Apply HN: Bandhub – online music collaboration community
We provide easy-to-use software for asynchronous, video-based, music collaboration. We make it easy for you to get to know like-minded musicians around your interests, develop relationships with them over time and stay connected on an ongoing basis by regularly making music together and sharing with the overall Bandhub community.
PROBLEM: 99% of the world's 500M people who play an instrument or sing do it recreationally, as a hobby. For people like us, it is very hard to get to socialize meaningfully around music ( forming a band, playing in gigs ). Yet those meaningful social experiences around music are what we aspire to the most. Making it easier to get those experiences is in our opinion the #1 problem in the musical products industry. The internet hasn't done much yet to help solve this problem. You can publish your performance in YouTube or Soundcloud but nobody will pay attention to it ( only the 0.1% of musicians will get attention ). The average recreational musician will be ignored.
INITIAL FOCUS: Our current product is good for the subset of people that are REALLY active in their hobby of playing an instrument/singing. That is people who play/sing for 2hrs every day when they come back from work/school. Bandhub users now spend those 2hrs using Bandhub instead, as the workflow is the same to what they use to do before Bandhub ( i.e., meticulously learning & practicing songs ) but now they get super meaningful social experiences by being part of "collabs" in Bandhub, which are multi-instrument online video-based collaborations.
MARKET: $30B/year spent worldwide in Musical Products ( e.g., guitars ) and Lessons. We believe meaningful social experiences around this hobby are the most valuable experiences people are looking for and whoever succeeds in providing them will capture a big portion of this overall market, and maybe also grow this market 10x.
16 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 59.0 ms ] threadHow are you going to vet your users to ensure that these are the more "serious" hobbyists, i.e. the people that are playing/singing for 2 hours every day?
One last frank question: how do you plan on making money?
Another important aspect is that the collaboration happens asynchronously. A lot of the frustration with forming bands is the synchronous nature of it. (1) all have to be together at the same time in the same place (which we know is very hard to do since people have their own schedules/priorities) and (2) all musicians have to actually perform perfectly in sync at once - any minimal screw up by just one of the band members and you have to start over. It's very frustrating. Asynchronicity solves those 2 problems.
For revenue, we have a freemium model, users subscribe to Bandhub Pro and get additional features.
(1) COMMUNITY FEATURES: Each user has a profile, you can follow/be followed, there is a news-feed, etc. The "posts" are exclusively music collabs, so you stay up to date on collabs your Bandhub friends are making, what's new, etc; you can comment and so on. You can search for collabs ( e.g., artists/styles/etc ) and create/share playlists. Also, there are interest groups ( e.g., "punk rock style covers" ). And there are added features specific to music collaboration ( e.g., "my list of collabs to participate" )
(2) THE MUSIC COLLABORATION SOFTWARE: There are two parts to it
(a) A collaborative GarageBand with video. When you open a collab in "STUDIO MODE" you get to a web-based multitrack audio/video editor - with many of the features of a DAW, but way simpler to digest. You can send/receive individual audio-video tracks, set the audio mix, enhance it with effects, determine which tracks stay/go, etc.
(b) Bandhub Recording App: when you want to record a part (called 'tracks') for a collab (e.g., the bass part), you use our Bandhub Recording App ( native app available for PC and Mac ). You connect your mic or instrument to the computer and using the computer's webacam you record audio+video through it. While recoding, you will hear the other parts of the collab (e.g., the drums and guitar) as backing tracks so you can play on top of them and stay in sync. When you are done, the track gets inserted in the collab in draft mode. You don't have to edit timelines for synchronization or use complex audio/video editing software at all. It's actually super super easy to use.
Here are a few screenshots:
collab "post": http://i.imgur.com/2nmc5J1.png
studio mode: http://i.imgur.com/VEKqHKe.png
news-feed: http://i.imgur.com/d2aytQH.png
Recoding App: http://i.imgur.com/xhbc3Xo.png
Where I'm going with this is what part of that can be increased and applied to a wider audience?
When you say applying it to a wider audience do you mean (i) to people who are not musicians or (ii) to musicians not in our focus segment ( e.g., people who play less frequently/more casually)
I'd want to talk to the current focus segment in depth, find out what makes them happiest about what they're doing with your product and look for ways to both increase the opportunities for those things and make them more accessible.
Is that making sense?
I think your current focus segment knows there's a rewarding feeling in return for the effort, and maybe group (ii) isn't as aware, or doesn't know how to get there...
Since our initial focused segment is big enough for us to get traction, we are not currently focused on expanding, but we will do so in the future and asking ourselves/our users the questions you suggest seems to be a good idea.
Currently you're just SHA512'ing your users' passwords and sending the hash over the wire in the clear. This is INCREDIBLY insecure and you're putting your users at risk.
I don't know a good resource off the top of my head to best practices, could someone else provide a link?
Looks like a great idea and I will definitely check it out.
[1]NOTE: Most of the latency is actually in the audio processing components (internal audio device, driver and application buffers). There is some specialized hardware that minimizes this latency, making it work well across <200miles distance (or so). After that, speed of light + internet router buffers add way too much latency and it starts to not work so well.