Thanks for posting these ideas. Here are some thoughts off the top of my head, train-of-thought.
Band Generator - There's something I love about this. I don't think Fandalism can just "generate" a band any more than LinkedIn can "generate" a startup. That said, it seems like musicians are always looking for the equivalent of marriage (a band) when I think it might be more fun to just have a several one-off trysts (random jams). The latter isn't really something musicians do currently. Which is an obstacle. But maybe there's a way to spark this behavior using a "random person to jam with this wednesday" generator.
Worldwide Music Battles - In theory this sounds really fun. I recently did a contest with Interscope records to promote the new Van Halen album. Musicians performed cover versions of the new Van Halen single in exchange for the possibility of fame and fortune. There weren't as many entries as I was hoping for. I think it comes down to musicians as artists -- and artists want to be free to create. They don't want to be told what to play. I think. Or maybe they think contests are cheesy, and your idea is more legit. I'll experiment.
Collaborative Online Recording - I think indabamusic.com does this. At least, that's the impression I get (I haven't used that site yet). It's surprisingly non-trivial to just throw a drumset recording over your bass line. To get a good drum sound you need a few mics, a mixer, recording software, EQ & mixing skills... it's really easier (and more fun, for me at least) to just jam with people in real life. And record it.
Thanks again for these ideas. They got me thinking and I'm sure I'll use them in some regard as I build new features. Same goes with all the awesome comments in my original post.
I'll keep blogging as I add new stuff to Fandalism. I plan to add a lot of stuff that was suggested in HN, in one way or another.
I think collbative recording can work well. My iPhone app, Jampipe, is kind of a scratch pad for musicians. Quality isn't the top priority, the main focus is on collaboration. Not sure about drums but most instruments pick up well with the iPhone mic. I sent you an email by the way!
cxz & pud -- If either of you guys want, some friends and I developed a pretty comprehensive collaborative recording suite a while ago that I just couldn't get off the ground.
I've since taken it offline (minimal active users + a couple hundred a month for hosting != sustainable), but if either of you want to take a look at the source code, let me know.
Here's a TNW article detailing what we did, from back in 2010:
Plenty of people might be interested in being able to get one of these awesome people to come and play at your party or have a custom song recorded just for you.
Your competition would include sites like GigMasters, which do (only) that -- which could be good and bad. But if you've got 400K users paying $0 right now, it probably wouldn't be hard to undercut $200 + 5%, for offering booking support.
Good points. For the band generator, you're right: I had also in mind one-off trysts:) Regarding the drums on the collaborative online recording: I was more thinking something that could be generated from a MIDI keyboard. I have been playing drums for several years and always got frustrated by the challenge of recording a neat drum sound.
Congrats with what you've build so far. Keep rocking with Fandalism.
Aside from a few neat feature suggestions this blog entry is pretty vague about how to actually solve the monetization issue.
Instead of going the commercial route, could a site like Fandalism survive as a registered non-profit? It seems like it would be a nice fit for a site devoted to connecting independent musicians.
While some Ideas are good (I love the collaborative online recording studio) this doesn't address the main point of the other post.
The main idea of this blog is that the answer to "I have lot of users, how can I generate money ?" is "Get more users and more content !"
It's not. More users and more content means more servers, more bandwidth and more money you have to spend.
It seem that in this "business" is only about generating users and user-generated content and don't worry about the money because some "Angel" investor will save you if you have enough users/content. Let them worry about how to get money out of it.
Why not start something monetizing it from the beggining. Why not add the monetizing problem and possible solution (advertising, premium content,...) at the beginning of the process so that when you grow you will see how it scales.
The main problem is not "How I will I monetize this whitout changing too much of my site" , the problem is "Why didn't you think about it before starting this process."
> Why not start something monetizing it from the beggining. Why not add the monetizing problem and possible solution (advertising, premium content,...) at the beginning of the process so that when you grow you will see how it scales.
Because that's not how you sell your 2 year old company to facebook for a billion dollars :)
Any blog post that ends with a discussion of what "potential acquirers" are looking for makes me wonder if the author understands the concept of "monetization".
Ignoring revenue and praying for a buyout is not a business plan any more than buying lottery tickets is.
Don't know, but I think it is not that difficult to monetize this user base - I think it is much more difficult to gain such user base in the first place.
For starters, I would suggest to throw ideas, listed below, at the wall and see what will stick:
1. Kickstarter for albums [where funding is prepayment for goods/services] - taking into account the state of music industry this shall fly a long way.
2. Pro account - personalized pages for a band and sample tracks for a monthly fee, paid by a band.
3. Events organizer - bands can propose concerts for clubs, bars, etc. Making money - transactions - either as cut of concert cost (band-club) or as cut from tickets sold. And this feature is available only to Pro-account holders.
I believe that just doing the above shall easily generate at least $10-50K per month in 3-6 mths, assuming correct execution.
There are other options to monetize, but the above are the most obvious/simple to implement.
> A collaborative online recording studio. Fandalists could create open projects and see other contributing to their creation.
This is an idea that's been bugging me for a while.
Something like a multi-track SoundCloud, where uploading a song requires uploading each channel (drums, bass, lead etc) as a separate bounced track. Hitting play for a particular song plays back all the channels in sync as intended by the original artist, or the song can be 'forked' by other users, who can tweak or replace individual channels.
A high-school kid swapping Jimi's solo in 'All Along The Watchtower' for his own, or an electronic artist forking a classical pianist and adding breakbeats... karaoke for musicians.
You'd be able to track songs 'forked' from your own ala github, and forks-of-forks would quickly diverge into something quite unique.
No idea how you'd monetize it (pay-to-fork?), attract users (would the the separate-channel thing be a pretty large barrier to entry for the average musician?), more than likely a legal minefield, and probably not particularly useful to Pud, but I'd love to see it happen :)
> A collaborative online recording studio. Fandalists could create open projects and see other contributing to their creation. Like a colossal music Dropbox on a certain tempo. I start a project with a line of guitar and some info (mood, tempo, chord structure). A bassist comes to the site and drops its line of bass. Later, a drummer adds a beat. Another drummer comes and offers a different beat version. In a sense, it would be a cloud-based Babel tower on which thousands would create together.
Just wanted to add that I've been craving something akin to this system for a fair few years now, the amount of reasonable little bits and bobs I've come up with that I just can't think of what to do with frustrates me.
As for monetisation, tip jars seems the obvious short term solution to me.
Its happening already with tools like Reaper, which have integrated cloud-based network recording features.
It would be a short step for the owners of Fandalism to get integrated with the authors of Reaper, build in some sort of centralized notification/artist-meetup service, and take it to the next step.
IMHO, this sort of strategic alignment of web/cloud-based services and traditional native application (DAW software) is the logical next step.
Indeed, I have been vague on number 3. My take-away was more like: "Here's a cool user base, let's see what else we can do with it", thinking also that these new features could open up the spectrum of monetization possibilities.
I don't mean to be cruel, but the ideas in this post are a strong argument against feature creep.
Politely, each one of those could be their own startup. However, are these burning need concerns? Is someone currently being held back by an absence of these ideas, or are they just distractions from the core value proposition?
I understand what you're saying, but PUD has a lot of experience building startups and I think he has the right mix of know-how and resources to launch any of the ideas listed in the article as part of Fandalism.
My first thought after reading PUD's original post was the "band generator" idea too. It seems in line with the idea of exposing and building on musical talent in a community-building atmosphere, which I think(?) is in-line with his core goals for the site...
* Content discovery pretty close to how you have it but with a better way to find local acts. I.e. a big read "Find Local" button.
* Have an admin interface for musicians to put concert dates, iTunes links, etc.
* Eventually you could become the one-stop shop for discovering new local acts as and figuring out who is playing in your town on a given night.
As an example you view some guitar video of a dude shredding a Metallica song. You click on it and you see what band he is in, where/when it is playing, songs from the band that you can stream for free(with user ratings), download for a price (or free if they want). That kind of thing.
The reverse of this is also true. You can see a calendar of all of the local acts playing near you. You can click on any act and see all of their fandalism videos as well as all the information I described above.
You should be able to purchase tickets and songs through fandalism.
Monetization
* Take a cut of said ticket and song purchases.
* Very subtle premium ads on the main page advertising shows in your area based on your tastes. Personally I would actually be interested in reading these ads.
EDIT:
Just had another idea which is an addon to my previous idea. A lot of people are coming up with ideas related to Kickstarter. This is a cool concept. I think it would be excellent if Fandalism partnered with music venues so that you have a list of a bunch of different acceptable venues and their seating capacity.
Bands or users could initiate Fandalism campaigns to have a band play a live concert. E.g. I'm willing to put $10 to see this band play live on one of these dates. Turns out 1000 other people were willing to do so as well. Fans vote on which of the 1000 person venue they want to go to. Band gets 5k, venue gets 4.5k, fandalism gets 500 bucks.
I think this plays to peoples' want to be ahead of the curve. How cool would it be to say "Yeah I funded the Red Hot Chili Peppers first concert way before they became famous".
This typically raises the growth versus revenue debate. Do you continue as is, adding users or try and monetise, risking alienating users.
There have been some smart sponsorship/advertising concepts that have worked well on free sites.
Kaggle comes to mind. They hold competitions for members. Usually sponsors throw in cash prizes and job offers.
So an American Idol YouTube competition with a prize to headline a big concert may work. Drives traffic and maybe some revenue from companies rather than users.
As I was trying to say in the last paragraph of my post: when you get people stick to your service, it broadens the realm of possibilites for monetization. For instance, the online collaborative studio could have some premium features (specific editing tools, extra storage... I am thinking out loud). Another example: when you get half-million users coming back every week, music labels or festival organizers might be ready to pay to get their advertising to the right audience (musicians, music fans) - see Pitchfork or Rollingstone.com.
He already has a big realm of possibilites for monetization. He just doesn't know what to choose. And you told him, hey you know what, you could get even MORE possibilities and then everything will solve itself and money and stuff. Reminiscent of the "2. ????" before "3. profit".
For that to really work I'd imagine the people using your API would need to be able to monetize? So you're basically shifting the challenge of turning users into value to a 3rd party.
I don't have anything to back this up other than a gut feeling, but to pull it off I think you'd need another order of magnitude worth of users, or some data that's exceptionally compelling to 3rd party developers.
(Maybe fandalism does have this? Alot of people seem to have interesting ideas on what to do with that many bands and fans in one place)
Band Generator - There's something I love about this. I don't think Fandalism can just "generate" a band any more than LinkedIn can "generate" a startup. That said, it seems like musicians are always looking for the equivalent of marriage (a band) when I think it might be more fun to just have a several one-off trysts (random jams). The latter isn't really something musicians do currently. Which is an obstacle. But maybe there's a way to spark this behavior using a "random person to jam with this wednesday" generator.
Worldwide Music Battles - In theory this sounds really fun. I recently did a contest with Interscope records to promote the new Van Halen album. Musicians performed cover versions of the new Van Halen single in exchange for the possibility of fame and fortune. There weren't as many entries as I was hoping for. I think it comes down to musicians as artists -- and artists want to be free to create. They don't want to be told what to play. I think. Or maybe they think contests are cheesy, and your idea is more legit. I'll experiment.
Collaborative Online Recording - I think indabamusic.com does this. At least, that's the impression I get (I haven't used that site yet). It's surprisingly non-trivial to just throw a drumset recording over your bass line. To get a good drum sound you need a few mics, a mixer, recording software, EQ & mixing skills... it's really easier (and more fun, for me at least) to just jam with people in real life. And record it.
Thanks again for these ideas. They got me thinking and I'm sure I'll use them in some regard as I build new features. Same goes with all the awesome comments in my original post.
I'll keep blogging as I add new stuff to Fandalism. I plan to add a lot of stuff that was suggested in HN, in one way or another.