Ask HN: Review my startup, GetPlaylists

Ask HN: Review my startup, GetPlaylists(getplaylists.com)

17 points by talentless 16 years ago | 11 comments

tptacek 16 years ago |

Like the idea. Wanted to do something like this a few years ago. It's an actual pain point: I have thousands of albums, and it's a pain to mix them so that I enjoy them and listen to most of them regularly.

Hate HATE the stock-footage girl on the front page.

What's with "My cart (0)"? I went hunting for the thing that costs money. Is there one?

I assume I can upload my iTunes playlist and you'll fit it to what's in your database, that being the value prop.

I assume your key viral loops are Facebook and Twitter, broadcasting to friends portions of playlists.

talentless 16 years ago | |

Thanks for the feedback. That is definitely one of the pain points we are looking to relieve. Good to hear that it resonates.

Yeah the stock photo is probably a bit too market-y, will work on replacing with solid content.

You are able to add any songs you don't own to your shopping cart for purchase. The downloadable software not only allows you to upload and share you itunes playlist, but it also allows us to provide you with purchase protection so you don't buy music you already own. The software also syncs playlists from the website with itunes or windows media player.

I am definitely hoping that Facebook and Twitter turn into viral loops.

Thanks for your feedback. It is much appreciated.

samdk 16 years ago | | |

Playlists are not something I have much use for (I prefer listening to whole albums at a time), but as a graphic designer I'd like to second the thing about the stock photo.

flooha 16 years ago | | |

Yeah the stock photo is probably a bit too market-y, will work on replacing with solid content.

This is a good candidate for a/b testing.

luchak 16 years ago |

As other people have said, the stock-photo girl has got to go. It makes me feel like you're trying to sell me insurance or tooth whitener or a mortgage or something.

My main issue after poking around the site for a couple minutes is that I still can't tell what you offer that I can't already get from iTunes and sites like Pandora/Last.fm/etc. The iTunes "Genius" feature works well enough for assembling quick 'n dirty playlists out of my current music collection. If I want to share my music tastes with my friends, I'm already on last.fm. If I want to share a specific playlist with my friends, I'll burn them a CD or something, since their collections don't overlap with mine much.

Maybe I'm not your target audience, but, regardless, here's what I'd like to see: really interesting curated playlists. I can't find any on the site right now. The playlists I can find now are all very, well, functional, but they're not compelling. Ideally these playlists would be more like mixtapes than unordered jumbles of songs. It seems like it wouldn't be too much trouble (or too expensive) to get some good online or college radio DJs to assemble some quality content for you. You could also just use show track lists as playlists, but the results wouldn't be quite as nice.

(It'd also be neat to get suggestions for playlists that contain mostly, but not entirely, music I already own.)

That's the smallest delta from the current site that I would find motivating. I'd argue, though, that there's still nobody who really does music discovery "right", so there's a lot of room for innovation. I'm glad to see you're exploring the space.

alex_c 16 years ago |

Saw you demo at SF Musictech today - good demo, and very solid product.

I don't think the stock photo on the front page is that bad - people who work with websites might cringe, but other than that it's not so bad.

My one criticism is that it's not immediately obvious why I should sign up or that I need to download a client. This page [1] is an excellent explanation, but it took a bit of hunting to run across it - at a very superficial first glance, it looks like I'm supposed to buy the music from you. It should be a lot more obvious that it works with my existing music collection (maybe say that instead of "works with your digital music player" on the front page).

[1] http://www.getplaylists.com/sync/download/?next=/playlist/11...

marltod 16 years ago |

I would like an app that would scan my mp3s then generate a few Pandora stations from that. "Rap Music I listened to in High school" for example

dryicerx 16 years ago |

Interesting idea, I like the site, although might want to clean the design, it's a tad bit busy.

The only crticisim I see here is you only get 30 second previews instead of the entire track, and I don't feel like paying up $100 for a playlist... Grooveshark solves this by allowing playlist sharing and full track playbacks which solves that problem. Any thoughts about that?

talentless 16 years ago | |

We don't currently have the rights to stream full songs, but it is something we would love to be able to do for our users. We would need to find a way to make business model work for us.

You do have one other option (as alex_c pointed out our message on this was unclear). You can listen to the full playlist with your music collection. If you have the software installed then we can match the playlist to your collection.

We are working on cleaning up the design. Is it too busy visually or is it more information overload?

Thanks for the feedback!

akc 16 years ago |

3 points for 2 cents:

1. I didn't get within 10 seconds what you offer. Work on that.

2. I agree with some of the other commenters; curated lists (from a trusted source) would be a great idea, if thats the direction you want to head in.

3. It would be great if I could buy a track without having to create an account. You'd probably make more money too.

bvi 16 years ago |

1. Looks like a pretty good product. 2. Clean up the page. Make it simple! It looks so cluttered, I've no clue where to look. Way too much text, and too many moving flash images.