I'm a software engineer and work at a HR startup in NYC. I started in music, first playing keys in a band in Europe, then building soft synths, which got me in touch with Korg, who got me in touch with Red Bull, who turned me into a game developer, and before I knew it I was a software engineer living in the US. Not sure how all of that happened, but the truth is, I miss working with artists.
Brew.fm is an attempt to help others turn their dreams into reality where I couldn't: make a living from music.
I started with a collaboration market place, after interviewing dozens of artists, and realizing some of them had a huge leg up compared to others, because of an early collab with an established artist.
It's pretty straight forward: you log in with Spotify, verify your artist account, and Brew.fm automatically imports all your tracks and turns them into collab requests. It will detect future releases as well, so no manual labor from your side needed other than those 2 steps. People can reach out through private chat after which you decide to share personal info (eg email) and arrange the collab.
So far 79 people signed up, very open to feedback.
I'm hoping to simplify this process, or at least educate users about common practices. Still talking with a lot of users before I feel confident enough to build a tool or a FAQ for it.
And what people burn out on is that a lot of these collabs go poorly because of artistic differences, or one people being not serious (for good or bad reasons). So if the collab is off-site, that eliminates the completion rate you have on a platform like skeb. IMF solves this by being more a community and so you get to know people more before working with them.
So I'm not sure it is solving really anything, and the approach does not seem sustainable (one email per new track per user? how long before everything goes to spam). But I'd love to be convinced otherwise :-)
On the scalability: I'm a big fan of not overcomplicating things early on. However, I'm planning to build a feature that lets you select a daily/weekly preference so you simply get a summary of what was added that day/week. I'm also planning on auto-tagging genres based on the track previews using essentia.js, so I don't have to spam metal heads with EDM daily. Lots of room for improvement, but waiting for it to become a problem first.
I might update the copy on the website, realizing there's not a whole lot of explaining going on :)
