alonetone is a really sexy website for musicians made by a musician. I came across the site a few days ago while looking for music resources and instantly fell in love with it. The site isn’t that new (launching late last year) but they recently launched a new version with a sexed up new design.

The concept is simple. Musicians can upload music to their account and share it with their friends. The site also provides a platform for discovering new music for musicians and non-musicians alike. The execution is seamless.

I managed to get in contact with the owner and found out a bit more about the origins of the website and concept.

I am a recording ‘bedroom’ musician, and I’ve offered my own music online (for free) for a really long time. I’ve spent a lot of time encouraging and helping other musician friends of mine record and share their music. I’ve always dreamed of a nice automated system that would help many more musicians get their music online for others to hear, without the stinky corporate feel getting in the way. Just music, people who make music, and their listeners and fans.

alonetone is different because it is non-commercial, run by a musician for musicians and is not trying to sell anyone anything. Tons of sites out there promise musicians money, fame, etc. Although this can seem attractive, it’s not really what a musician needs when they start recording and sharing music. It is another false promise from another company making profit from them (or trying to). It’s very unlikely that the musician will make any money by signing up with these other sites.

With alonetone, there is no reason to include money in the discussion. Maybe if the site explodes in popularity, it will need some help to pay the storage costs. But that is about it. The code is open source. The development is out in the open. I encourage the musicians to tell me what they are looking for and I try to develop something that will address their underlying needs. Really, it’s just all about the music and the people who make it.

Also, alonetone is a step in a larger ladder. I have many ideas about how music can look online. The biggest issue with online music is – how do you find music you will like? alonetone provides musicians with a home, but I’d also like to move in the direction of providing listeners with one too.

alonetone is an on-going project so if you find any bugs or issues while browsing the site please report them. It’s a great project with some honest goals and I really hope it does well.

There are many studies being performed about colors and color psychology, and one theory I enjoy agreeing with is that colors have effects on one’s mood. Have you ever taken a look at a color, and imagined further? As in, for example, you’re looking at a blue billboard and think of the sea, which in turn yields you to think in calm terms? Here, a quote from Bloomberg University:

Color, without our realizing it, can have a profound effect on how we feel both mentally and physically. Dr. Morton Walker, in his book The Power of Color, suggested that the ancient Egyptians as well as the Native American Indians used color and colored light to heal.

The article then goes on to list examples of a variety of colors triggering moods or thoughts, like blue, for example: “Blue represents peace, tranquility, calm, stability, harmony, unity, trust, truth, confidence, conservatism, security, cleanliness, order, loyalty, sky, water, cold, technology, and depression.”

So how does one utilize this? Or, even more, how can you turn something involving something as common as color and mood into anything worth venturing into and profiting?

Guitarati seems to have figured all of this out, as founder Sonal Pandey puts it, “Guitarati provides an offbeat, intuitive way of music discovery based on music-color co-relation. Amidst a world of music discovery dominated by tag clouds, 1-10 rating systems and so forth, we wanted to create something that enabled users to easily find music that others had ‘felt’ the same about.”

The thing that impresses me most about Guitarati is the creativeness of the idea, and how well they’ve pulled it off. Just recently launched in public beta, the service works well with not many visible bugs.

So how does Guitarati make money, and how is it legal? 

Guitarati provides multiple means of revenue for bands and labels, as they get
paid for song downloads as well as streaming. They (bands and labels) decide the
price of their music and retain 75% of the earnings. Record labels can manage
their entire roster and earnings through a single dashboard. Artists can upload
their unsigned as well as released albums. The website is free to use and there
are no hosting or registration fees. We also aim to offer a plethora of
unconventional tools to artists and labels to promote and sell their music.

All in all, a wonderful start-up, a creative idea turned into a profitable new pit-stop for finding music online. Check it out @ Guitarati.com

P.S. – No funding or expenses were disclosed in the e-mail we received, though check back in the comments for something from Pandey possibly.

Ever wanted to make your own game depicting some crazy situation that will more than likely never happen? Check out fyrebug.com.

Fyrebug lets you heavily customize a whole library of pre-made flash games any way you want. You can upload images from your computer or pull them from other websites. Once you’ve added some custom images you can then tweak how you want them to display.

Once you’re happy with your game you can share it with your friends and embed it in blogs and social networking profiles.

I managed to speak with Jonathan Widro, (one of the co-owners) and managed to get a bit more information about the idea behind fyrebug.

My partner and I were working at 4kids Entertainment, and worked closely with flash games. We came up with the idea for Fyrebug, but kids cant upload their own images, so we decided to pursue the idea on our own.

Designed and developed completely by Jonathon and his partner they managed to keep startup costs considerably down.

Here is a game I made depicting me and Mike Arrington having a play fight. If you have a few minutes have a play with the system and make your own game. I’d be interested to see what crazy situations indiestartup readers can create.

Dorble is an interesting new startup offering a searchable database of downloadable and streaming music.

Dorble crawls the internet in search for music files to index and add to their database. All of the music files are hosted on remote servers, dorble just provides a way of indexing that content and makes it searchable. Currently they have quite a limited number of indexed songs and artists (I performed a search for a few reasonably big bands and nothing was returned) but they’re growing the database all the time.

The site has some really nice apple-coverflow-style flash effects like the one you see above that break up the design of the very google-esq homepage.

I spoke with the owner and while he didn’t go into detail too much detail about how much he has spent so far he did tell me it was under $10k.

Some might question the legality of sites like this so it will be an interesting site to keep an eye on. If they can get past the possible legal issues that may arise then monetizing the search results should be a walk in the park. Anyway, i wish them the best of luck.

I recently got an email from Jim Benton informing me about his new “social guide to Chicago” (for lack of a better phrase). The site is based on the wiki model meaning anyone can come and add or edit any of the information on the website.

Jim had the idea about two years ago after being dissatisfied with the current listing options in Chicago.

I was trying to find a list of thrift stores in Chicago a few years ago, and I was unable to find a decent list anywhere on the internet- I found this surprising. Also, I have always been annoyed by most of the existing local search options, as when I search for ‘coffee’ I get about 20 Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. I found this frustrating, because in Chicago we are lucky to have lots of excellent places that roast their own beans, but they are always buried in search listings. I wanted it to be easy to find the places that make Chicago a unique, interesting place to live.

It’s really great to see startups harnessing the knowledge of groups of people to help other people, and small businesses out. The indylist does this wonderfully.

To date the only money spent has been on hosting although I was told that if someone wanted a similar site developed it would have cost roughly $15k.

Starting off on his own, Jim is now working with 3 others on the website. Justin Siddons, Jon Sestak, and Phil Kalas. Justin handles the graphic design work, Jim does the programming, and Phil and Jon are taking care of the business and marketing aspects of the site.

It’s a great little startup and they’re doing some good things that are benefiting a lot of people. If you live in or are planning on visiting Chicago check them out and give them some love.