Good idea. I'm not a movie maker so I don't know much about the business, but I'll investigate.
7,868 karma · joined May 14, 2009
Founder of DistroKid, TinyLetter, F*ckedcompany, AdBrite and other stuff.
TuneCore charges a (much larger) annual fee.
DistroKid collects royalties & pays out monthly. I also founded AdBrite which paid out several million dollars per month, if that adds to DistroKid's credibility.
And the good thing is that even if your distributor disappears, your music is still in the stores. It's decoupled from the distributor. Tho I'm not sure how you'd manage your music if your distributor went away, but I'm sure there's a way. Also, the stores vetted DistroKid somewhat. Likely so they can avoid having to figure this out.
Right now there's a cron that runs every few seconds, finds the next unprocessed file, and processes it via command line. If/when volume gets really high, I'll probably have to do this somewhat differently to make sure it scales.
DistroKid uses MediaInfo to figure out what the user uploaded:
http://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo
Then uses SOX for audio conversions:
And native Railo (the backend programming language I use) functions for image processing/resizing.
I may figure out a way to automatically submit there from DistroKid (so there's one less thing the artist needs to do), but in the meanwhile, Pandora makes it easy.
\m/
If "too many customers" becomes a problem (increase in customer service expenses, etc) I'd consider it. But right now that's not an issue and I love that it's cheap.
Just really wanted something where as a musician, I can just upload my music to stores without really giving it much thought. Kinda like how anyone can upload to YouTube easy cheesy.
Totally agree. Funny how things change: Old technology for music discovery was FM radio. Today it's YouTube's related videos and stuff people are tweeting.
I encourage all musicians to make videos for their music if possible, for YouTube discovery... (related business opportunity: make this easier)
But if/when they're ready to buy, I think they go to iTunes/Spotify/Google Play/Amazon.
They should work on a better testimonial video.
I think the "!" comes off as corny and condescending to users.
Bret founded Google Maps and FriendFeed. Then he was CTO of Facebook for 3 years.
So this should be interesting.
Source: I didn't know it existed before now. (It's awesome btw, thanks!)
He listened to hundreds of Steve's talks, studied art & topics that influenced Jobs, read Jobs' favorite books, obsessed over him for months, ate Jobs' diet, even learned to walk like Jobs (who has an odd gait, likely due to years of walking barefoot).
I got to see a screening of the movie yesterday with subsequent QA by Kutcher. Even though he's humble and doesn't claim to be an expert, it was borderline freaky how well Kutcher seems to understand Jobs. At least, from the point-of-view of someone who wasn't friends or family.
I consider him an expert.
Related: I like when RapGenius branches out from rap. I wonder if it will always be called RapGenius for non-rap content, or if they'll come up with a more general brand name. I think it'd be neat if RapGenius became as broad as Wikipedia.
After receiving your 20th "I forgot my password" email, you're sure to build that reset-password feature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Pepsi
Here's an old pic of me drinking it. (and eating a turkey leg).
In the 80's, everyone agreed Bose products were pretty but overpriced. Unfortunately that reputation stuck.
These days, we all gladly pay extra for good aesthetic design (see: Apple, and almost every electronic gizmo on Kickstarter).
Bose was ahead of their time.
As the service (hopefully) grows, I may need to come up with other ways to police it. Fortunately Apple and Spotify and Google and Amazon have systems to detect spam as well.
I do launch a lot of stuff though. I think most of it is fairly MVP (Minimum Viable Product, as the kids say...:) and not super complicated. If/when one of my projects becomes popular, then I tack on the complicated stuff.
Also, when I'm building things, I have this irrational fear that some competitor (real or imagined) is building the exact same thing. So I work as fast as I can, as late into the night as I can. So I can beat them to launch.