Venture Pimp: Mixest is like Pandora but without all that thinking attached | Hacker News Reader

Venture Pimp: Mixest is like Pandora but without all that thinking attached

venturepimp.com

19 pointsmarkchristian19 comments

It's interesting, but one of the big draws of Pandora is the ability to like/dislike a song and have a station get more and more tailored to what I like. This seems to just be a random sampling of indie stuff.

It's much more niche than Pandora, but I can see that if you like the kind of music it plays (mostly poorly-recorded very-indie rock songs of about two minutes in length, as far as I can tell) then you might like it better than Pandora, which has the downside that it seems to wind up playing a fairly small subset of songs on rapid rotation, at least in my experience.

Pandora aims to replace radio. This just aims to replace one radio station. Good luck to 'em.

One vertical to begin with isn't a bad strategy. I think the one they've chosen is a good vertical to start with — the genre has a strong online community looking for new things. If it works with indie music, Mixest can broaden out.

Of course this might not be what they're intending to do at all.

If I understand correctly, they're playing unsigned garage bands who want extra exposure and not paying any royalties. That will limit their ability to expand outside genres where such bands are common.

I wonder what kind of quality control they have. Will they accept my five-minute a capella nose-singing version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow?

In the 2 minutes I've spent on there I've seen a number of artists I don't know (which could be unsigned garage bands) and number that I do including Of Montreal and Animal Collective — both well respected and successful groups. I'm not sure what quality control they have, but it doesn't seem like all they're looking for is unsigned groups.

Pandora is allowed to license and stream music based on a contract and DRM restrictions built into Flash. If this gets at all large it may be shut down by the music industry. Right now I can go into the source, find the URL of the mp3 file and just download it to my hard drive. I'm not sure if streaming rights have been given by the authors and if they know that their music can be downloaded.

Hey Locke, the music we play is gathered from indie music blogs - we figure that if there are already direct links to the mp3 file then it is ok to stream as well. We could be totally wrong though.

It is a precarious legal ground... technically you don't have reproduction permission unless they explicitly say so. Still, thanks for the great answer!

I think the idea of Mixest is great, but I also don't see it as a replacement for Pandora or even something like HypeM.

It's great to have the serendipity factor, but sometimes I just want to listen to 'custom-tailored-shuffle' ala Pandora, rather than actively managing the playlist.

To clarify: I find myself distracted by skipping a song much more often on Mixest than Pandora.

It's run by Wasabi Ventures' - perhaps an effort to do something neat to attract attention to their program and companies?

I've never heard of them, but it looks like they're a mix between VC and startup consulting firm - taking very active roles. Many of their portfolio "companies" even say Wasabi Ventures in the copyright - interesting.

I get new music ideas from friends, I would never use this. What I want is a webapp where you type in a band name and it just plays that band, not pretending to have any idea what else I would like. If only that were legal.

Grooveshark.com

I like it (although I must admit I love indie rock to begin with), but isn't it quite similar to http://www.thesixtyone.com/ ?

Except that T61 destroyed their usability in the name of a shiny new design, and drove away a ton of active users. I loved the old T61, but find the new site completely unusable.

What thinking?

simplicity in exchange for choice, imo .. is not really that compelling (I really don't find pandora that complicated to start with). I would like to judge this service a year from now, to see how compelling the use case is.

Pandora gives a lot less choice than it really claims... it's very easy to listen to songs I like that Pandora has, but they very quickly get to playing the same ones over and over again.

I'm willing to take a more niche selection if it means it's easier to find fresh stuff.

What we really need is for Pandora to change its algorithm. Remember that it played song X just yesterday, and relax its constraints to find me a song I haven't heard before.

Would like to see album covers.

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