Posts Tagged ‘music’

25Jun

Indexing social music with Qbox.com

Social networks are a relatively un-tapped source for music. Sites like myspace and bebo have massive amounts of streaming music at their disposal but do little more than encourage struggling musicians to create profiles and add as many friends as possible.

Qbox has found a way to utilize this massive collection of music.

Our player essentially works like a remote control that lets you take control of all the social network music available for streaming.

There is also a desktop application that I unfortunately couldn’t test (I’m on a mac and currently it’s windows only) but this video outlines some of the features of the software.

Tags:   ,

30May

Rifflet.com – A home for unfinished music.

Rifflet is an interesting project that lets musicians share unfinished parts of songs in the hope that other musicians can collaborate and combine musical ideas to form new ones.

Rifflet was produced for $0, in roughly two weeks, from idea to launch. It’s a great example of a solid idea executed very well for very little cash.

I heard from the sites founders, Jon and Kelly. They we’re more than helpful with helping me source this post.

It’s amazing how fast the Riffflet community is growing, and every day we hear from people about how much they love the site. We just had one member produce the first song built out of pieces on the site, so we’ve actually help something get created, which is really exciting.

I love little startups like this. They noticed a gap and they produced something quality for very little money to fill it. If more people were doing this the Internet would be a much better place.

There is already some good stuff going on over there. If you’re a musician check them out.

Tags:  

14May

alonetone.com – For musicians by musicians

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.

Tags:  

11May

Meet Guitarati – Tagging music with color psychology

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. Guitarati LogoHave 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.

 

 

Tags:   ,

08May

Dorble.com – Music Search 2.0

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.

Tags:   ,