I listen to a lot of music from small and independent artists. People who just do music for the fun and love of it.
I have always wished there was a simple way for me to show my appreciation for their work and support their projects. Sure I can buy their digital music (which I do!) but I was hoping to support them in a more personal way.
That's why I created SoundRat. On SoundRat anyone can upload their own music and let their fans listen to it without requiring listeners to have an account or pay for something up front. Fans can stand out and support their favorite artists through payments. When sending a payment they can attach a personal message to the artist and supporters get some "perks" such as being able to download songs and get access to lyrics.
I was planning to highlight some more artists and add a couple more feature before announcing the website. However, seeing as Spotify recently announced their way of letting fans support artists (US & UK only) I thought I shouldn't wait longer.
Let's be upfront about the most important points of the terms and conditions:
- Artists own their music. I only need the right to host the music.
- SoundRat takes 6% on all payments. This is used to pay for the servers. I believe this is a fair number
I have been working on SoundRat for the past few months and doing it learned a lot from audio encoding to payment integration (It is way easier to accept payments than processing payouts to users!)
I hope to offer artists a different way of sharing their music and connect with their fans.
Let me know what you think!
If you really want to be fairer than the competition, be transparent about costs and profit margin. Just stating that 6% seems fair reeks of rent-seeking. This might not be what musicians and fans want, and it won't differentiate your service from Spotify.
> perks […] get access to lyrics.
You will need to come up with better perks than that. The lyrics for any moderately popular song can be found on-line at a click.
I did this for fun and for my interest in listening and discovering small artists.
I also would like to experiment with some new ways for artists to connect with their supporters that is not possible on Bandcamp right now. Supporters can send a personal message to the artists when donating and leave comments on songs. I think there are some more "perks" that I can support in the future.
soundART is banal and also reads extremely poorly from a grammatical standpoint (as an uncountable noun it doesn't fit as a singular brand).
Why wouldn't an artist want their personal brand to be associated with the term rat? The cute logo mascot is also a positive association.
Except: I liked it enough to trying clicking on the icons 'For Fans' and 'For Artists' to see the details: nothing. These days, I'd be very unlikely to register for anything without having seen them first.
You can do and see most features without an account. Hope this helps
https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/e51gwn...
The newly added support button on SoundCloud is just a PayPal button as far as I know and does not integrate within the platform. I want to integrate the support feature as a core part of SoundRat and let supporters stand out as loyal fans. Lastly, I have been working on this before SoundCloud announced their support button ;)
Do you plan on adding a paywall when a listener has heard a song a certain amount? I’m a huge fan of Bandcamp, and I love that I hit a paywall when I’ve heard an album a certain number of times. Reminds me that there’s an artist behind the music and that I obviously like the album enough to buy it. Often I’ll buy the album on Bandcamp but then find it on my streaming service and listen to it there (easier for adding to playlists, etc).
However, I could see adding a notification or achievement after listening to an artists music a lot. This way we could remind the user to support the artists work.
Another form of community-building is what Beatport did, which encouraged remixes by offering stems and integrating with software that the artists used.
Another indie music site is good news; I remember fondly finding some good music on Amie Street before Amazon gobbled them up.
I don't think the commenter above was trying to make out that 6% is not fair, just that they'd like to see the breakdown of this percentage covering some or all of the costs.
iTunes, Bandcamp and co. might not offer that breakdown, so you're definitely not worse, but it would be a really nice differentiator.