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Comment by pud | Hacker News Reader

Three thoughts about selling music on Fandalism:

1) The site is setup for individual musicians, not bands or acts. I'm really targeting the high school kid who sits on his bed and plays lightening-fast guitar solos. He doesn't have anything to sell.

2) If I promised that kid he'd make significant (to him) $$ selling his music, I'd probably be lying.

3) Most musicians aren't going to make money selling their music. But they get a high out of having lots of people listen to it. So I'd rather just let people give it away for free and optimize for generating lots of plays, which would make them happy. Vs helping them sell it only to be disappointed.

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hey Philip - I agree with these 3 points. I lost your email address since we met at TED but email me at derek@sivers.org - glad to help.

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 need some headphones and a resonable quality microphone. I guess if you were looking for a way to squeeze some money out of this, perhaps you could sell recorded copies of the jam sessions to the participans or anyone else willing to pay for them I guess. Sorta like a demo mixing service :P I bet a lot of bands could get their start this way. You'd be removing any limitations of proximity between musicians. Can you imagine if every member of the Beatles had been born in different parts of the world?

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.

Microphones aren't that expensive though - maybe a couple hundred for a semi-decent one and a reasonable sound card? Lots of people would spend that on a guitar.

The latency might be an issue live, but there's no reason that the musicians couldn't (eg.) Lay down drum tracks, bass tracks, etc. and mix them up afterwards.

You could sort of go the kick starter route... Raise money for bands, take a small percentage... Raise money for musicians to sign their own label? Raise money for something bands do like maybe equipment? Take small percentages. Do a craigslist for musicians. Sell things like Ebay.

Sorry for the sporatic, it was a brain dump...

Optimizing for happiness will bode very well for Fandalism.

Well thought out response.

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