Apply HN: Bandhub – online music collaboration community | Hacker News Reader

Apply HN: Bandhub – online music collaboration community

14 pointsPabloOsinaga16 comments

Bandhub (http://bandhub.com) is an online music collaboration community.

We provide easy-to-use software for asynchronous, video-based, music collaboration. We make it easy for you to get to know like-minded musicians around your interests, develop relationships with them over time and stay connected on an ongoing basis by regularly making music together and sharing with the overall Bandhub community.

PROBLEM: 99% of the world's 500M people who play an instrument or sing do it recreationally, as a hobby. For people like us, it is very hard to get to socialize meaningfully around music ( forming a band, playing in gigs ). Yet those meaningful social experiences around music are what we aspire to the most. Making it easier to get those experiences is in our opinion the #1 problem in the musical products industry. The internet hasn't done much yet to help solve this problem. You can publish your performance in YouTube or Soundcloud but nobody will pay attention to it ( only the 0.1% of musicians will get attention ). The average recreational musician will be ignored.

INITIAL FOCUS: Our current product is good for the subset of people that are REALLY active in their hobby of playing an instrument/singing. That is people who play/sing for 2hrs every day when they come back from work/school. Bandhub users now spend those 2hrs using Bandhub instead, as the workflow is the same to what they use to do before Bandhub ( i.e., meticulously learning & practicing songs ) but now they get super meaningful social experiences by being part of "collabs" in Bandhub, which are multi-instrument online video-based collaborations.

MARKET: $30B/year spent worldwide in Musical Products ( e.g., guitars ) and Lessons. We believe meaningful social experiences around this hobby are the most valuable experiences people are looking for and whoever succeeds in providing them will capture a big portion of this overall market, and maybe also grow this market 10x.

This is a really neat idea. I know a lot of musicians who struggle to find other musicians to jam/start a band with. Generally, they find people who say they're musicians and willing to dedicate time, but those people turn out to be flakes.

How are you going to vet your users to ensure that these are the more "serious" hobbyists, i.e. the people that are playing/singing for 2 hours every day?

One last frank question: how do you plan on making money?

The community self-regulates who connects with who like any other social network/community. When you first logon you can explore/search for collabs and musicians and you will quickly identify people you'd like to connect with. If you are somewhat active the first few days you will quickly develop relationships with the type of people you are looking to connect.

Another important aspect is that the collaboration happens asynchronously. A lot of the frustration with forming bands is the synchronous nature of it. (1) all have to be together at the same time in the same place (which we know is very hard to do since people have their own schedules/priorities) and (2) all musicians have to actually perform perfectly in sync at once - any minimal screw up by just one of the band members and you have to start over. It's very frustrating. Asynchronicity solves those 2 problems.

For revenue, we have a freemium model, users subscribe to Bandhub Pro and get additional features.

Do you see a synchronous collaboration solution in the future ? is it feasible technologically - due to latency ?

It is technologically feasible today within a distance radius of 200 miles or so if the internet infrastructure around you is solid[1]. But as I mentioned in another comment, synchronous collaboration has a lot of friction, so I think while this is really cool, it's sort of an icing in the cake type of experience more than the most used scenario. Asynchronous is more convenient. And Bandhub has a sort of "live" feel since it has video and most tracks are recorded in one take (so there could be some slight mistakes or imperfections that make it feel very "real"). If you haven't tried it yet you should. The "live" feel to it was a pleasant surprise.

[1]NOTE: Most of the latency is actually in the audio processing components (internal audio device, driver and application buffers). There is some specialized hardware that minimizes this latency, making it work well across <200miles distance (or so). After that, speed of light + internet router buffers add way too much latency and it starts to not work so well.

Please please PLEASE authenticate over https.

Currently you're just SHA512'ing your users' passwords and sending the hash over the wire in the clear. This is INCREDIBLY insecure and you're putting your users at risk.

I don't know a good resource off the top of my head to best practices, could someone else provide a link?

Thanks. We will get it fixed.

Thank you!

Looks like a great idea and I will definitely check it out.

Cool. Let me know if you have any questions/comments as you do.

What does a Bandhub user satisfaction story look like? How do you measure it?

It's very high. We are not doing anything scientific around it but talk to the users constantly and I can tell you they are very very happy. The phrase "changed my life" is recurrent.

I guess what I'm getting at is what do they mean when it says it changed their life? What is fulfilling to them?

Where I'm going with this is what part of that can be increased and applied to a wider audience?

The ability to connect with other people and develop deep relationships around something as intimate as profound as music making is very powerful. Making new friends is life changing.

When you say applying it to a wider audience do you mean (i) to people who are not musicians or (ii) to musicians not in our focus segment ( e.g., people who play less frequently/more casually)

I mostly mean group (ii) at this point.

I'd want to talk to the current focus segment in depth, find out what makes them happiest about what they're doing with your product and look for ways to both increase the opportunities for those things and make them more accessible.

Is that making sense?

I think your current focus segment knows there's a rewarding feeling in return for the effort, and maybe group (ii) isn't as aware, or doesn't know how to get there...

I think there is a lot of truth in what you say. Most of our users in our target focus segment ( i.e., people who already play 2hs a day ) feel very confident in learning, practicing, playing/recording songs. Making music is hard after all, requires a lot of dedication. A lot of people aspire to get there, but they are not confident, or know how to get there. That's why lessons are so important in this hobby.

Since our initial focused segment is big enough for us to get traction, we are not currently focused on expanding, but we will do so in the future and asking ourselves/our users the questions you suggest seems to be a good idea.

Can you talk a bit about the technology behind it?

Feature-wise Bandhub can be thought of as a combination of Facebook and YouTube with added specialized features for music collaboration.

(1) COMMUNITY FEATURES: Each user has a profile, you can follow/be followed, there is a news-feed, etc. The "posts" are exclusively music collabs, so you stay up to date on collabs your Bandhub friends are making, what's new, etc; you can comment and so on. You can search for collabs ( e.g., artists/styles/etc ) and create/share playlists. Also, there are interest groups ( e.g., "punk rock style covers" ). And there are added features specific to music collaboration ( e.g., "my list of collabs to participate" )

(2) THE MUSIC COLLABORATION SOFTWARE: There are two parts to it

(a) A collaborative GarageBand with video. When you open a collab in "STUDIO MODE" you get to a web-based multitrack audio/video editor - with many of the features of a DAW, but way simpler to digest. You can send/receive individual audio-video tracks, set the audio mix, enhance it with effects, determine which tracks stay/go, etc.

(b) Bandhub Recording App: when you want to record a part (called 'tracks') for a collab (e.g., the bass part), you use our Bandhub Recording App ( native app available for PC and Mac ). You connect your mic or instrument to the computer and using the computer's webacam you record audio+video through it. While recoding, you will hear the other parts of the collab (e.g., the drums and guitar) as backing tracks so you can play on top of them and stay in sync. When you are done, the track gets inserted in the collab in draft mode. You don't have to edit timelines for synchronization or use complex audio/video editing software at all. It's actually super super easy to use.

Here are a few screenshots:

collab "post": http://i.imgur.com/2nmc5J1.png

studio mode: http://i.imgur.com/VEKqHKe.png

news-feed: http://i.imgur.com/d2aytQH.png

Recoding App: http://i.imgur.com/xhbc3Xo.png

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