Currently, beatlab.com is just me, but it is an incredibly fun project to work on. I'm based out of San Francisco.
Of course, It's fun to get to do projects with people like Paul Oakenfold. But it's also incredibly rewarding to interact with young kids on the site that have no preconceived notions of how music should be created, and to watch them progress on beatlab.
1. If you want to force people to listen to the whole thing then by all means force them too, but it will decrease engagement from people checking it out quickly. 2. Things I listen to first from a song, intro, chorus, breakdown, outro. If you're using Grids then this could even be marked out. If you have a waveform then this makes it easier and you can look to see the structure from the get go. 3. One thing to be aware of is that if music tastes do change (ie non-quantised music such as Electronic Dance Music) then your market could deacrease as I imagine you're placing yourself in the market as a online version of what Fruityloops was to kids back in the 2000's.
But one thing that precludes my own participation is, that beatlab is essentially a walled garden :-S. While this may be a fun app that brings kids closer to music, it's just impossible to attract serious musicians to a web-based step sequencer with no download options whatsoever. The Facebook login doesn't help either.
I've intentionally ripped the Come Together vocals and am going to use them in a way that even YouTube infringement algorithms aren't able to fingerprint. Just for the sake of truly creating something new out of the samples \o/.
I hope you understand that this is nothing personal, it's just the true everything-is-a-remix mentality that's prevalent among music makers on forums, SoundCloud and the like. If that's the crowd you'd eventually like to attract, that's the mindset you'll have to get accustomed to and support with beatlab's features.
I agree regarding facebook. I plan on offering soundcloud and google logins as well.
What kind of projects are you looking to have people work on? And/or what skill sets of are looking for?
Many hit hip-hop and electronica songs could have been composed on something similar to beatlab. The amount of additional complexity required is minimal.
For example, one project is to create another area of the site for laying down vocals over a beat. The grid is a poor metaphor for these kinds of things. The vocals will by recorded separately, and then independently synced up with any other grid on the site.
Another project is to allow for the arrangement of grids into a basic song structure. For example, there should be the intro grid, the chorus grid, etc..