From the top of my head, I'm going to guess people want (1) personable and agreeable bandmates with (2) compatible music styles, (3) musical talent and skill, and (4) can play instruments or roles that a band is missing.
So the interface should support users in presenting and finding these traits. If I were to design it, I'd have:
- Auto-playing music sample gallery. This is the most important thing to present. The current design asks the user to dig into Youtube and Soundcloud links — which is very high-friction and would have the user jumping between this app and other apps every few seconds.
- One-minute self-introduction video. This helps the user grok the general 'vibe' of someone.
- Allow users to connect their Spotify or other music accounts. Then show users their shared music interests. This can provide another clue about having compatible musical personalities.
If I was looking to start a band today, I'd definitely give this kind of thing a try.
Dating app monetization creates a principal-agent problem: both subscriptions (for paid apps) and advertising/data-brokering (for free apps) are revenue streams that depend on people engaging with the app as much as possible — which people who actually manage to find solid romantic relationships won't do.
The only good dating app monetization model, would be a one-time-fee model. This would induce the correct incentives: as long as people are on the app, they continue to be a cost burden on the service with no further revenue — so, like people hogging a table at a restaurant, the service would be motivated to satisfy them and get them out the door!
But AFAIK, nobody has ever done this yet. (I think it's just because such a site would make so much less money than the traditional "milk your user base eternally" type of dating site. And people who build dating sites are usually in it for the money.)
Even with millions of users, there's better ways to match people up than a simple swipe. It's to keep people at the mercy of an algorithm where spending money is the only way to get any sort of control over what you see.
It exists only for shady monetisation.
https://marvelpresentssalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/id...
where you can't conclude anything at all because a user didn't click on an item. (That and the scan-ignore-repeat UI paradigm that has kept RSS readers thoroughly out of the mainstream forever)
Even if you want to have a search-based UI it would still make sense to show you one match at a time and let you thumbs up and thumbs down and have the system remember your choices so you can come back next week and look at new items without the considerable cognitive burden of ignoring. But say “see something once, why see it again?” and people look at you like you’re a psycho killer. The whole advertising economy though is based fundamentally on spamming you with the same crap over and over and a ‘dislike’ button that works (negative sampling) would end it overnight, i guess there’s a reason why you can’t explain something to a person whose paycheck is based on not understanding it.
Swipe UI is not the problem. Tinder is separately awful independently of its UI.
You only have to punch the beat into a drum machine once.
(Had bands and multiple drummers. Love’m)
(Agree with sibling posts, getting a great drummer is hard and amazing.)
Drummers.
The drool comes out both sides of the drummers mouth.
List of Spinal Tap Drummers, all deceased https://zeroenthusiasm.tumblr.com/post/47032679583/list-of-s...
Also why am I limited to my area? I want to be able to collaborate digitally. I don’t need to be in close proximity to do that. I ran out of people in my area after 2 left swipes.
I would like to just click on the genre of artist I want, hear a sample of their work and then be able to message and favorite the ones I like.
Swipe left - I never want to see this person again!
Swipe right - I must contact this person right now!
What happened to the idea of curating a list of interesting people who I may or may not want to meet right this moment, but I would like to make a list that I can refer to later?
Just look at OkCupid for what a disaster this turns into. I see an interesting young lady, but it may be late at night (like 2AM my time right now).
I would like to put her on my personal list of someone I may want to contact at a more reasonable hour, and after I've had a chance to read her profile more thoroughly.
My only choices are to swipe left and forget her forever, or swipe right and send her a "like" and I'd better send her a message right now!
Maybe there are a few young ladies I may be interested in contacting.
Why doesn't the site let me make a list of them?
I did finally figure out a hack. If I click the little "down arrow" at the bottom of the main page, it takes me to her profile. Then I can use the "share" link in Chrome to create a draft in Gmail with a link to her profile!
I have a lot of drafts now.
This really sucks. If you are a dating site, just let me make a list of the profiles of interesting young ladies!
The same applies to a site for musicians I may want to contact to play music with.
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Mind you, the more charitable argument is that allowing this would also massively decrease matches. Everyone would just say "maybe" to everyone else, because nobody is ever immediately sure that they like someone; the likelihood of two people both actually going back to their "maybes" to say "yes" to one another, and getting a mutual match, would drop to zero.
The Tinder model forces you to make a decision before you can move on, because the FOMO feeling generated by the possiblity of never seeing the person again if you press "no", is literally the only way to get a "yes" out of many people. An app based on a requirement of mutual matching, just wouldn't work without that coercion in place.
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That being said, there's a lot you could do to ameliorate both concerns. You could limit the number of "maybes" someone could hold onto at a time; and you could make "maybes" expire, so that a person has to eventually make a decision on them before they can move on. (Instead of "maybe", perhaps call the associated action "review later"?)
I have in the roadmap a "don't limit to my area" option!
Also plan to have some sort of inline playable sample on the profile, but haven't figured out the best way to do that - video vs audio vs embedding SoundCloud or YouTube.
The best way is whatever the musician has available and is comfortable sharing. Allow any of the embeddings or ability to upload a clip you’ll host. Start with the easiest and ping your subscribers each time you add another one.
But yeah, "don't limit to area" should be top priority if you want to scale.
In v2, you could add profile pics, but the hard part would be finding artists similar to previously “liked” ones.
Is there a foundation model for music yet? If so, I think it’s just a matter of sticking an embedding for each audio clip into pgvector or whatever.
Anyway, since the gui has no text, you get internationalization on day one!
Not a valid reason. No-one in my country cares whether an app is translated or not. In fact, I find it kind of patronizing that you feel the need to shelter us like that. I always set the language to English even if the app has first-class translations.
> I haven't yet implemented the feature to toggle off "local-only" artists.
That's a valid reason.
Imagine if every website needed to be translated to 500 languages before you can order a domain.
Esp ironic, since I absolutely hate seeing my native language (icelandic) in UI translations... It's rare and when it's translated I have to translate the text to the English counterpart in my head before I grok the thing.
yes anyone can use a throwaway email, maybe it's all irrational, but i know from user interviews i'm not the only one who feels that way
same thing for app vs web. there's at least a feeling that scammers/hackers/creeps on the other side of the world have less access to my personal info. again maybe it's fake, but the perception is there. (otherwise generally i would prefer web > app 100 times out of 100)
Back in the old days, we had a local paper that allowed musicians to connect from a classified section, and boy was it scary meeting some of the strangers that posted in there to jam.
I considered having MP3 uploads or even video uploads, but didn't seem worth it building a transcoding/streaming system, when someone could still upload things that is not them playing.
Another idea is to "verify" linked Spotify accounts by having the artist place a short random code in their Spotify bio, to prove they are actually the artist.
Anyway - great call on the song requirement, for a lot of us, it’s important to know that the people we work with can operate a daw and solve their own problems and care about creating a finished product. Unless they’re incredibly talented instrumentalists (usually not the case, they find bands) at a certain point it becomes either a jam sesh (not interested) or you become a producer for someone who isn’t very good.
You want people to be able to have a low quality video of them noodling or playing along to something for 30 seconds.
A little scared to make it selectable, as it would make it much easier for spammers/scammers to target locations, as the only verification is email. I do realize they can still change their location that with an emulator.
So there's not really any hurdle at all for automated spammers who can fake their location easily, but you're making it more difficult for genuine users anyway?
What I will say is that it seems a little unfortunate that so many "matching" apps take the tinder swipe model these days when it really makes the matching experience worse.
I have a friend who's a drummer in central Illinois. He's used https://www.bandmix.com to find multiple groups that he's been jamming with for a while now. The UI is such that you can see a grid of all the bands/artists matching your criteria, and can facet and filter your search in the sidebar with a lot of other options including distance, commitment level, genre, etc.
I intend to add filtering, but didn't initially because 0 people use it currently, and also wanted to get an mvp out quickly
This could be a good way for people to find that when they don’t have other musicians in their network who can fill that role for them.
It lets you create an artist profile, view nearby ones, match with them, then have a real-time chat with your matches.
Added a "nearby concerts" tab mainly so that the first adopters in new areas would have something useful besides a blank screen.
This would be a million times more useful without the geographical restriction, although I concede if the true intent is to make in person bands then sure, it's useful. Just consider the wider market.
I didnt get chance to look into the app fully yet, but my idea covered musicians and people ( like restaurant owner/mgr or other ) to hire musician, I also handled a way to find other band members too. Would love to share my idea and details in case you are interested
jhg7nm at Virginia.edu
Also, it works as advertised if you play an electric instrument and can block out the natural sound of your instrument with headphones. For this reason, electric bass was a lot easier than upright bass for me.
Many of the musicians are not techies, and explaining these details is impossible. "I took my headphones off because hearing the mix was messing me up" is a constant refrain. Trying to maintain a sense of time under those circumstances made it mentally fatiguing to play, and no fun, so I eventually gave up and started just working on my technique and improvisation.
Jamming with people outdoors was a lot more fun.
But I would like to point out that these days, releasing an app as mobile-only really doesn't disenfranchise that many people.
• iOS apps can be installed and used pretty transparently on Apple Silicon Macs;
• and Android apps can likewise be installed and used pretty transparently on both Windows 11 (via Windows Subsystem for Android) and on ChromeOS.
So by choosing to release an app as mobile-only, you're "only" excluding people without (even a very old!) smartphone, who are also:
• people with only Intel Macs;
• people with only Windows PCs, who are stuck on a previous version of Windows;
• or Linux users.
That's... not too many people at this point. (And most of them live so far behind the curve that they wouldn't be interested in installing some bleeding-edge mobile app anyway.)
I would guess that probably most people in that state of "no smartphone and no modern Windows/macOS/ChromeOS device", who would also actually care about installing some random bleeding-edge app, are people who are in that state by choice — i.e. they're not unable, but rather unwilling to use a mobile app, due to being extremely concerned with their privacy/anonymity.
And being that kind of person, is actually kind of incompatible with being a "member in good standing" of a matchmaking service (whether the matchmaking is for dating; for getting a band together; for finding a babysitter; for renting a condo; etc.)
Matchmaking apps only "work" insofar as they 1. can prevent catfishing, 2. can allow users to permanently block others who are harassing them, and 3. can allow users to report spammers/scammers/etc in such a way that a bad actor will be permanently removed from the platform altogether. Matchmaking apps that don't make these guarantees, end up being negative-experience generators and go down in bad-PR flames.
With the rise of botnets that use proxy IP addresses to register massive numbers of accounts on such services for nefarious purposes, the only way matchmaking services have been able to survive, is to require the user to at least complete initial registration through a device that can give a remote attestation that the user is not in ultimate control of the device — i.e. the device has a Trusted Computing Base and has not been rooted — and so the app is not being tampered with or fed false device metrics. (See also: browser integrity.)
Wanting to have absolute privacy/anonymity, is fundamentally incompatible with using a device that's able to make such guarantees.
1) You should have "drum machine" or "sampler" as an instrument option for hip-hop/electronic producers looking to connect with other beatmakers, I get it's for live band type stuff but plenty of electronic-based production teams double up and form teams.
2) The email entry box on the first screen of the mobile app is some non-standard input. I had to manually type in my email when every other app autocomplted with 1password
Since it’s designed to have people meet up, it’s important to require a photo. It’s a safety thing.
This seems like it would be the first feature (what photo-swipe is to Tinder) but it would be nice if, when the card is displayed, you heard a sample of the musician’s music. It’s odd that the cards are silent. The entire app should be a sonic experience. Linking to YouTube is fine but why send people away from the app?
Also, sad but true, don’t forget to populate every major city with a few really good looking and sounding fake profiles. There were just 5 blank profiles near me.
Love the app idea!
Other services I've tried are Hendrix (gohendrix.com) and Vampr
Got a lot of feedback for needing a neutral skip, so that's on my list.
Also considering replacing the swiping UI entirely, as many people here pointed out that it's not really ideal.
Tinder's selling point isn't the swiping mechanism itself, but that it's taking something publicly taboo, harem culture, and enabling it by taking it private, with a discrete, subtle, and low-stakes mechanism for participating in that culture.
There's nothing to hide when it comes to finding musicians to jam with, so that's why I think a more traditional search & filter thing would be better suited for this.
Whether the mechanics of Tinder are worth parodying is another question, I need to try the app first.
If you thought online dating was hard and judgemental ... finding musicians to play music is even more judgemental .. if you are a good to great singer for instance these apps will keep you busy. Personally i just wanted to connect and play music without the judgement (tho do want you to be able to actually play an instrument fairly well .. strum chords on guitar and lets sing along as we strum together).
I posted songs i wrote where professional singers were singing them and those got people reaching out. Their messages were like good song and did you sing that (i noted i did not) but they became disinterested when they truly realized i was not the singer.
And one powered by "list yourself" where people would create their profiles to make themselves easier to discover.
This would avoid the issue of not having many users initially whilst also making it interesting to use.
I'm the kind of person that needs stuff to be a group activity or I lose interest very very quickly.
Clone the app and call it L2Play, there's a bunch of noobs just like me.
edit - Lock it geographically, but not temporally. I'm as interested now as I was 6 months ago and will be 6 months from now.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/3/16082864/treble-fm-social-...
ISO - band. Lead guitar player, regularly practices Yngwie Malmsteen songs.
Moments like this always make me sad. Even a cursory web search would have surfaced Vampr, along with several other find-a-bandmate sites.
Weeks or even months of work because Googling was too much trouble.
So what happens now?
Do you let sunk cost dictate your actions and force you to continue working on an undifferentiated and far less feature-rich product?
Or do you stop working on your app and just start using Vampr?
It was cool. Sadly it’s no longer up.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/grouptones-help-to-bring-...
“Yeah, brah! This’ll help you build your sweet-as rock band… or jazz or some shit, whatevs…”
