Presell Your Songs-In-Progress One Track At A Time With Spawnsong
Spawnsong is an interesting new take on a music sales and discovery platform. Musicians upload song snippets and listeners can preorder the track-in-progress. It seems to be getting shoveled into the crowdfunding category though it's simply a presale platform. As the founder Justin Kim clarifies, it's an experiment to see if such a platform can attract listeners interested in quickly discovering new music.
Spawnsong is a fairly simple concept though you won't get all the details from the site. Unless I'm missing something obvious, there's no help or even an explanation of what the heck is going on. Some of it is obvious but things like revshare need to be explained before people start uploading music even if only to say it's still being sorted.
Fortunately there's been some coverage though Spawnsong is clearly nothing like Kickstarter. Nobody's crowdfunding anything. It's a presale platform.
That clarified, founder Justin Kim said he was inspired in part by a teaser ad on tv for Daft Punk's "Random Access Memories." Apparently it featured a preview clip and connected with Kim's own tendency, shared by many, to decide if they like a song with just a partial listen. He maintains:
"The way to properly promote a song in this modern era is to give the audience just a taste, not the whole song in a lesser bit rate."
Kim believes shorter song samples also open up paths to discovery:
"Our competitive advantage lies in the compact nature of our hosted content…This allows users to approach the issue of music discovery in an expedited manner. I think it’s how people will consume music in the future. Pandora, Spotify, Grooveshark, et al. for older songs; Spawnsong for the fresh stuff."
Of course, once they've discovered a snippet, they can't listen to the whole song right away. They have to wait until the musician finishes and by then they've heard lots of other things.
That means for the discovery process to not get stuck at that minute, there needs to be completed music available on-site or via links out. Otherwise listeners won't really be able to bond with a new artist.
But those are simply challenges to address as Spawnsong moves forward. And obviously Kim will be basing his next steps on what actually happens on Spawnsong. As he notes:
"I think having a specific platform that is dedicated to just finding and listening to new jams is the ideal method. Spawnsong is my experiment to test this hypothesis."
Additional details:
"Pre-orders cost $1.23, with payment info taken at the point of pre-order, and the payment itself taken on delivery. Spawnsong’s business model is based on taking a cut of the pre-orders. It says it’s still figuring out what proportion that will be, based on negotiating 'more appropriate terms' with payment provider Stripe."
More:
- This Is My Jam Builds 'That One Song' Teaser At #Midem Hack Day
- SongAmpr Launches Song Promotion Platform
- Launch Your Own Song of the Month Club
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/Facebook) is currently relaunching All World Dance. To suggest topics about music tech, DIY music biz or music marketing for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
