Hi,I'm a 19 year-old starting a new music streaming service, would love feedback
Hi guys!
I'm a 19-year old freshman at UC San Diego, and I'm just about to get my first startup, Galiboo, off the ground, which actually started as an infectious side project about 2 years ago during 10th grade.
I've always been a huge music listener, but around 10th grade, I began to realize that discovering & sharing the music I love became quite a manual process that involved a lot of manual searching & playlisting.
In short, I found the countless music streaming services that exist today (whether its Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Youtube Red, etc.), to have more or less the same function: to curate a catalog of millions of tracks in one central location, that their users can then browse, search, & access (which actually revolves around a lot of manual work for users).
As a result, I thought it would be cool to create a music streaming service that worked differently:
- One that focused on less searching, and more listening.
- One that could automagically bring its users the music they love, when they needed it, so that they didn't have to manually playlist & search for songs--whether it's motivational tracks for kicking butt at work, or relaxing music for unwinding after a long day.
- One that could make sharing music with friends as fun & easy as a single tap.
And so, I set out to build one.
I've been passionately working on this project since 10th grade, primarily building the "music-understanding" AI technology that powers this service, enabling it to understand the music tastes of its users at an unparalleled level.
And now, I've almost finished building the beta version of the app, and I thought it would be awesome to get your thoughts & feedback on this idea/startup!
http://www.mysongsnap.com/
Thank you so much in advance for giving me your valuable feedback!
FWIW... I use Spotify quite a lot, and when I first open the app, I'm immediately presented with pre-curated playlists that seem to cater what I might need at that time.
On a Sunday morning, I get 'Sweet soul Sunday' or 'Easy Love Songs'. At 9am on Monday it's 'Concentration Music' or 'Background Synth Songs'. Around 2pm, you start to see 'Workout Mix'.
Then you have 'Daily Mix 1', 'Daily Mix 2' and so on which are automatically created playlists, based on what I've listened to. They themselves are generally categorized into rough timbres or styles.
I think Spotify actually employs 'agents' that curate and search for new music for a given style or scene. I think Apple does too.
I very rarely search on Spotify. I've never created my own playlist.
If it's relevant, I would consider myself well versed in music. I studied it during my younger years, and whilst I don't these days - it's a passionate hobby of mine.
I just wanted to mention this, as you've mentioned things you want to do, that Spotify already does well, in my opinion. I can't speak for the other services.
That being said, maybe you could do it better. So I don't mean to discourage you.
If you could build something exactly like Spotify, that allows me to filter out songs with explicit content I would snap that up in a heartbeat. LOL.
Hi telebone_man, thanks a lot for your feedback! I'm learning a lot from users like you, which is awesome!!!
The main difference in my service is that we don't do any manual curation using "agents," since the public editorial playlists can actually be quite generic, and not as personalized as creating a mix just for you, based on your tastes.
So, we've basically built an AI tech that can accurately understand music like humans.
Using this, our service can better serve you the right music for your moment, since it can understand your tastes much better (by understanding the music you like/listen to) & serve you the type of music you want, on-demand.
For example, you can tell the app to play some "relaxing music," and we'll instantly serve with you with music that's relaxing (which we didn't have to manually curate for you; it''s done on the fly by our A.I.).
As a result, you're not limited to any editorial selections, and the music you get once won't be the same as what someone else gets, etc.
Also, as another example, if you don't like to listen to aggressive, explit-type tracks, we can automatically learn that & improve the recommendations you get instantly, since our music-understanding AI can pickup the fact that you're not really into explicit-type tracks.
I've explained a bit more on how my service is a little different than Spotify in the comment I've posted above.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this!
Once again, thanks a lot!
Nice work. I can only give you one piece of advice, get a lawyer. Good luck.
Hey I live near UCSD (recently graduated) and I've love to talk more about what you're doing. Feel free to ping me - details in profile.
Initial feedback: I'm kinda confused by mysongsnap vs galiboo? Like other commentators have mentioned my first thoughts are to find what differentiates you from pandora, spotify, or even youtube and what additional value you can offer beyond similar existing services. I think your landing page did a great job of communicating your initial proposition but I'd wish you explained more HOW you're 100x better than Spotify Radio and Discovery weekly.
I did poke around your demo at galiboo and some of the tags seem contradictory? Like simultaneously being 'Emotion-Pleasant / Comfortable Emotion-Arousing / AwakeningEmotion-Powerful / Strong' and I could definitely forsee this almost being an API service.
Overall I think if you can execute+deliver there's people who are definitely interested in better music discovery and I'd love to see it happen!
Hey testb! Thanks a lot for your feedback! It's awesome to know that you're from UCSD also!!
I would definitely love to talk with you, but I don't see any contact details under your profile..
To address your thoughts, sorry for the confusion! Songsnap is the name of the music streaming service and Galiboo is the name of my startup.
Also, out of curiosity, which name do you think would be better for the music streaming service? :)
Moreover, I've given a little info of how I'm different than Spotify, Pandora, etc. in my comment above.
I would absolutely love for you to check it out!
It's great to know that you tried out the demo!
The main tech that powers my music streaming service (and makes it a lot different & better) is an AI that can extract emotions/tags from music (which is the thing you saw at demo.galiboo.com).
In fact, the tags it output actually have weights associated with them (indicating their relative importance), which I don't visually show in the demo. I just realized that this can probably cause a little confusion!
Also, the funny things is that I have actually built an API for it: apidocs.galiboo.com
But I wasn't sure if developers in general would love to use it.
What do you think?
Also, I would love to connect with you! I couldn't find any details on your profile, but it would be nice if we could connect another way!
Thanks a lot!
Good work for getting this far.
I've built several music-related services and apps. A couple of points to think about.
- What is the source of your music?
If you are planning to setup deals with record labels to stream their content...then good luck.
If you're planning to use an existing service (e.g. stream songs from Spotify) then make sure you have an incredibly-tight agreement. The old adage "Never build a business using someone else's platform" exists for a reason.
- Why is your app 100x better than curation than Spotify and Apple?
TBH you should remove this wild statement because it's most likely not true. Perfectly matching music to mood is incredibly difficult, to the point of impossible, so for a brand new unknown app to make this claim just rings out alarm bells.
____
Rather than trying to be a fit-all music discovery service, maybe try and think about a niche you're passionate about.
For example, https://www.soundshelter.net focuses purely on personalised vinyl recommendations for house & techno DJs.
Might want to have a hero image that isn't 4.2 megs, holy hell
lol, sorry, but thanks for the note! I clearly missed that while rushing this.
How does it work? How does it know what I like? Or not like? It's a web app, Android, osx?
I like Spotify because it has the discover playlist that I always seem to find one of two songs I like in it.
Hi ibdf, thanks for your feedback!
I've described my service in my comment to the original post above, and how's it different from existing services. It is a mobile app.
In short, however, my music streaming service basically tries to serve you the right music to go along with what you're doing (commuting, exercising, etc.), using an A.I. technology that can accurately understand the music you listen to.
Using this A.I. tech, we're able to understand your music tastes much better, and give you a "discover weekly"-like experience, on-demand.
Hope that clarifies, and would love to hear any other thoughts/questions you have!
Thank you so much for your questions!
It sounds you are building something like Noon Pacific (https://noonpacific.com/)?
Hi bernardino, thanks for the feedback! I checked out the link you posted, and I'm actually doing something very different.
I've explained a bit in my comment to the original post above.
Would love to hear your feedback on this!
Thanks!
Sounds a lot like Pandora.
Hi guys, thanks a lot for your feedback!! I certainly should have done a better job of communicating my service's core value/distinction! In short, the main idea behind my service is that, whenever you open the app throughout the day, we'll instantly curate and provide you with different music mixes that align with your tastes and go along with what you're doing (such as upbeat tracks for commuting to work, relaxing music for the evening, etc.).
So when you're at a cafe, for example, we can automatically detect that and instantly serve you with "focus" mixes of songs that you'll love, without having to pre-curate a public, editorial playlist of focus tracks (which aren't personalized to YOU).
In fact, a main point in our service is that, unlike Spotify & Apple Music, we actually DON'T manually curate public editorial playlists (since this can lead to generic & unpersonalized recommendations). Rather, we've built an AI technology that can accurately extract emotions/moods from music, which can help you discover more of the music you love-- on-demand.
For example, you can tell the app to play some "relaxing music," and we'll instantly serve with you with music that's relaxing (which we didn't have to manually curate for you). As a result, you're not limited to any editorial selections, and the music you get once won't be the same as what someone else gets, etc.
Finally, it's actually different from Spotify in many ways:
On a high level, Spotify Radio operates by playing you similarly-liked music, based on the tracks that you & others like/dislike. This can sometimes leads to uninteresting recommendations, since just because you like rap and classical doesn't mean you want to listen to both at the same time in a radio session! However, as mentioned before, I've built an AI that accurately extract emotions/moods from the music you listen to, enabling my service to not only better understand your personal tastes (as opposed to using "similarly-liked" songs like Spotify Radio) but also serve you with music that actually sound similar.
So if you don't like to listen to aggressive, rap in the night, we can automatically learn that & improve the recommendations you get instantly.
We don't use playlists, since they're static and don't instantly adapt to the user's tastes & behavior (and are often manually curated & created once per day/week). Rather, we're able to use our A.I tech to act as your personal music "concierge," serving you an ever-changing music mix that dynamically adapts to your likes, in real-time.
We're also different from Pandora, because Pandora is a service that's more oriented towards artist-based music recommendations, whereas the main point of our service is to get you the right music that aligns with your tastes & what you're currently doing at the moment (your context), whether it's commuting, exercising, unwinding, etc.
Does this give you more insight into my service, guys? What do you guys think?
Once again, thanks for your feedback!! I've learned a lot from you guys so far! Really appreciate it!
Just wanted to let you know that I created a community of young coders you might be interested to join :) https://forum.coderyouth.club or https://coderyouth.club for information.
If you can't even host a secure website, I'm sure your service is seriously lacking in many, many, many ways.
Don't be harsh. They are 19 years old. You can only learn so much in a short amount of time. And there is a lot to learn in software development.
Just check "Let's encrypt" and you'll be cover.
I really like your idea. If I can help you with proofreading or editing your text, please let me know. I can be reached at victomlinson@proofpapers.com.
Sincerely,
Vic