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I have 404,772 users. Now what?

pud.com

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Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#61

Post by mgkimsal »

pm wrote: post #53
pud wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the idea of American Idol for guitarists/drummers/etc. I really could find the best musicians in the world. That would be fun. From a business perspective, if I wanted to make money doing that, I could imagine sponsors like guitar companies paying. Fender (maker of the famous Stratocaster guitar, for you non musicians) just filed IPO paperwork and had something like $700M in sales last year.

I'm all for finding the "best musicians in the world", but what really shits me about Idol and similar shows is that they find technically brilliant singers, but they can't write a song if their life depended on it. The same with many brilliant musicians I know - they have the technical chops, but have no basic idea how to structure a song other than chorus-verse or maybe AABA. There's got to be a market for musician…

or a market for bringing them together

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#62

Post by pud »

DanI-S wrote: post #58

Pud - when I look at your site, I see a marketplace for video music lessons. A tonne of people would pay $1.99 to learn a Radiohead song on piano, or get that perfect 'wub wub' sound in Reason. There's similar stuff on YouTube, but it's low quality and unreliable, and discovery is hard. Create a marketplace and you'll attract the best of the best. Prerecorded video would be perfect at first, but you could happily exp…

That's a good idea. There are people on Fandalism who are unbelievably good musicians, better than pros. I should ask them to do online lessons or whatnot.

(of course, just because they're a good musician doesn't mean they're a good teacher. but i could come up with guidelines to help them teach..)

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#63

Post by dyeje »

A music selling platform sounds like a pretty good idea for this I'd say. It could be a one stop shop for searching for music, interacting with artists, and buying music. Might be interesting. Take some notes from Myspace Music, Bandcamp, and Ultimate-Guitar.

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#64

Post by bryanh »

pud wrote: post #23
bryanh wrote: post #16

Why not go the CDBaby, Bandcamp.com or Threaded route? You have musicians, they have music, why not create a marketplace around their persona and talent? Feature them, give them exposure. Get them sales . Just take your modest cut. 400k users is an awesome sandbox, don't waste it!

Three thoughts about selling music on Fandalism: 1) The site is setup for individual musicians, not bands or acts. I'm really targeting the high school kid who sits on his bed and plays lightening-fast guitar solos. He doesn't have anything to sell. 2) If I promised that kid he'd make significant (to him) $$ selling his music, I'd probably be lying. 3) Most musicians aren't going to make money selling their music. Bu…

Well thought out response.

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#65

Post by replax »

mladenkovacevic wrote: post #48
pud wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three thoughts about selling music on Fandalism: 1) The site is setup for individual musicians, not bands or acts. I'm really targeting the high school kid who sits on his bed and plays lightening-fast guitar solos. He doesn't have anything to sell. 2) If I promised that kid he'd make significant (to him) $$ selling his music, I'd probably be lying. 3) Most musicians aren't going to make money selling their music. Bu…

I have an idea that probably doesn't have much revenue generating potential but it could be a cool new feature (to me at least). I spent about 20 seconds on the website so sorry if you already have this, but I didn't notice it. The users could have the ability to do interactive jam sessions, even if they are miles apart. Maybe something like a high fidelity audio only version of Google Hangouts.Each participant would…

While the idea sounds good/okay, it wouldn't be ready for prime time yet. That is, because

a) HQ microphones are not a very usual thing to have and they are not cheap and

b) because lag will probably kill the experience, even with a very good connection, a delay of, say, 150ms will be noticeable when playing music relying on reacting to each other.

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#66

Post by prateekdayal »

pud wrote: post #45
swaroop wrote: post #6

IIUC, Muziboo.com is a similar site and they do offer pro features : http://www.muziboo.com/tour/

Interesting thanks. I hadn't seen that site before. Do you happen to know what their pricing is? I don't see it on that page.

It is $49.95 per year or $9.95 per month. You can see more details at http://www.muziboo.com/pro

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#67

Post by j45 »

pud wrote: post #12
j45 wrote: post #9

Some (random) thoughts / ideas. They might or might not hit what you're looking for but they're some types of connections that came to mind when surfing the site: - On first sight, I get the impression that it's a profile site. The musician in me wants to find others like me, or that complement what I'm doing to connect, relate, share music with, maybe collaborate with.. - Events - Maybe music related events (learnin…

I like all these ideas and want to do all of them in one form or another. Most of them I'd want to make free (like the learning stuff). But.. events ... that could be a fun one. Specifically, I envision a huge trade show like CES but for musicians. There's currently one called "NAMM" but it's not open to the public. It would be a lot of hard work but I think would be fun. Ideally it would be free or cheap for musicia…

You potentially have the ultimate meetup for musicians... Music is as much about creating as connecting.

Some more ideas from the music consumer perspective:

1) I've been listening to music on the site for an hour and I've been struck with how much soulful music there is here... Any thought in helping them publish to iTunes and taking a small cut?

2) If love to be able to make a playlist by genre and share it.

3) Maybe there's a way I can give micro payments for all the stuff I like? Another angle for consumers to maybe sign up for a membership to vote with their wallet to the artists you listen to in a month..and my 10/mo is split among the number of listeners I liked in a month?

4) Could there be sponsors for learning materials?

5) What about a digital music streaming service for businesses? Good music, all original, businesses routinely pay $20-40/month and up for this kind. Put the music into genres, let the community rate it and let it self-rank into playlists.

6) Spawn an online radio station exclusively for the music on the site.

I've been around online music and radio for a while..had lots of potential ideas, just didn't have the content. if you want to bounce ideas if love to.

Forgive any typos or grammar, writing from my phone. :)

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#68

Post by prawn »

If you have advertising, perhaps try not to compromise the site visually and limit it to below the fold, and keep it relevant.

You could develop a section which creates/collates guides that might interest amateur musicians. Have some basic ones for free, small fee for others. Things that might appeal to amateurs: finding band-mates, splitting meagre proceeds, sticking together, battling stage nerves, inspiration for writing new material. Even up to and beyond getting your first sales online.

Crowdsource content by asking your more experienced users to answer questions. What's worked for them? What challenges have they overcome? What do they wish they could've told themselves 10 years ago? Maybe some content goes into a Guides section, while another goes into Fandalism Stories.

Allow people to flag themselves with badges like: only listening, learner, just jamming, gigging, touring, etc. Maybe charge for badges related to online sales (links to their stores), commissioned music (contact form), etc.

I know you're reluctant to suck amateurs dry, but you could give everyone a random chance at being featured so people don't have to pay, but charge for others to jump the queue and be featured in a different way. e.g., top row of results are promoted. Have a paid option to enhance/theme their page.

You could trade some level of careful promotion on your site with a another in exchange for opportunities to offer your users - that won't make you anything, but it will strengthen your site.

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#69

Post by DanI-S »

pud wrote: post #62
DanI-S wrote: post #58

Pud - when I look at your site, I see a marketplace for video music lessons. A tonne of people would pay $1.99 to learn a Radiohead song on piano, or get that perfect 'wub wub' sound in Reason. There's similar stuff on YouTube, but it's low quality and unreliable, and discovery is hard. Create a marketplace and you'll attract the best of the best. Prerecorded video would be perfect at first, but you could happily exp…

That's a good idea. There are people on Fandalism who are unbelievably good musicians, better than pros. I should ask them to do online lessons or whatnot. (of course, just because they're a good musician doesn't mean they're a good teacher. but i could come up with guidelines to help them teach..)

Judging by the success of games like Rock Band, everyone wants to play music. Traditional music tuition isn't suited to most people, since you start with pretty dull material, and you don't get results until you've been at it for a while. Most people will give up unless they feel progress straight away (I've spent my life doing this).

When a musician friend helps you learn a song, you get an instant rush of gratification. That's what all learning should be like. It fits the $2 impulsive-app-purchase model pretty well, and it works for any skill level.

Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?

#70

Post by rufugee »

I'm sorry, but $2,500 a month to run this site just seems high...I'm not sure what technology pud used to create the site, but it'd be interesting to know. I'd love to see my own sites get this much traffic, but damned if I could really afford to carry the success for too many months. This is where I really think the whole Rails (not saying he used rails...just using it as an example) argument of cheaper development costs but higher server costs breaks down. For the single entrepreneur, and app implemented in Rails versus one in a much faster/resource-friendy (PHP? Java?) framework/language could mean real, significant, insurmountable costs.

Of course, I could be wrong, and I'm sure someone will throw out the rails-is-not-the-bottleneck-the-database-is argument, but I recall reading an article about the gentleman who wrote plentyoffish.com in an unorthodox fashion with C#, and was able to run it for some time successfully on his home machine, then on one physical server. I think this would likely be impossible with rails.

And I say this as a rails fan/developer...

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