mySpoonful – Music Discovery for Busy Bodies
There's a zillion music blogs out there. Hype Machine aggregates the best of them. Even if you only follow a few, there's tons of info to sort through. There's another zillion sites that champion themselves as music discovery tools, but good luck finding a one that can suggest a song that feels spontaneous and alive. It just doesn't happen.
What you end up with is a bunch of bands that you've been discovering for the last ten years, because the sites can't dig down deep and offer something new.
Then there's the fact that we all get busier every year and have less and less time to go searching for music. We're busy bodies that live for music, but often the best we can do is turn on a Pandora station and hope a great song comes on.
So, what's the answer?
One company called mySpoonful thinks that there's a market to be tapped in offering weekly curated tracks to people that live hectic lives. They send a e-mail out on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday – one new artist and one free song.
If you're already shaking your head, there's good reason to. This isn't exactly a new idea. I've been receiving daily e-mail updates from Track in the Box since November. Quite honestly, being a busy body myself, I love the idea of single song servings via e-mail. The problem is that in practice it's actually a terrible idea. Anyone who is a busy body is already sitting on a mountain of e-mail.
This is why, despite my best intent, I don't think I've opened a single e-mail from Track in the Box. I feel like sending more e-mails to busy people sort of adds insult to injury, as we already get too many of those. I don't want more e-mail.
Perhaps, they will create a music app and let us listen to songs that way.
It would work better.
Then there’s Fingertips: three songs, once a week, free and legal, since 2003. With an email option. Or RSS. Or Twitter. Would love to have an app but am still very unlikely to attract venture capital. 🙂
Wow. What a dickhead article.
i’m not interested in clogging my inbox up any more. if they come up with a genome clone that sends specific tracks from my taste, it may interest me…but i’m not going to be sitting around waiting to get one song per day. i can do that myself.
if you want a way to filter the best material from your favorite artists, i think our growing resource at http://gorankem.com does a great job of breaking it down so you can find the songs you were meant to hear.
hello? RCRDLBL.com
Don’t be bitter, just enjoy the music.
Yeah their site is very RCRDLBL.com-ish, but less cutting-edge, musically.
What sucks is they only take music submissions from SonicBids, and you’ve gotta pay $10 for the honor of submitting.
Hmm – sounds like a bit of a racket/scam. I think I’ll start a website, charge bands ten bucks each and tell them I’m going to send their music out to the four people that I have subscribed to my site.
And Hypebot will put together a poorly-written feature on my new scam/site. Huzzah!
You're too kind.
Kyle – Dan here, one of the founders of mySpoonful. Thanks for the article. Frankly, we had some of the same concerns you did when we first started this thing. We actually had a prior incarnation as Spooonful, as a regional newsletter here in SF. We got such a good response (including high open rates on our emails), that it allayed our concerns and actually encouraged us to go national. We also decided to offer a full site experience and mobile-optimized site (you can download and stream from mobile) to expand the ways people could discover music, outside of the email newsletter.
Good comment on the native mobile app, we’re working on it.
No music delivery service, publication, or newsletter is for everyone. However, based on the response to our original newsletter and to our new launch, we think we’re resonating with a lot of busy people that find us useful in discovering new independent music.
How many E-mail addresses do their E-mails go out to right now?
Wow, lots of haters. It’s good to hear a founder chime in and defend his concept and merit. I love all the armchair critics who more than likely will never take the risk of starting a company (and it’s a digital music one at that!).
I agree that there are plenty of music blogs, and plenty of recommendation techniques out there, but each one aims to be a little different that the rest, and for that reason will appeal to different niches. One service doesn’t have to rule the entire playing field.