Ask HN: Please Review My New Social Music Website • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Please Review My New Social Music Website

#11

Post by Flankk » Fri, Feb 05, 2010, 3:45 PM UTC

Youtube costs two million dollars a day to run. If you are planning on hosting music, better sites like www.grooveshark.com already exist. Furthermore, everyone is fine with uploading their audio files to Youtube. All the lectures I listen to are through iTunes U along with all other audio files. Indie bands can distribute their music through iTunes using sites like www.cdbaby.com.

The url is horrible.

You want to be Youtube for lectures and music and have a social media aspect and be last.fm with a radio functionality and twitter integration. Your idea is too broad.

Apologies for being overtly negative. You seem to have your idea thought out so I thought I'd give you some perspective.

Re: Ask HN: Please Review My New Social Music Website

#12

Post by ajcronk » Fri, Feb 05, 2010, 3:53 PM UTC

jrdcarter wrote: post #4

I like the idea, getting the audio only off videos could be really useful. However, I agree with unignorant, the UI needs work. When you get more tracks it could become hard to browse. Plus, have fun when you start getting hit by DMCA notices every day!!

We've been running http://bln.kr for over 6 months and haven't had a single DMCA notice.

Re: Ask HN: Please Review My New Social Music Website

#13

Post by mtalantikite » Fri, Feb 05, 2010, 4:40 PM UTC

You need some sort of search function right on the front page.

I agree using YouTube for sharing music is a bit overkill, but it's nice to be able to just get to YouTube, search for some obscure band, and find random tracks immediately.

By not focusing around search you're forcing your users towards functionality in which they personally upload tracks to send to their friends. I find myself less wanting to upload tracks to share, but rather wanting to share links of stuff that already exists in the system with my friends.

Make that piece of functionality prominent and you're letting visitors easily leverage the work of the people that actually want to be a part of the system, as most users probably just want to be casual users.

Re: Ask HN: Please Review My New Social Music Website

#14

Post by JangoSteve » Fri, Feb 05, 2010, 7:36 PM UTC

I like the idea and it looks really clean and professional. But if your purpose is to allow people to simply listen to things that are otherwise uploaded to YouTube, why not just create an application where you can type in the URL/GUID of a YouTube video (except on your site) and it plays back the audio from that YouTube video, rather than making people upload things to both YouTube and your site.

(Keep in mind I'm not familiar at all with YouTube's API, so I'm not sure if this is either possible or in compliance with their TOS, so if it's not possible, then I say great job, looks good!)