PS: Music startups are hard. We are looking for mentors/advisors/investors/music-enthusiasts who can guide us through. Please feel free to email us [hello AT musicfellas.com]. Cheers!
I got a good selection of music just from the front page. Would you consider adding a radio option that's based on a song or an artist, like Pandora and Spotify do?
Have you considered doing a variable pricing model like Amie Street did back in the day? The more popular a track or album is, the more expensive it gets. I think this is a really good model for selling independent music because it rewards all the right people in the right way. If you get an album for an inexpensive price that means you helped 'discover' that artist and you helped them gain popularity (i.e. their price goes up a little). And if you buy an album for the going market price ($9.99 or whatever) that means a lot of other people have already validated that it's good and you know you're getting a good deal. Just a thought.
Radio based on artist is already under the works, we should have that out soon.
Variable pricing does seem like a good option. We'll have to explore this further & see how that goes well with the artists. Because they and they alone control the pricing for now. We however do a have a "pay what you want" feature right now, something people have used more often than not.
Again, thanks for the great feedback. I have your email, would like to send you free invite to preemium features once we have them out.
1. No one I know wants to browse "independent music" as an amorphous blob of everything lumped together. On the initial "Hot Songs" page, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to get by clicking on the Play button for each song. I went from a weird electronica song to an "alternative" song to an acoustic guitar song.
2. Also, there seems to be quite a lot of stuff on there. As a new user, I don't want to listen to lots of rubbish to find good songs. Give me a clue about what other people have listened to a lot, favourited, and so on. If I find some things I like I'll probably explore the site a bit further. If I don't find anything within the first few plays, I'll leave and I won't come back. (The data could be fake - just things you like - but regardless, give me some sort of opinion to work from.)
I do agree, can you help me understand what distinguishes independent music from regular music? It isn't hard to be added to Spotify, so why would you have any music Spotify doesn't? Or is it simply that the compensation model is different.
I played around with this for a bit and found 3-4 aritsts I liked just by hitting play on a dozen or so songs, and then exploring further.
Big fan of this.
Thanks again for trying out.
I'm keen not to make any comments about recommendations or the breadth of music available, as I'm aware that the latter is a chicken-and-egg situation, and the former is hard to judge without giving the site a chance to learn my tastes. I'm going to give it a try for sure.
And now for some classic hn nitpicks:
* Please stop your site links from opening pages in new tabs. Whilst looking about for more information, I ended up with 7 tabs open. Please no.
* I clicked on the feedback tab on the right side and was presented not with a feedback form, but a login form. If I can listen to music without signing up/in, surely I can leave feedback?
About the nitpicks: 1. This was to avoid user accidentally clicking and losing the music queue. Now that we've added a js check, we should certainly remove it. 2. We had to shut it down because of the spam. I know we could do captcha, but then we realized most of the feedback anyway came from signed up users.
FYI the flash blocker in chrome doesn't register that there's flash content on the site. I had to click around quite a bit in order to get an option to enable flash.
Better yet, you should use the Web Audio API and fallback to flash for unsupported browsers :)
Edit: Are you on firefox by any chance? Apparently mp3 is not supported there. If not, which browser are you using?
One important improvement: If you're going to use a "metal hand" as the icon for your Like button, you really need to add a :hover{margin-top:-2px;} to it so that pumps up and down as expected when you mouse over it.
Like the example here:
http://www.blogabond.com/Photos/PhotoView.aspx?imageID=21691
(according to their blog post 3 days ago at http://blog.musicfellas.com/post/59478848137/generosity, musicfellas implemented PWYW "a few weeks back" - Loudr has had its current slider design since we launched in February of this year).
Although on the plus side, it means that our slider is cool enough to copy! (Ours even allows artists to bundle multiple albums together, to reward their fans for paying more).
I'd love to have a chat with you guys. Feel free to write to us. Cheers!
We're available at info@loudr.fm if you want to get in touch.
In addition to this, we make discovery super simple and you can also support the artists by buying their music.
We do have non-english music, unfortunately there is no easy way to search by language right now. We should have that up soon.
- I have an error icon next to my name in the sidebar, that says I need to complete my profile. I really don't think not having a bio should warrant a this kind of warning. (Maybe a notification instead?)
- I logged in with Facebook, and my country and profile url weren't auto filled out. That's a little weird.
- No last.fm (or libre.fm) support. For me this is a deal breaker. If it doesn't scrobble, I don't listen to it. I'm sure there are other people out there who feel the same.
What formats are the downloads available in?
1,2. Fair enough. 3. That is definitely on our to-do list. Should be out soon.
Downloads by default are in 320kbps mp3 for now. For any other format, you can make a purchase & shoot us an email.
Moreover, most of the artists and songs I see up there are just at bandcamp.com and no where else. Are you just scrapping Bandcamp and reselling their music. E.g. googling for the album "Creatures" on homepage (https://www.google.com/search?q=creatures+new+campaigns&oq=c...) loads up only from Bancamp and other albums too.
Feedback: the player panel, instead having tabs for Now Playing / Queue, why not move the tabs below the player buttons, and have Comments / Queue tabs.
Thanks, and good luck on the site! :)
Any chance that you would add free music aka music by people who want their art listened without anyone having to pay?
Giving their fans a way to compensate would be amazing.
We do :) I know of at least these 2 artists from Japan.
Make that smaller.
One question - are artists paid for streams or just track / album purchases? I'd likely pay a monthly sub if so!
Currently they are paid only for music purchases since we don't make any money off streaming. Eventually if and when we make money off streaming, artists would definitely be compensated.
I hope there's an API or a mobile app plan in the future.
Love the design, btw. Although I feel there should be a "list view" to go along with the Album-cover-thumbnail view.
Congrats on the great site and what seems like a successful launch!