I like the idea of meetups. It would be nice to have a feature that allows a group of musicians to arrange a get together, jam session, to play music.
I have 404,772 users. Now what?
141–150 of 198 posts
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#142Pud - 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…
>A tonne of people would pay $1.99 to learn a Radiohead song on piano //
Sounds like a rights management nightmare as the location of delivery (assuming the location of production is the US) is likely to have particular rights groups that you have to handle. In the UK you'd need to get rights from the PRS, the artist (if you play a clip) the production company for trademarks and what have you and probably a few others.
Just a suggestion to look in to IP rights issues before you get too far along with things.
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#143I'd love to learn how you grew so quickly.
Affiliate income on tabs, sheet music, musical equipment, recording equipment.
Subscriptions - just like DeviantArt or Flickr.
Use Earbits's business model - pay money to promote bands. People who play music listen to music. After all, you are building out an audience.
Sell tutorials - hire the best guitarists to teach techniques, etc. Just like on the iMac.
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#144You could become a music publisher! Allow the artists to sell their songs for ~.5 usd and you take 10% of that. I know everyone of them would be very glad if someone paid anything for their music, and it would help pay for the site (and make you a millionaire, who knows!)
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#145You could become a music publisher! Allow the artists to sell their songs for ~.5 usd and you take 10% of that. I know everyone of them would be very glad if someone paid anything for their music, and it would help pay for the site (and make you a millionaire, who knows!)
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#146You could become a music publisher! Allow the artists to sell their songs for ~.5 usd and you take 10% of that. I know everyone of them would be very glad if someone paid anything for their music, and it would help pay for the site (and make you a millionaire, who knows!)
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#147A lot of nice, practical suggestions here. Let me add one on more abstract level. But first congratulations on achieving hard thing - building two-sided market (http://cdixon.org/2010/10/16/the-ladies-night-strategy/). I think that in that situation you need to check which side benefits more from your site - and that's the one to get charged. And that's something what can be (and should be) tested - for example by this one-question technique "How would you feel if Fandalism was shut down tommorrow?" (can't find the proper link right now). The other thing to identify/verify is what actual problem does your site solve for the people and what additional value related to this problem they would appreciate (and pay for). You have quite big userbase so you don't need your own ideas anymore. Just ask people (as some people already stated here).
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think any musician that's serious about playing music has at least one decent microphone and some sort of recording setup (M-audio stuff is a low-cost way to get into recording). Hearing yourself play is also invaluable towards learning.
The second issue is real and since I know nothing about how to solve it perhaps the idea is dead in the water for now. But anthonyb's suggestion of recording all the tracks separately and allowing the musicians to mix them in post might be one way of going around this.
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#149It strikes me that musicians are like computer geeks, in that they often have a fair bit of expensive kit lying around and there is a fair bit of tech involved in making and recording good music.
So if in addition to showcasing the music, you also let the musicians talk about how they make it, you would both foster interesting conversations about the technicalities of the music and the tools used. That in turn is a perfect place for a marketplace for musicians to connect and buy/sell second-hand items - and a very valuable spot for companies to advertise gear to interested buyers or an opportunity to charge the site's members themselves for posting ads.
Also, finding session musicians who can stand in or help with a recording session may be another reason members might want to advertise to each other.
Re: I have 404,772 users. Now what?
#150Great blog post. It was refreshingly honest in its approach to the HN community. HN gets a lot of the "How do I get started fishing?" type posts. I very much enjoyed reading this "Okay, I have my hook set on something big. How do I pull it into the boat?"
I would recommend doing a lot of little things in different directions that can be measured then focusing on the ideas that show the most promise.
Pick the low-hanging fruit first, like ad sense. Keep the ad box small and unobtrusive. You could set it up in a day and see how it performs. You can always remove it later.
A simple mobile app that you could give away for free shouldn't take long to write. That will get you something installed on lots of devices that you could then use as a foothold for upgrades and premium features down the road.
Finally, find ways to reach out to your users and really tap into what they want from the site. Build ways into your site to get that reach and to take metrics of everything they're doing. In real terms, I'm talking integrated surveys, A/B testing of interfaces and features, and ways for you to increase the channels of communication between you and your users. Your users will help you figure out which way you could go with this thing.
Good luck!