artist playlists to navigate now.
|
| Even just the Weedian compilation albums are so full of tracks,
| I just don't have the time to listen through them to evaluate
| and brutally curate which songs/artists I love before the next
| one comes out. The lasted album, "Trip to California" is like
| 99 songs and over 8 hours. I think people vastly underestimate
| how much music is out there and is being newly released.
|
| Part of this, is the Doom genre tends to be 5-15 minute songs,
| which is absolutely what I want, but also makes listening a
| significant time investment. Fortunately the majority of songs
| are easy to say "yeah nope" to and cull.
|
| Definitely suffering from success here. On the plus side, I've
| come across a lot of gems that can deserve to sit next to Yob
| on my playlist, that I wouldn't have come across otherwise.
|
| I really need figure out solution that lets me stream from a
| self-hosted archive, rate songs on a 5 star scale, genre tag,
| and share playlists with family members. The 5 star rating
| seems to most troublesome to fulfill.
|
| A tool to automatically produce a public facing playlist that
| links to bandcamp, YouTube and perhaps other places as a last
| resort would also be amazing. The best way to discover music,
| is finding and following people like me who make exploring and
| curation into a hobby. "What music do I like? Here's my 5 star
| list"
| ewhicher wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. We are actually already saving genre
| against any track submission so when we have a big enough bank
| of music we will switch on the genre filters :)
| cageface wrote:
| I've been predicting a return to manual content curation for a
| while. Algos are not going to be able to keep up with the flood
| of new content. Record labels are going to be more important
| than ever.
| pacomerh wrote:
| Would be great if you could narrow down to sub-genres. Music is
| not like apps where you can just post a general list in the home
| page. Can't expect someone that likes hip hop to like
| experimental. Maybe also get inspiration from Product Hunt's
| ability to have sub categories.
| ewhicher wrote:
| Great feedback! I'm pleased to say genres are coming, all
| tracks are tagged by genre already so it's just a matter of
| waiting till we have enough to show them by genre.
| hailpixel wrote:
| Amazing, history does repeat itself. One of the companies in my
| batch (S07) was iJigg
| (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ijigg), which had the
| 2007's version of this interface: single upvote, player, and all.
| It did well and then petered out as many hyper-niche apps did at
| that time.
|
| Best of luck with this version!
| twiss wrote:
| There is also https://hypem.com/, which focuses on music posted
| by blogs but is otherwise fairly similar. It helped me discover
| a lot of cool music back in the day :) Nowadays Spotify's music
| discovery algorithm is often "good enough", though.
| ewhicher wrote:
| Love hypem
| zapatos wrote:
| Similarly there was We Are Hunted
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Hunted), before they
| got acquired by Twitter
| roldie wrote:
| Hype machine is great, still an active user and supporter!
| lordswork wrote:
| Timing is everything. Maybe _now_ is the right time for a music
| discovery app to take off.
| janalsncm wrote:
| If we think about the technology available around 2007, a
| crowd-sourced music recommendation system is basically what I
| would expect. No offense, that's just what we had at the time.
| The Netflix prize wouldn't come out until 2008. Pandora's Music
| Genome project was perhaps ahead of its time but mostly manual
| (20-30 minutes per song!).
|
| Today, we would usually use automatic song similarity
| technologies to recommend songs. The reason is pretty clear:
| popularity-based systems don't know anything about the songs
| they recommend. They don't know anything about you. They only
| know metadata about the song, that a certain number of people
| liked a song, essentially throwing away half of the information
| in a user-song tuple.
| solardev wrote:
| Doesn't this work better in the context of personalized
| recommendations? Pandora is scarily good at this because it's an
| offshoot of the Music Genome Project, which analyzes the
| constituent parts of music
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project?wprov=sfl...
| )
|
| It combines that with your personal things up and listening
| history and predicts what other songs you yourself are likely to
| enjoy.
|
| By contrast, up votes from strangers across genres seems unlikely
| to match your personal tastes.
| ewhicher wrote:
| Genre filters are coming, once we have enough tracks live. What
| we want to do it give artists and music lovers a place to
| discover talent outside of what might be served up for them by
| algos. If the community likes a track enough it will rise to
| the top and get in-front of more ears that might not have
| discovered it otherwise.
| hahajk wrote:
| I don't think you'll be able to compete with Spotify for
| personal recommendations. But there's a fatigue that comes with
| being kept in your recommendation bubble. I want to hear
| something new and good and different! And not corporate-
| approved like Pitchfork (rip). Through the grace of god Hype
| Machine is still running and still highlighting some solid
| tracks.
|
| Strangers' preferences can be better than a personalized
| recommendation, if they are cool strangers.
|
| Last edit: I seem to remember a study that concluded that
| people who listened to a wider range of music types spent more
| money, or were more lucrative advertising targets. However,
| there are fewer of those kinds of listeners.
| soco wrote:
| Maybe because by "wider range" many people understand
| whatever the trendy stations will feed them - from rap to dad
| rock, r&b or pop, so they behave as a captive audience? My
| Spotify must have a reason for always trying to feed me
| Coldplay although I swear I never (actively) listened to
| anything from them.
| mavhc wrote:
| I tried Pandora once, it just played me music that was a bit
| like the music I liked, but worse. If the music were better I'd
| already have known about it
| 4d4m wrote:
| Nice UI! I tried to verify an artist using the Bio verification
| code but it didn't work, any tips
| ewhicher wrote:
| Hey thanks for the comment! Sure I can try to help. What
| happened when you pressed verify?
| Reubend wrote:
| Just chiming in to say that the same is happening for me. It
| says "Failed to verify, please check and try again"
|
| I'll keep trying in case this is something to do with cached
| bios
| ewhicher wrote:
| Could well be cached bios, great shout. We'll look into it!
| ewhicher wrote:
| can you send a screenshot of your bio to hello@tracklist.it
| please
| janalsncm wrote:
| The implicit assumption here is that _popularity_ is a good
| heuristic for _relevance_. Typically music recommendation systems
| will take popularity into consideration, but it is not the
| primary ranking factor.
| stanislavb wrote:
| Something similar but with a different angle - Urban DJ
| https://urbanpoll.com/dj
|
| Every day people order the top 5 songs and nominate one another
| song and a new topic. That way, we always have songs on the
| same topic. When there are more than 5 songs nominated on the
| same topic - people filter them out with one extra step.
|
| It's fun, and it's been running since Nov 2022
| https://urbanpoll.com/dj/rounds. I'd be happy if more people
| joined. I'm the "founder" of this little side project.
| illegalmemory wrote:
| > popularity is a good heuristic for relevance , but it is not
| the primary factor.
|
| Is the statement not valid for products too ?
| pg5 wrote:
| I built something just like this, but I found everyone would drop
| there tracks and never look at anybody else's stuff. I shut it
| down as it ended up being kidn of pointless.
| esafak wrote:
| It doesn't make sense because artistic tastes are
| idiosyncratic, making popularity as the sole criterion
| worthless, and the volume of art work overwhelms anyone's
| ability to even superficially consider.
|
| The only scalable solution is to use machine learning, as all
| the big players do. They're never going to be much better than
| Spotify. I'd be surprised if they got even close.
|
| I suppose there might be a use case for A&R types who are on
| the hunt for new material, rather than casual listeners.
| ewhicher wrote:
| Good points here. What we want to achieve is something akin
| to the 'support' act before a headline set. Where a more
| successful artist champions a smaller artist because they
| like what they are doing. With this site the goal is for
| artists to share fans to help grow their fan base. This
| version is the first step towards that. If that makes any
| sense :)
| esafak wrote:
| So it's a site for musicians. Then say so, and lean into
| it.
|
| As I said before tastes are idiosyncratic so it makes no
| sense to have a single leaderboard. I would multi-tag each
| track by genre and language so users can rank by the
| subsets of tags that interest them. Ask musicians what
| other features they would value.
| maz1b wrote:
| Best of luck! We tried this with Songfari back in the day around
| 2015-2017, and while it was promising, it just didn't work out.
| ewhicher wrote:
| Thanks!
| webprofusion wrote:
| First problem is that such systems are typically easy to game
| with a script to trigger /listen from multiple IPs etc.
|
| I once demonstrated this when a telecoms giant ran a very similar
| music popularity contest (around 24 yrs ago) and they were not
| amused. Everyone else was most bemused at my mid-paced metal
| instrumental No.1.
| stevekemp wrote:
| Kinda like product hunt, where nothing is real and posts live
| or die by how many people you pay to vouch for your
| submissions.
|
| "Product Hunt for ..." is a bad tagline for selling anything,
| it's been gamed to hell, and back.
| ephaeton wrote:
| As a small artist living in quite a tiny niche - didgeridoo music
| - I have to say that the requirement for having your music on
| spotify is a no-go. Artists like myself don't benefit from
| spotify, I don't think, it's a net loss and you join the ranks of
| people with questionable actions (cf., e.g., spotify-AI-generated
| content). BC and/or YT would be viable alternatives for those who
| actually need discovery IMO.
|
| E.g., here's some unexpected percussive organic trance for you
| that my collaborators and I put on BC:
| https://dojorich.bandcamp.com/album/tubecolab (I'm Freddie
| Veggie, btw). Music of that scope doesn't "perform" on spotify,
| so I won't invest in having it there.
| mg wrote:
| Hey, I run two somewhat popular music recommendation websites,
| the Music-Map and Gnoosic. I currently experiment with the
| ability to feature the music of artists, so I have put your
| music up on Gnoosic:
|
| https://www.gnoosic.com/artist/freddie+veggie
|
| And put you on the map next to some other didgeridoo artists:
|
| https://www.music-map.com/freddie+veggie
|
| I'm not yet sure when I will turn the signup into a public
| feature. Currently, I'm interested in feedback from artists. If
| you like, shoot me an email. The two sites have a pretty big
| audience, and I would like to find out how I can use it to help
| small artists.
| ephaeton wrote:
| awesome, thanks! And thank you for the invitation to a
| conversation, I'll take it up!
| ewhicher wrote:
| I love your music! Thanks for sharing your insight. I'm happy
| to say that verifying and posting from other services is
| coming... we just chose to start with Spotify. We are a small
| team of two working on this as a passion project so have to
| build little by little. We will keep you updated :)
| ephaeton wrote:
| Thank you! And I absolutely understand you gotta start
| somewhere.
|
| Music recommendation is HARD. A lot of people don't think
| they like didgeridoo (which is where my expertise lies) until
| they hear a live performance of contemporary didge over a PA
| and they're in tears of joy (seriously, if you got the
| chance, give it a try - the stack of vibrations from this
| single, simple tube is amazing). IME, that wouldn't work for
| your average ear-buds or "smilie curve"-tuned over-ears. So,
| say, a friend convinces you to go to some concert with them -
| that would be a proper, healthy, sustainable music
| recommendation service. But of course that doesn't scale in
| any direction.
|
| Best of luck with your project - I'll be checking back :-)
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| youtube's music discovery algorithm ia shit.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| ALL music discovery algorithms are shit. The only thing good
| at recommending music to humans is other humans. But AI
| features are so much easier to build than social features,
| smh. Spotify's social features are worse than abysmal.
| bploetz wrote:
| I'm not trying to tell you how to market your music, you do
| you, but with services like Tune Core, Distro Kid, etc that
| allow you to submit your music to every single music service in
| existence with one click, why wouldn't you just put your music
| everywhere? You may be surprised at just how big of a community
| there is for your niche genre on Spotify and elsewhere!
|
| https://open.spotify.com/search/didgeridoo/playlists
|
| Anyways, I agree that the Spotify requirement is artificially
| limiting, especially if this is targeting up and coming
| artists. They should probably support all of the biggies
| (Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube, etc) as well as indies like
| Sound Cloud, Band Camp, etc.
| ephaeton wrote:
| Thanks for your input!
|
| I've pondered on and off about distrokid (or the like), and
| thankfully one of my peers has done just that. Mind you, he
| is more established and "successful" (as in, gets more paying
| gigs, more audience, ...). So I've talked to him about it.
| During the past half year, he's "earned" 4EUR from Spotify
| (in other words, one song made the cut of 1k listens over a
| year), and 180EUR from Bandcamp.
|
| I see Distrokid as helpful marketing investment for
| discovery, so I was still inclined to burn some money (one
| teaching session will likely cover my loss, so whatever), but
| then he went on how he put a video of a performance of a
| published song of his (published via Distrokid) on YT - et
| voila - he's got challenged by Distrokid for it. Uh, yeah. I
| understand you gotta relinquish rights to let DK do their
| thing, but that's the sort of headache I wouldn't ever want.
| Maybe he was doing something wrong, of course, but I'll
| likely fall into the same trap. More reading required ...
|
| I'll keep in touch with him about it, maybe the discovery on
| spotify led to the BC throughput, but we'll have to dig
| deeper. There's a lot of us small artists in different stages
| of our development (say, performance, entertainment,
| composition wise), I'd love to exchange experiences on what
| works and what doesn't for the ailing musician. There's
| platforms which contains a lot of us, but everybody seems to
| be struggling and there seems to be a strong sense of
| competition among many of my peers, so it's hard to get
| unfiltered (subjective) truths there. And the internet is
| filled with horror stories as well as "from dishwasher to
| millionaire" survivorship biased fairy tales. Oooph.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| Out of all the ways discovering music, surprisingly Soundcloud
| has been the best. Being able to curate a list of DJs in various
| genres means that I'm constantly finding new music by being
| exposed to what they're putting in their sets.
|
| It's kind of a _meta_ music discovery, I can piggy back off
| others who have tastes that I like.
|
| The biggest benefit of this is that I don't necessarily get
| recommendations of music that's adjacent to what I already like.
| In other words, if I like Depeche Mode, I don't want to listen to
| bands that sound vaguely like them.
|
| What I've yet to see someone do, is track what music someone
| listens to _after_ listening to a song. Often when I hear a piece
| of music, it makes me want to listen to something else that feels
| the same way or reminds me of being in similar place in time. A
| music recommendation engine based of this concept would be
| interesting.
| ewhicher wrote:
| Love this, I totally agree. That's why we want to find a way to
| make this work without algorithms. We know what hits us in the
| same way as something else. I'd love to build this site to
| achieve close to what you suggest.
| ljlolel wrote:
| You're wanting https://hangout.fm/
| buss_jan wrote:
| This looks great! What are your plans around community and
| content, I feel like Pitchfork could use some competition. Best
| of success!
| rocky_raccoon wrote:
| Tangential question:
|
| What is the best Pandora-adjacent service these days? In other
| words, where can I plug in "Artist X" and get a great platter of
| recommendations?
|
| Spotify doesn't cut it for me -- the recommendations are either
| hyper-generic or songs that I've listened to many times in the
| past. Last.fm doesn't seem to have many lights on these days.
|
| Pandora, in its early days, was a great place to discover new
| music because it would find songs that were roughly similar to
| what you requested but by often unheard-of artists.
| n4r9 wrote:
| Bandcamp has a "if you like this, you may also like" feature
| which seems to be unbiased by listening history and allows
| unheard-of artists to crop up. I've found a few good recs that
| way although it can be hit-or-miss.
| Backing5890 wrote:
| I haven't personally used it, but I do know that ListenBrainz
| offers a Last.FM-esque experience, and I see it does have a
| "similar artists" section. I'm in a similar boat as you though.
| Most of the Spotify-generated stuff is just repeats of songs
| I've already liked or just generic songs.
|
| I've been diving into the past about artists I've been meaning
| to check out and also using Rate Your Music to stay semi-
| conscious of what's popular today.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| I use a site called https://www.queup.net which is a successor
| to turntable.fm. You find a "room" with a genre of music you
| like and just sit back and listen to people DJ using soundcloud
| and youtube videos. I have it on all day in a room that is
| majority electronic/chill/lounge and mostly non-vocal. I've
| learned about so many artists this way but you need to find an
| active room you like, and sites like these tend to skew towards
| the many different electronic subgenres
| mukti wrote:
| ListenBrainz Radio can be decent -
| https://listenbrainz.org/explore/lb-radio/
|
| This is made by the MetaBrainz folks, the same people behind
| the MusicBrainz database (which is used by ListenBrainz).
| havefunbesafe wrote:
| I'm a lifelong touring musician. This has all of the great things
| that BIRP.FM and others provided for so long, without the foolish
| gatekeeping that has plagued the music industry forever.
|
| Bravo. I hope this takes off in a massive way.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Reminds me of https://hypem.com/
| bploetz wrote:
| One bit of feedback after submitting a track: The list of genres
| to select from is too course-grained IMHO. There's a gazillion
| sub-genres of electronic dance music for example, but
| "Electronic" was as close as I could get. Genres like metal have
| the same issue. It doesn't matter so much now given the current
| UX, but if you consider others' suggestions on adding genre/sub-
| genre specific lists (which I agree with 100%), then I think
| you'll want to allow people to get as fine-grained as they want
| to (sub-genre lists could all bubble up to a parent genre list,
| and all of the steps in between). Submit Hub does this very well,
| if you're looking for examples/inspiration.
|
| My two pennies. Good luck with the site!
| 7ero wrote:
| This reminds of me https://hypem.com, similar concept, except
| music is aggregated by popular online blogs.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-07-18 23:09 UTC)