What is Mixest?
Mixest is a Pandora style internet radio site focused on only the newest indie music. We especially like obscure music, the music you would only find after spending hours scouring the internet to find.
How did you get involved?
Eric Zhang and I were inspired by HipHopGoblin, a site that does the same thing except for new Hip Hop. I helped the front-end developing of the site. That means that I focused on simplifying the interface, culling bugs, and improving the user interface. I also coded the recent songs list, wrote the code that handles hotkeys and easter eggs. I also wrote the client code that handles unique song links.
What are unique song links?
They are the links that allow you to listen to a song twice or send it to a friend. If the link for each song were not unique, you wouldn't be able to do either of those.
Cool, and how does this all come together to make Mixest a working site?
Our friends, users, and indie bands recommend music for us to add to the site and all the code we wrote works to make it so that obscure songs bubble to the top. Songs that are too mainstream get pushed down when users press the "more obscure" button.
And how do you market Mixest?
At the moment we do not do any marketing. Occasionally really awesome users will tweet what they've been listening to. Otherwise, beside our initial post on hacker news, and our first couple of interviews, we haven't been marketing very much. We get about 100 visitors a day.
Do you have any competitors in the online-indie-music-streaming scene?
Our most notable "competitors" are hypemachine and TheSixtyOne. Neither of them focus as much on obscure music as we do, though they are both quite simple, like us. Our main goal is to make it effortless to visit our site and listen to music. We like to think we've done a good job with that goal.
What about social sites like purevolume.com or myspace.com?
I feel like myspace is somewhat competition, but we aren't really fighting for anything because we don't make any money, we just exist.
You don't make any money?
We don't make any money! This is a super hairy issue for us, and music in general is super hairy. That's why we have kept mixest up as a side project for visitors who like it.
Do you have any plans to monetize or fundraise for the site?
Not at the moment, We would need to speak with a music business attorney to get ourselves squared away legally before we moved in any direction toward monetization. That's a relatively large barrier for us as full-time students.
Where is mixest headed in the coming months?
It is headed nowhere that it has not already been. Eric, the rest of the team and I have our minds elsewhere.
What about the users?
We do plan to continue updating the music library, though the time-scale might not be as fast we would like. We don't plan to take the site down because people do like it.
If your minds are elsewhere, where's that?
I'm currently working a phone controlled game that you play be calling a number and pressing numbers. There's a video of the game at twilly.no.de.
Any advice for beginning entrepreneurs?
Don't touch music? Actually, let me give you some more serious advice: don't touch music. In general, keep your life simple, wait for users to request things before adding them as features, be lazy, get out there and build shit. Our main bit of advice, mostly because we need to do this and STILL haven't done it: get your user's emails so you can talk to them and get feedback!
Have more question for David or just want to chat? He's open to emails sent to dtrejo at cs dot brown dot edu. You can see more of his work at his website (including the clock I posted a few days ago). You can see Eric's other work at his site if you'd like. Like the site's design? Check out the designer's site here.
Thanks for the information. I have tried Pandora,and now I will try Mixest sounds like I will like it!
ReplyDelete