22nd
Music is Changing
As a followup to my User Centered vs Self-Centered Design post, I’ve been working pretty intensely on a Next Gen Music Player over the last month. This player is inspired by needs I have observed in myself and in friends music listening patterns
I realized two core needs for music listening:
#1 For a continuous streaming experience.
#2 To listen to any song I want, whenever.
My personal problem statement:
I couldn’t find any music player that catered to BOTH of these needs. I would always find myself switching between Pandora and Mixturtle/Songza to fill these two needs.
Pandora is frustrating because of license restrictions. I can’t make specific song requests, and my stations always seem to corner me in specific genre. I ended up listening to very unrisky music.
Online music services (Mixturtle, Songza…) are really nice, but my behavior was to sign on looking forward to playing one or two songs, playing those, and then feeling lost about what I should listen to next.
I set out to create a music player that would offer ad-hoc “stations” set up by listening to a couple good songs. It plays the requests and continues playing similar music until you tell it to stop. You can set up bizarre mixes like Britney/Metallica Mix Radio. You can also ‘favorite’ songs to add to a personal, everyone-growing, online music library. That is the idea, simple, but I believe powerful.
And, yes, it is all free.
I’m releasing in private alpha to gather feedback. If you would like to test out the current product, post a comment, and I’ll send you the link.
