Bands and music industry start-ups are using crowdfunding platforms to raise the dough they need to make their dreams come to life.
Crowdfunding sites like KickStarter and Indiegogo have been making headlines with their innovative approach to helping startups get funding.
A group of Electronic Music lovers is trying to launch a platform that helps artists get discovered, much like Pandora or Slacker... but with an interesting twist.
The following was contributed by Masha Kubyshina (@MashaKubyshina)...
It’s all about the rhythm!
It took us about a month to completely redesign our website. What you see now is the new Opentracklist.com. Apart from the new face, we are about to introduce new features to the platform, such as profile creation, music lists, and favorites. This is the reason we have opted for crowdfunding. I will tell you more about it in just a second.
Let me introduce our platform first. If you have not heard about Opentracklist before now, here is what we do: we are using an algorithm that learns from the DJs their criteria to select tunes for their performances. After we get the algorithm, we replicate it on our music site!
By collecting electronic music data over the past couple of years, our team realized that what people (and DJs) really care about is the rhythm of the tune, and not necessarily the name of the artist who composed it. At Opentracklist we followed the data and created an algorithm that evaluates tunes based on the rhythm. We help the audience to discover music that they love and we make sure that the next song follows the rhythmic characteristics of the previous one.
What does this mean to the artist? At Opentracklist the same relevance in given to the famous as to the unknown artists. This approach puts the music (not the name of the artist) at the center of the algorithmic analyses. With time we found out that this method benefits new artists that are at the very beginning of their careers.
As I have said above we decided on crowdfunding to support the development of the new features on the site. Check out our crowdfunding campaign here
The service we provide is free; this is why we need community support to carry our platform redesign and implementation forward. We want to keep it free for everybody. We want to make it awesome too! Check out our crowdfunding description to learn what new features we are going to introduce and what perks you get!
And of course we would love to hear any ideas on how to make our project better, feel free to email me at [email protected] with your feedback, concerns, questions and ideas. I mean it, I would love to hear from you. I also post regular reports on our crowdfunding progress on my blog www.mashakubyshina.com
We are a small team of four people working from Barcelona, Spain. Our website designer is totally awesome; she is a student at Academy of Art University in San Francisco. So far we have found support and listeners on both continents! Now it is your turn to get excited about the rhythm and become part of the Opentracklist community!
About Masha and Opentracklist: We are a small team of four people working from Barcelona, Spain. Our website designer is totally awesome; she is a student at Academy of Art University in San Francisco. So far we have found support and listeners on both continents! Now it is your turn to get excited about the rhythm and become part of the Opentracklist community!
Help fund Opentracklist at: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/opentracklist
Visit Opentracklist: http://www.opentracklist.com
Follow Opentracklist on Twitter @opentracklist
Follow Masha @MashaKubyshina
