Doesn't that sorta directly compete? Why bother buying on Bandcamp when you can support the artist right from Google Play/iTunes/Amazon MP3, which you're already using?
In Bandcamp you can buy with Paypal. I appreciate that. On the other hand Bandcamp is a bit more like that brick-and-mortar record shop next door compared to those huge corporations. Music and corporations don't match too well for me. I know my reasoning is out there for the most, but can't help it :)
Better audio quality, cheaper price, better shopping experience, can buy physical products eg vinyl and tshirts, shopping page is customized by artist and has links to their online presence, bigger cut goes to artist, some tunes given away free, traffic is driven by music review blogs, the list goes on and on.
Because there are many people who simply don't. They may require lossless audio or local storage instead of streaming. I know I do - and none of those services offers these options. That said, bandcamp, boomkat or qobuz are indispensable lossless audio stores for me.
Thought this at first but seems like the model is pretty different. Bandcamp sells direct and allows tons of free streaming. This service is geared towards placement in "stores" like iTunes and Amazon.
Also the community feature of bandcamp will be harder to beat.
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.
Very nice on the market place approach. I wish discovery services were of sufficient quality to allow us to find new and unknown/small musicians. Word of mouth and algorithms only go so far.
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.
Funny how things change: Old technology for music discovery was FM radio.
Interestingly Radio Helsinki is a radio station that doesn't have playlists. Therefore they play every day 99,5% different songs than yesterday. I listen to that station when commuting and I tend to end up finding 1-2 new artists or albums on daily basis. At least for me Spotify manages just to suggest annoying and mediocre crap, if I try their random radio or what ever it is called. That's the difference between qualified and experienced DJ and some algorithm randomizing songs.
I ran a community radio show (3 hours, one night a week) in Brisbane for a few years. That's what I did: I'd rock up in studio with my music collection and play whatever I felt like at the time.
Now, it was a small station, but I had thousands of listeners in the country who tuned in online (was broadcast on DAB+, AM and online) and the main reason they gave was because of the bands I played that never got airtime anywhere else.
It also made me happy that other people got to hear my favourite local post-rock bands, and really helped with getting interviews ;) Was a lot of fun. I miss it to be honest, and am sad that it's going the way of the floppy disk...
When I first bought my car, it had Sirius/XM free for a few months. Most of it was schlock.
One show I did find interesting was "Metal Roots" -- it was on Saturday sometime in the afternoon -- usually when I wasn't driving. The shows I did catch were quite amazing -- places like indonesia and south america. Learning something new.
I've seen the same w/ Radio Helsinki (lived there for about 1/2 a year in a previous life), CBC Radio 3 Sessions, etc. But most of the US doesn't seek out anything more than the local cumulus station.
Born/raised in the bay area, lots of small venues including 924 Gilman and Slims provided early exposure. Then there was "The List", I believe Steve Koepke started, which was a great way to track local shows.
I usually augment local with attending festivals in other cities (one such in Vancouver on and off for the last 15ish years), but as tastes change and more is available to us globally, true discovery is hard. There is a lot I find I like in passing, but bands I truly want to see live or hear more from, it's hard.
Youtube and, to an extent, the audio "platforms" I've you access, but there are no real good filters.
My best avenue, for now, is follow the musicians I know and follow up on who the like/are inspired by.
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.
Excellent product and targeting, actually almost muttered 'ooooh' after reading your post. I'd also add in some other promotional channels on next iteration like Soundcloud uploads. Promotional and general 'radio' like stations, I find lots of new music at Soundcloud, get started http://developers.soundcloud.com/docs
This is an impressive accomplishment, I would say almost more because of the deal-making and logistics of dealing with the online music stores than the coding but together these accomplishments show you really have your heart in the game!
I will immediately share this with the people I know who would be interested.
Also let me know if you need/want marketing help, I would love to help spread the message of Distrokid!
Agree. It would be interesting a post where you explain how you made all the agreements with Apple, Google & co. and how do you handle association for copyright protection (like RIAA).
A few other people have also suggested I raise the price.
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.
I love that it's cheap, too. It recognizes the reality of the situation: There is no reason for middlemen, like this, to exist...except that the market is currently broken because of over one hundred years of copyright law being built up around expensive duplication and distribution.
I believe you're doing it Right, both from an ethical perspective and a business perspective. At this price, you can position yourself to be the distribution partner people choose even after the market evolves to fit reality. It will still be easier to use your service, and you can add additional features for marketing, discovery, licensing for other purposes (like film use of songs, or for commercial use in businesses, which is owned by Sirius/XM and their ilk currently) and more.
The problem would be better named "too many customers, too much hassle and not enough income to support it". It might be wise to come up with a premium service for users who can/want to pay more. In general you don't want to compete on price, but on quality and convenience.
Well said ... it's not a "too many customers" problem so much as you need to maximize the profit per customer. If you can build a service that's intuitive and error-free (within reason) customers and costs scale linearly. Peldi (Balsamiq) and patio11 (BingoCardCreator) are great examples of this.
Great... also to see the distribution channel evolution and the implied step in maturity: from CDs to generic distribution, from Baby to Kid. Smart naming.
When I was reading this, I was asking myself the same questions. Unbelievable that a musician can't just upload a song to iTunes. I thought that was one of the huge driving factors of digital music distribution, breaking down the old barriers? I don't use iTunes, but apparently I missed something - sounds like the music industry hasn't changed much after going digital.
I think Apple was/is scared of "unprofessional" music. Apple doesn't want to be the YouTube of music. Not allowing shitty (or pirated!) music is a hard problem to solve. A bunch of suits and contracts does a decent job because not many people are going to take the time if they just want to troll.
So, how does Distrokid factor in to this? After reading, I had the impression that anybody with $20 could upload their music via Distrokid... is the idea that the annual fee is supposed to be a filter to prevent shitty music? Pirated music is one thing, but 'shitty music' seems a bit tougher to police.
> As others have said, shitty is entirely subjective.
I strongly disagree that shitty is entirely subjective. Contextually, "shitty" could mean music recorded on a cell phone, or tracks that were 2 seconds long, or tracks that have been transcoded 7 times and sound like they're being played from a walkie-talkie at the bottom of a well.
I can understand why a music platform might want to enforce some standards of professionalism or technical competency, even if they didn't want to do so for matters of taste.
or tracks that are actually completely stolen. this is a HUGE problem on BeatPort. DJs take 90s house records and just change the speed do a small edit and then release it as their own production. and BeatPort releases it. I have many friends who are furious because their music has been blatantly stolen.
initially it was very difficult to get on iTunes unless your label was big enough for Apple to deal with. or if your indie label could work with their own indie distributor (Caroline etc.) to do a deal with Apple.
then came TuneCore which became the middle man to make it easy for both sides. this was great and empowering. but they have a big yearly fee.
it is possible to deal directly with Apple but its actually a significant value add to go through a middleman and reduce the labor and billing complications.
It is available and it's called bandcamp. I said it before but I think it's a superb platform for musicians and listeners alike.
iTunes / Apple takes the curated approach with their catalogue, they obviously don't want you there unless you're signed to a label. That is fine - let's not act as if iTunes is the holy grail of music distribution - I'd argue that if you aren't big enough to get into iTunes without another middle men you're very unlikely to make any sales there either - especially as a small indie artists. It caters to casual listeners of popular music.
Bandcamp on the other hand is for enthusiasts actively seeking for obscure music. Depending on your audience you might be a lot better served there.
There are multiple music store providers and a musician should have presence in all of them.
It seems that DistroKid solves this problem by uploading the music to all the music stores (not really all atm but maybe they will get there). This way musicians doesn't need to study what kinds of hoops they need to hop through to get included in any of the stores.
If iTunes et al solely deal with distributors/publishers, then they can pass all copyright concerns onto them - there's a vetted company/organization (which presumably must be a legally-formed entity).
As someone else pointed out, they don't want to become the "YouTube of Music" - but I suspect it's more because they want to avoid all of the copyright issues that come with such a mantle. No need to be sued or worry about DMCA so much etc.
> In 2013 why does capitalism and technology allow this to occur
I'd ask why music is sold at all when people will freely distribute it for you, and marginal costs are gone.
The answer to both cases, though, is legislation. Tons of law around recording, labels, etc that make it even if Apple wanted to be kind and play nice it is probably a legal morass to let anyone sell music next to labels.
Though the more likely case is that the middleman exist because they are powerful. Apple couldn't have launched itunes and had the success they did by trying to ignore labels - when all the popular bands are on labels, and new musicians think they need a label to be successful, Apple has to play ball with that mindset.
And mindsets change slowly. Expectations will evolve much slower than technology. It is the same reason apps took 15 years past the launch of the Internet to come to fruition, because moving past pieces of plastic in ones hand took some time.
A few year ago I worked for a company that offered a similar service, but was more focused on labels than individual artists. Even though iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and Play may be there big ones there are 100s of music stores, plus ring tones, call back tones, lyrics sites, user generated content sites (youtube, vimeo etc) etc that need to get the latest content, either the music or just the metadata. There are new sites springing up and dying regularly.
When a site starts up, they don't need to go cut individual deals and setup the transfer technology with every label and artist. They can approach a few companies like the one I worked for, write a plugin and get a huge amount of content right away. The labels don't want to monitor every site that starts up and send content and handle royalties. They could set usage rules and the content would be sent to the appropriate sites.
Once sites get huge like iTunes, they cut their own deals with the major labels. But without services like this there is no way small artists and music sites could ever survive, it would be far too time consuming.
Interesting. So every amateur can make an account and upload their stuff to Amazon? No filtering? Also, wont this attract people who upload Motorhead songs as their own?
So at first I was skeptical of "...a service where musicians can just upload songs whenever they want..."* -- where I was thinking "How is this different than SoundCloud" -- but with reading about how to submit to the various providers -- that is awesome!
Pud should provide an API for these other music hosts to channel user content to these providers.
What I am interested in though, more than the ability to submit, is to FIND -- If this service were able to allow me to find micro-artists in certain genres on the major players - that would be fantastic... or to create channels/playlists of them.
I LOVE electroswing -- and it is dominated by the wonderful Parov Stelar -- but I have every track by him... so I'd like to branch out. If I could track a genre of "ElectroSwing" and have it look for artists across all the major vendors, and keep a purchasable playlist of these guys... that would be farking amazing.
Also, been a fan of Pud's for years... don't wind up on some fucked list ;-)
Concerning ElectroSwing: Do you know 'Proleter'? Found him a few days, it's sort of ElectroSwing meets Triphop - amazing stuff. I assume you also know Caravan Palace? I love those two, not a big fan of Parov Stelar however.
Interesting technical question (disclaimer: I have no financial interest in these things). How is stuff like "Then stuff to automatically convert audio & image files to the right formats." usually done ?
Does the webapp push stuff in a queue and call a commandline tool like mencoder or something is there an industry standard tool ? How do you deal with concurrency (some kind of Actor model ) ? And most importantly, do you have to tune the linux kernel to achieve performance on this (just saw the LinkedIn NUMA post as well, so thinking about that)?
I am sure Youtube and all do it using the enviable Google infrastructure, but how does someone else do it
I can't speak for them, but yes it almost certainly stores it in a database and queues it for processing by a command line tool like ffmpeg. You could just have a script that checks to see if there are songs in the queue, then runs the command line tool against the next song in the queue when one of a specified maximum number of processing slots is available. You could fire that monitoring script with a cron.
This isn't the type of service that would do massive Youtube-like volume, so I cannot imagine that they are doing anything special to handle high volumes of uploads. I would guess that a single lower-end AWS server would do an adequate job for the volume they'll be handling.
Plus a delayed job worker process managed by upstart, tada, got yourself a video-encoding-and-streaming system.
> And most importantly, do you have to tune the linux kernel to achieve performance on this (just saw the LinkedIn NUMA post as well, so thinking about that)
Ha, no. Definitely not until you have really significant scale - it's remarkably fast on a reasonable dedicated server and scales well across cores, run N/2 to N+1 delayed_job processes for N cores depending on how well ffmpeg et al make use of your cores. Well faster than realtime.
All the stores have different requirements. One store requires 2500x2500 artwork, another requires FLAC audio, etc. So when users upload audio or video to DistroKid, everything gets converted to appease all the different stores.
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:
thanks ! very interesting - I have never heard of any of the things that you mentioned .
could you talk about why you chose Railo, which looks to be a fairly esoteric stack. Is it something you chose specifically for its media capabilities ?
I love Railo. And I love the CFML language, which is what it uses. Railo is free (as opposed to Adobe ColdFusion - the other CFML platform), open source, has a great community, and does everything I need. I'm a speed demon in it. And the pages load super fast.
>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.
Hah! Really cool. I wrote a very similar script/program to do that for huge video files using tons of different case/switch methods that carve up mplayer2.
Railo claims to be based on JavaEE, so you have lots of options for scaling this if needed (TimedTasks can be run on more than one server, JMS provides queuing when jobs are waiting, etc).
My does that kind of "stuff", we automatically convert audio and embed inaudible watermarks to prevent piracy,leaking, etc.
AWS makes a lot of the concurrency issues easy (and scaling). Basically you can use their SQS ("Simple Queue Service"), add tasks to it, and when the individual drones check out a song from the queue, it's no longer available for a set amount of time.
If the drone finishes the process completely, it removes it from the queue permanently, but if the drone fails, dies, whatever, after that time-out it gets bumped back into Queue for the next worker drone.
We use FFMPeg for conversion.
---
note: tracktrack.it, if you're curious about watermarking.
From my brief last.fm experience, industry standards are a huge mess. I think we actually had our own program for doing at least some of the conversions, but it was just a couple of hundred lines calling standard libraries; commandline ffmpeg would not be unreasonable.
And yeah, it's an actor-like model, except you don't really have a problem with concurrency. You just need some kind of task queue that you add encode jobs to and a bunch of worker machines that take tasks off this queue, run them, and respond. Almost every big system seems to start looking like this.
Store all the assets/data however you like, then append a job description (referencing the assets/data) onto a queue. Separate servers have a worker process running that tries to fetch a job from the head of the queue and start processing, taking as long as it takes. When it's done, it fetches another. A separate overlord process monitors the queue health. If the queue grows too large, it fires up more servers. When the queue is small, it shuts down idle servers.
The simplicity of the distrokid landing page makes me weirdly happy:
* Clear headline right under the logo that explains the service.
* Dead ass simple call to action where you'd expect it.
* Clear benefits listed next to form.
* Complete explanation of the service & FAQ on the page.
* Social proof from solid brands.
The style isn't "gorgeous" and it doesn't follow best practices necessarily - maybe too much info, not enough contrast, not enough focus on the call to action, etc but for some reason it's jumping out at me.
Just feels honest and straightforward which is easy to over think / over-design.
There's something very honest and almost nostalgic about it. It contrasts with all the startup sites that follow the latest design fashion down to the t. This is real simplicity -- no gimmicks.
I was just happy that it loaded quickly and with no problems. I'm on an iPad 1, and more and more sites nowadays either take forever to load, or flat out crash iOS safari.
@pud - Do you do Xbox Music as well? My brother just published an album through some distribution service and I was very surprised to find it on Xbox Music.
Cool, I just uploaded a track to see what would happen. All seems very painless so far.
I'm interested in the question somebody else asked - doesn't this mean there's now basically no quality control on itunes etc? I feel like it shouldn't be quite this easy to look like a proper musician...
Is it possible to upload but say you don't want your stuff to go to Spotify? I'm interested in doing digital downloads but not streaming, since I believe they rob sales to a greater degree than they create new sales through discovery.
174 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadFrom DistroKid.com: "We'll put your music on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, and Amazon."
Different model, no?
DistroKid helps musicians get their music in the mainstream stores. Bandcamp is its own store.
I think they're serving different ends.
Artists set their own prices and many are below the $0.99 price point.
A lot of albums are "name your price" and you can't beat that.
Did I mention that I love bandcamp?
Also the community feature of bandcamp will be harder to beat.
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.
Interestingly Radio Helsinki is a radio station that doesn't have playlists. Therefore they play every day 99,5% different songs than yesterday. I listen to that station when commuting and I tend to end up finding 1-2 new artists or albums on daily basis. At least for me Spotify manages just to suggest annoying and mediocre crap, if I try their random radio or what ever it is called. That's the difference between qualified and experienced DJ and some algorithm randomizing songs.
Now, it was a small station, but I had thousands of listeners in the country who tuned in online (was broadcast on DAB+, AM and online) and the main reason they gave was because of the bands I played that never got airtime anywhere else.
It also made me happy that other people got to hear my favourite local post-rock bands, and really helped with getting interviews ;) Was a lot of fun. I miss it to be honest, and am sad that it's going the way of the floppy disk...
One show I did find interesting was "Metal Roots" -- it was on Saturday sometime in the afternoon -- usually when I wasn't driving. The shows I did catch were quite amazing -- places like indonesia and south america. Learning something new.
I've seen the same w/ Radio Helsinki (lived there for about 1/2 a year in a previous life), CBC Radio 3 Sessions, etc. But most of the US doesn't seek out anything more than the local cumulus station.
Born/raised in the bay area, lots of small venues including 924 Gilman and Slims provided early exposure. Then there was "The List", I believe Steve Koepke started, which was a great way to track local shows.
I usually augment local with attending festivals in other cities (one such in Vancouver on and off for the last 15ish years), but as tastes change and more is available to us globally, true discovery is hard. There is a lot I find I like in passing, but bands I truly want to see live or hear more from, it's hard.
Youtube and, to an extent, the audio "platforms" I've you access, but there are no real good filters.
My best avenue, for now, is follow the musicians I know and follow up on who the like/are inspired by.
Congratulations, looks really good. You mentioned some related business opportunities. Is there a way to reach you by email? Thanks.
i've been looking to putting some of my music on iTunes recently, so really excited about this service. any chance of supporting Pandora?
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/
I will immediately share this with the people I know who would be interested.
Also let me know if you need/want marketing help, I would love to help spread the message of Distrokid!
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.
I believe you're doing it Right, both from an ethical perspective and a business perspective. At this price, you can position yourself to be the distribution partner people choose even after the market evolves to fit reality. It will still be easier to use your service, and you can add additional features for marketing, discovery, licensing for other purposes (like film use of songs, or for commercial use in businesses, which is owned by Sirius/XM and their ilk currently) and more.
Congratulations on the launch and all the positive feedback. (We build with Railo too.)
Congratulations btw! :)
When selling to independent musicians, you want to compete on price.
This is amazing. This is exactly what I would have created if I didn't sign a non-compete agreement when I sold CD Baby.
I just created an unlimited account on DistroKid and I'm uploading all of my own music in the background as I type.
I'll be sending everyone I know to DistroKid now.
Congrats, Pud! You rule.
Why isn't everything digital sold like apps?
What's the point of these middlemen?
iTunes provides the store and artist provides the product. In 2013 why does capitalism and technology allow this to occur
As others have said, shitty is entirely subjective.
But pirated is a really easy problem to solve. Just run it through an identifier like Echoprint.
http://echoprint.me/
I strongly disagree that shitty is entirely subjective. Contextually, "shitty" could mean music recorded on a cell phone, or tracks that were 2 seconds long, or tracks that have been transcoded 7 times and sound like they're being played from a walkie-talkie at the bottom of a well.
I can understand why a music platform might want to enforce some standards of professionalism or technical competency, even if they didn't want to do so for matters of taste.
then came TuneCore which became the middle man to make it easy for both sides. this was great and empowering. but they have a big yearly fee.
it is possible to deal directly with Apple but its actually a significant value add to go through a middleman and reduce the labor and billing complications.
iTunes / Apple takes the curated approach with their catalogue, they obviously don't want you there unless you're signed to a label. That is fine - let's not act as if iTunes is the holy grail of music distribution - I'd argue that if you aren't big enough to get into iTunes without another middle men you're very unlikely to make any sales there either - especially as a small indie artists. It caters to casual listeners of popular music.
Bandcamp on the other hand is for enthusiasts actively seeking for obscure music. Depending on your audience you might be a lot better served there.
It seems that DistroKid solves this problem by uploading the music to all the music stores (not really all atm but maybe they will get there). This way musicians doesn't need to study what kinds of hoops they need to hop through to get included in any of the stores.
As someone else pointed out, they don't want to become the "YouTube of Music" - but I suspect it's more because they want to avoid all of the copyright issues that come with such a mantle. No need to be sued or worry about DMCA so much etc.
I'd ask why music is sold at all when people will freely distribute it for you, and marginal costs are gone.
The answer to both cases, though, is legislation. Tons of law around recording, labels, etc that make it even if Apple wanted to be kind and play nice it is probably a legal morass to let anyone sell music next to labels.
Though the more likely case is that the middleman exist because they are powerful. Apple couldn't have launched itunes and had the success they did by trying to ignore labels - when all the popular bands are on labels, and new musicians think they need a label to be successful, Apple has to play ball with that mindset.
And mindsets change slowly. Expectations will evolve much slower than technology. It is the same reason apps took 15 years past the launch of the Internet to come to fruition, because moving past pieces of plastic in ones hand took some time.
When a site starts up, they don't need to go cut individual deals and setup the transfer technology with every label and artist. They can approach a few companies like the one I worked for, write a plugin and get a huge amount of content right away. The labels don't want to monitor every site that starts up and send content and handle royalties. They could set usage rules and the content would be sent to the appropriate sites.
Once sites get huge like iTunes, they cut their own deals with the major labels. But without services like this there is no way small artists and music sites could ever survive, it would be far too time consuming.
Pud should provide an API for these other music hosts to channel user content to these providers.
What I am interested in though, more than the ability to submit, is to FIND -- If this service were able to allow me to find micro-artists in certain genres on the major players - that would be fantastic... or to create channels/playlists of them.
I LOVE electroswing -- and it is dominated by the wonderful Parov Stelar -- but I have every track by him... so I'd like to branch out. If I could track a genre of "ElectroSwing" and have it look for artists across all the major vendors, and keep a purchasable playlist of these guys... that would be farking amazing.
Also, been a fan of Pud's for years... don't wind up on some fucked list ;-)
Does the webapp push stuff in a queue and call a commandline tool like mencoder or something is there an industry standard tool ? How do you deal with concurrency (some kind of Actor model ) ? And most importantly, do you have to tune the linux kernel to achieve performance on this (just saw the LinkedIn NUMA post as well, so thinking about that)?
I am sure Youtube and all do it using the enviable Google infrastructure, but how does someone else do it
This isn't the type of service that would do massive Youtube-like volume, so I cannot imagine that they are doing anything special to handle high volumes of uploads. I would guess that a single lower-end AWS server would do an adequate job for the volume they'll be handling.
https://github.com/jrgifford/delayed_paperclip/
https://github.com/owahab/paperclip-ffmpeg/
Plus a delayed job worker process managed by upstart, tada, got yourself a video-encoding-and-streaming system.
> And most importantly, do you have to tune the linux kernel to achieve performance on this (just saw the LinkedIn NUMA post as well, so thinking about that)
Ha, no. Definitely not until you have really significant scale - it's remarkably fast on a reasonable dedicated server and scales well across cores, run N/2 to N+1 delayed_job processes for N cores depending on how well ffmpeg et al make use of your cores. Well faster than realtime.
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:
http://sox.sourceforge.net/
And native Railo (the backend programming language I use) functions for image processing/resizing.
http://getrailo.com
could you talk about why you chose Railo, which looks to be a fairly esoteric stack. Is it something you chose specifically for its media capabilities ?
Hah! Really cool. I wrote a very similar script/program to do that for huge video files using tons of different case/switch methods that carve up mplayer2.
Really awesome project, BTW.
AWS makes a lot of the concurrency issues easy (and scaling). Basically you can use their SQS ("Simple Queue Service"), add tasks to it, and when the individual drones check out a song from the queue, it's no longer available for a set amount of time.
If the drone finishes the process completely, it removes it from the queue permanently, but if the drone fails, dies, whatever, after that time-out it gets bumped back into Queue for the next worker drone.
We use FFMPeg for conversion.
--- note: tracktrack.it, if you're curious about watermarking.
And yeah, it's an actor-like model, except you don't really have a problem with concurrency. You just need some kind of task queue that you add encode jobs to and a bunch of worker machines that take tasks off this queue, run them, and respond. Almost every big system seems to start looking like this.
* Clear headline right under the logo that explains the service.
* Dead ass simple call to action where you'd expect it.
* Clear benefits listed next to form.
* Complete explanation of the service & FAQ on the page.
* Social proof from solid brands.
The style isn't "gorgeous" and it doesn't follow best practices necessarily - maybe too much info, not enough contrast, not enough focus on the call to action, etc but for some reason it's jumping out at me.
Just feels honest and straightforward which is easy to over think / over-design.
By trying to post this on Reddit, though, I've discovered a surprisingly negative comment that also seems to have a point: http://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/1o1abq/...
How do artists authenticate themselves? How do you know I'm not Kanye?
Are you or the stores handling payments?
I think the simplicity would be the biggest selling point to Distrokid.
I'll pass this to some of my friends who are musicians :)
All the best!
I'm interested in the question somebody else asked - doesn't this mean there's now basically no quality control on itunes etc? I feel like it shouldn't be quite this easy to look like a proper musician...
Glad to try out CFML again - trying out Railo.
Is it possible to upload but say you don't want your stuff to go to Spotify? I'm interested in doing digital downloads but not streaming, since I believe they rob sales to a greater degree than they create new sales through discovery.