Comment by lewisflude | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lewisflude | Hacker News Reader

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As far as the branding goes, MVSIC reminds me of a minimal Bandcamp and I assume the whole V thing is taken directly from Svpply?

Now, I'm sure this will resonate with the artist, but the problem you have is the same problem faced by many sites I've seen before. It's partly a branding issue (on the front page, all I see is a globe) and a distribution issue. Do I have to post a link to mvsic somewhere in order to get people in the door? If so, what are the benefits of sending them to mvsic rather than somewhere like Bandcamp?

I'm not saying that Bandcamp does what you guys do, better (I'm sure mvsic is awesome, and I'm going to delve into it further after work), but it's not clear what value it actually brings to me as an artist.

So, here's some things you can do now.

* Make the front page friendlier. Pictures of the product in action. Keep it minimal, that's a great thing you have there, but just take a think about what someone wants to see when they visit mvsic.co.

* What IS your USP? Give me it in plain english. (It's definitely a SP but not sure how U it is!).

* Maybe think about offering a free tier. I know you've put a reason as to why there isn't one, but I'd urge you to experiment with offering a free trial for a certain amount of downloads, restrictive features etc. For instance, make your account FOR FREE , after first 50 downloads prompt the user to subscribe to your service.

Thanks for the feedback. To answer some of your points:

I think our goal is to one day drive our own traffic to an artist's music. Have people coming to the site and clicking around to find stuff. But in the near term, we can't promise we'll drive any of our own traffic to the artist, so we're relying on the artist to spread it.

The other thing people have seemed to love is the concept of real-time stats similar to Google analytics. When an artist posts a new release, there's that "moment of truth" where they blast it out to their fans and then wait for a reaction. But it's hard to really get insights into what's happening. Who is listening right now? Where did they come from (referrer)? Where are they located geographically?

And then eventually being able to do cool things with all that data to follow up with the right fans with the right message at the right time.

We're also aiming to take a lot of things other sites have done (ie, charging money for a download) and making is simpler for the artist to manage. We'll deposit money directly into an artist's stripe account, for example, rather than holding it until they hit a threshold.

And we've gone back and forth about offering a free tier dozens of times. Our current solution is to allow anyone to sign up and get their hands on the software for free, but then they have to pay before they can publish a track. Among other things, we're hoping this cuts down on the risk of DMCA violations we have to worry about :)

Screenshots coming soon!

Sounds awesome! I'll talk to the rest of the band about signing up with you guys.

Thank you! We'll definitely be posting updates on our blog (blog.mvsic.co) in the coming month or two as the service continues to be built.

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