Unless there are somehow millions of musicians looking to get matched in a single city, the "swipe" UI is pointless and will just make the whole thing unusable. The search + filter pattern for online datasets was perfected many decades ago. Use it.
Does the app feature music by musicians? As a musician that's what I'd expect to see myself, because seeing a bunch of people only talking about what they do is useless in terms of conveying style and skill. It also enables scammers and fraud if people aren't required to at least upload a video of themselves in action.
Back in the old days, we had a local paper that allowed musicians to connect from a classified section, and boy was it scary meeting some of the strangers that posted in there to jam.
Since this is the first iteration, I went the easiest route where people link their SoundCloud/Spotify/or Youtube channel.
I considered having MP3 uploads or even video uploads, but didn't seem worth it building a transcoding/streaming system, when someone could still upload things that is not them playing.
Another idea is to "verify" linked Spotify accounts by having the artist place a short random code in their Spotify bio, to prove they are actually the artist.
You're missing the bulk of the already small market if you're assuming people signing up for your app will universally have Spotify tracks up or their own YouTube channel. Soundcloud is more likely, but still not a given, as it's geared towards mostly finished tracks. Hint: the most sought after band members are bassists and drummers, and they don't tend to do solo tracks.
You want people to be able to have a low quality video of them noodling or playing along to something for 30 seconds.
I think, fwiw, I would rather work with someone who has the drive and motivation to finish a track of their own than merely recruit a noodler. I think that from a management perspective, I would also abhor opening up any sort of video/audio sharing because then you’re a target for the majors and you get DMCA’d into the ground when kids start uploading their remixes of Taylor Swift songs or whatever.
I work in the music industry. An important thing said once to my arrogant twenty something self by a product manager: "Our market is amateurs. The pro market is a unsustainably tiny." There's basically no product in the music industry that can be supported by just pros. There just aren't very many of them.
And again, most drummers and bass players don't create complete tracks on their own, and they're the main thing people are looking for. And honestly, a lot of drummers and bass players don't want to come into a band where the guitar player has already decided what the bass and drum parts should be. You can get a lot from listening to sketches / noodling. (By noodling I mean mainly improvising something unaccompanied, not necessarily trying to win the gold medal at guitar gymnastics.)
I'm a bass player. A younger version of myself lived from playing bass for a couple years. I still play quite a few gigs. I very, very rarely produce tracks (one every few years), and there's very little of my bass playing online.
Interesting. My perspective is pretty skewed as a semi-pro musician and someone who is mostly a recording artist and not a live band/jam guy. I think there are a lot of people who CAN do it all but might be open to collabs with the right person(s). You are correct that the pro market is vanishingly small but if OP thinks they’re making any money off of bassists who could just post on Craigslist I think they’re in for a surprise.
I've used sites that are trying something similar to find bands in the past. So I think I'm pretty close to the target market (or have been in my past). I don't want to post bass-player-looking-for-band on Craigslist or such -- did it once, and you get swamped by shitty bands who mostly still don't send any audio.
As a bass player, I want to hear if the singer can sing, and if the sketches of songs are good.
I can also play all of the standard band instruments at varying levels of competence, but I'm not much of a songwriter. What people expect from bass players and drummers is that they are good at catching things quickly and writing interesting parts.
For sure. When I’ve played bass in bands or filled up a stage for a live show, that skill is indispensable. And I don’t mean to downplay the importance of gigging or band-formation for this kind of thing: OP should cater to as many people as possible. I was originally just saying that I understand the desire to outsource content hosting to avoid the long fingers of the majors or user-generated content controversies.
So you don’t need an app like this in order to find gigs or collaborators.
I don’t know. Similar to comment OP I don’t “need” it but I think it’s cool and it has the potential to be better than Craigslist.
Record a couple minutes of you playing something, upload it to your YouTube channel, and submit the link.
You’re acting like young people wanting to join a band don’t know how to post things on the Internet.
Are you a musician? Have you ever used a site like this?
My comments are literally based on the disappointments in using similar sites in the past. Most people don't add audio. Profiles without audio are useless. Making (and possibly providing minimal vetting?) people post audio would already be a big step in the right direction.
Just my experience but as a musician who used Bandmix for a while, I found that most profiles I was interested had audio. It felt like it was expected and profiles without links to audio weren’t complete.
It’s awesome that you did the simplest thing. Whenever I’ve done these kinds of attempts to collab with strangers online kinds of things, I’ve always found that people will express a desire to be in a band but are awful at creating music. Just requesting that someone posts a sample through another channel is a great idea. Do you think this could become toxic though? Like people stealing tracks and trying to release them? My guess is no but you never know.
Anyway - great call on the song requirement, for a lot of us, it’s important to know that the people we work with can operate a daw and solve their own problems and care about creating a finished product. Unless they’re incredibly talented instrumentalists (usually not the case, they find bands) at a certain point it becomes either a jam sesh (not interested) or you become a producer for someone who isn’t very good.
Unless they’re incredibly talented instrumentalists (usually not the case, they find bands) at a certain point it becomes either a jam sesh (not interested) or you become a producer for someone who isn’t very good.
For the case of instrumentalists finding bands -- the times I've used sites like this in the past are right after a move or considering stepping out of the music scene that I've been in (going from techno back to bass).
Also I feel like the Tinder-like mechanics would be suited to cities with big music scenes. You're right that it's easy to just stumble into everyone in smaller places. What I've enjoyed some on musician-finding sites is the ability go genre shopping to some extent. Sometimes I run across stuff I think I'd enjoy playing that probably wouldn't have popped out of my social network.
There's a simple website for where I live (Berlin) which is basically musical want ads. Biggest problem is that while it allows it, most musicians don't include an audio clip. People self-describing their musical ability is almost entirely useless.
What's the website called?
Would be cool to have a version of this app that banned photos, and only allowed music samples as an introduction.
Drummers are probably going to be the "attractive person" equivalent on this app lol
What does a drummer use for birth control? Their personality.
(Agree with sibling posts, getting a great drummer is hard and amazing.)
I’m slow. Can somebody explain all the drummer jokes? What’s wrong with drummers?
They beat on things with sticks, like a caveman. It's low hanging fruit. The bass player often cops it to a lesser extent as well, it's how singers and guitar players retain our false sense of superiority. We actually usually love our drummers (but only if their playing is on form, otherwise they cop abuse).
Hard to find a good drummer. If you're in a developing world country, even harder because drum kits take up valuable space.
Pro tip: Having a hard time finding a good drummer? Steal one from another band. Of course, your band has to treat them better than the old band. This is a time-tested and proven stratagem.
Often the drum pattern that best fits into a song is simple/boring. Maybe stereotypically, it's hard for the drummer to resist "overdoing" the drums.
I think there's a metaphor that can be applied to software engineers.
There are jokes about all instruments, but some seem to get the brunt of them. In orchestra it’s the viola
we’re the coolest, it makes the note players jealous.
How do you know that there's a drummer at your door? The knocking speeds up.
Do you know what they call people who hang around with musicians?
Drummers.
What’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine?
You only have to punch the beat into a drum machine once.
(Had bands and multiple drummers. Love’m)
My Roland MC-505 is in violent agreement.
Sure, sure but can it still drum when you turn it completely upside down like Tommy Lee?
As long as the cables reach because it's a drum machine running from a program.
You can even go Marty McFly on the ground jamming on the keys and kick over the subs if you really want to.
EDIT: PS: If you kick over my sub, your foot will break from either the sub itself or this 6 pound sledgehammer foot detector. Fair warning.
We did have a drummer but unfortunately he died in a bizarre gardening accident.
I heard you've gone through quite a few drummers, actually.
List of Spinal Tap Drummers, all deceased https://zeroenthusiasm.tumblr.com/post/47032679583/list-of-s...
On stage or off? (What? There could be a band that does live gardening as part of its routine.)
Now technically he died by choking on his own vomit. But the thing is - it wasn't his vomit. But you can't very well fingerprint vomit, innit?
you meant to say "good drummers"
What does swiping left mean? I may not want to collab with someone for a particular project but that doesn’t mean I never want to see their profile again. Also swiping left feels like rejecting them. What if I’m just browsing the artists? I don’t want to be rejecting while I’m browsing options.
Also why am I limited to my area? I want to be able to collaborate digitally. I don’t need to be in close proximity to do that. I ran out of people in my area after 2 left swipes.
I would like to just click on the genre of artist I want, hear a sample of their work and then be able to message and favorite the ones I like.
Thanks for the feedback! Having a skip, but not reject sounds useful.
I have in the roadmap a "don't limit to my area" option!
Also plan to have some sort of inline playable sample on the profile, but haven't figured out the best way to do that - video vs audio vs embedding SoundCloud or YouTube.
A neat idea would be to have “projects.” Each account/profile has a default/personal “project,” meaning a contained instance of matching. But they’re also able to create additional “projects.” So if someone wants to look for a match for a specific project or a new band they can create a new project and swipe across all accounts. Would be cool to set up filters when creating a project, so that the options to swipe are more relevant to the current “project” at hand. Making it easier to find a match
Love this! Bc my various music styles are very different!
TikTok is your top competitor. Your edge aganst it is that you are focused on musicians only. BTW TikTok has swiping down to go to next video, up to go back, left to go to live, and the like, follow, comment etc.
But yeah, "don't limit to area" should be top priority if you want to scale.
but haven’t figured out the best way to do that...
The best way is whatever the musician has available and is comfortable sharing. Allow any of the embeddings or ability to upload a clip you’ll host. Start with the easiest and ping your subscribers each time you add another one.
This is the same problem that every modern dating site seems to have after they copied Tinder.
Swipe left - I never want to see this person again!
Swipe right - I must contact this person right now!
What happened to the idea of curating a list of interesting people who I may or may not want to meet right this moment, but I would like to make a list that I can refer to later?
Just look at OkCupid for what a disaster this turns into. I see an interesting young lady, but it may be late at night (like 2AM my time right now).
I would like to put her on my personal list of someone I may want to contact at a more reasonable hour, and after I've had a chance to read her profile more thoroughly.
My only choices are to swipe left and forget her forever, or swipe right and send her a "like" and I'd better send her a message right now!
Maybe there are a few young ladies I may be interested in contacting.
Why doesn't the site let me make a list of them?
I did finally figure out a hack. If I click the little "down arrow" at the bottom of the main page, it takes me to her profile. Then I can use the "share" link in Chrome to create a draft in Gmail with a link to her profile!
I have a lot of drafts now.
This really sucks. If you are a dating site, just let me make a list of the profiles of interesting young ladies!
The same applies to a site for musicians I may want to contact to play music with.
I would love a "maybe" button for apps like this. Apartment List is the only one I've seen with this option, and it's useful for all the reasons you've described. Glad to know I'm not the only one with this frustration.
a hack solution to your problem could be to become romantically involved with every option in as little time as possible
If there were a "maybe" button, then you could just click "maybe" on every single entry (or have a bot do that for you), and thus end up with the thing that's anathema to the Tinder monetization model: a directory of all users, for you to browse at your leisure, filtering and sorting and picking and choosing from it as you like, rather than as The Algorithm likes. (Which in turn means they could no longer upcharge people to appear immediately in other people's queues, etc etc.)
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Mind you, the more charitable argument is that allowing this would also massively decrease matches. Everyone would just say "maybe" to everyone else, because nobody is ever immediately sure that they like someone; the likelihood of two people both actually going back to their "maybes" to say "yes" to one another, and getting a mutual match, would drop to zero.
The Tinder model forces you to make a decision before you can move on, because the FOMO feeling generated by the possiblity of never seeing the person again if you press "no", is literally the only way to get a "yes" out of many people. An app based on a requirement of mutual matching, just wouldn't work without that coercion in place.
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That being said, there's a lot you could do to ameliorate both concerns. You could limit the number of "maybes" someone could hold onto at a time; and you could make "maybes" expire, so that a person has to eventually make a decision on them before they can move on. (Instead of "maybe", perhaps call the associated action "review later"?)
So you’re asking for okcupid of band mates when OP made tinder..
More like Feeld, imo :)
(Feeld also lets you skip a profile, and get back to it later)
Cool idea, but I'm not giving you my location. Please allow me to select a city manually.
I figured that "allow once, approximate location" would be sufficient for the privacy conscious.
A little scared to make it selectable, as it would make it much easier for spammers/scammers to target locations, as the only verification is email. I do realize they can still change their location that with an emulator.
A little scared to make it selectable, as it would make it much easier for spammers/scammers to target locations, as the only verification is email. I do realize they can still change their location that with an emulator.
So there's not really any hurdle at all for automated spammers who can fake their location easily, but you're making it more difficult for genuine users anyway?
My thought process was that clicking allow or allow once would be less difficult for genuine users than searching for their city.
Then support both?
The concern's probably that in order for location tracking to not give you their exact home location, they'd have to drive a good distance away from their home or something before allowing it once. That doesn't seem less difficult than searching for the city from the comfort of their home.
IMO you’re losing more people due to the location requirement than you are gaining a bad rap from scammers/spammers. I just went through the exact experience of the above poster, I blanket deny loc tracking.
Keep in mind the privacy concerns of the HN are significantly higher than for normal people. It might not be much of an issue at all.
That said, one thing that is useful with being able to select a city is that it would allow me to browse my home city when I'm abroad, or look for people to play with while I'm traveling.
Tinder offers this as a premium feature.
What if I'm not in the location I care about? Musicians are famously people who are often on the road.
Great premium feature. Like on Tinder. Put location choice behind a paywall; keeps fake profiles out, too.
I think asking for location is perfectly sensible and the right thing to do. Track how many people say no, but if the opt out rate is too high, work on the wording to increase the rate before you allow manually entering a city.
You're only keeping honest people out. It's trivial to spoof location on Android.
Installed iOS version. Looks like I can’t even browse content without (1) giving away email and (2) entering profile information. So I uninstalled it. Please consider showing content before you ask for personal info from the user.
That is fair, I may have copied the tinder model too literally.
I disagree. People on HN won't even signup for Twitter because "reasons". I think gate keeping finicky people is fine, you should at least A/B test how likely you can encourage registration because building initial network effect for something like this is crucial.
I agree with this, don't get too bogged down by what people here think, focus on your target audience. This is the crowd that would have passed on Dropbox because it's so easy just to use rsync.
When you use rsync, you don't have to share your data with foreign intelligence.
I'm aware of the benefits of rsync but you've sort of proven the point. Regardless of the niche concerns of the HN crowd Dropbox was an extremely viable product and the company went on to make a lot of money.
i definitely get this sentiment, but as someone who's used similar apps for other stuff, i prefer knowing that people who are viewing my profile at least had some email verification
yes anyone can use a throwaway email, maybe it's all irrational, but i know from user interviews i'm not the only one who feels that way
same thing for app vs web. there's at least a feeling that scammers/hackers/creeps on the other side of the world have less access to my personal info. again maybe it's fake, but the perception is there. (otherwise generally i would prefer web > app 100 times out of 100)
App is a dealbreaker for me also. Neat idea though.
I agree, musicians are a finicky bunch. Show profiles and onboard after peaking an interest.
I agree with this sentiment as well, but my OCD requires me to inform you that the word you want is "piquing"
Would be interested in testing, however not available in my country.. is there a particular reason? Seems like some artists like to collaborate across borders.. it's not like a dating app where your location is crucial, and you want certain level of usage saturation in a particular region before expanding.. I guess what I'm saying is: why not open for all regions?
I didn't want to release the app without proper translations for the target countries. FYI - I haven't yet implemented the feature to toggle off "local-only" artists.
Which language do you think is most popular in the UK? :)
Not American!
We apologize for the inconvenience, but unfortunately, our specialized app is not authorized to operate or cash checks from your financial center due to a catalog of regionalized legal financial terminology, and therefore, we cannot fulfill a properly personalized vernacular experience.
Unfortunately, this language barrier also prohibits any user dialog about future support for your neighborhood. See ya, buddy! Aluminum!
/humor
(Disclaimer - Not actually associated with the site, but having lived in both countries, I feel so very qualified to clear things up.)
My tongue in cheek take :)
IMO English only is better than nothing, support can always be added later. I live in Finland and guess the probability of translation to Finnish is somewhere on the order of 0.1%. It’s also not really needed since a large majority of people here under the age of 50 speak English pretty well.
Same for the Netherlands. Fun fact: a majority of Dutch people prefers to have their apps in English.
I’m imagining a version of your app where the artist profile display is a solid color (chosen by the artist), the profile is an audio clip, and when the second person swipes right, it displays a text box that sends a message to the other person.
In v2, you could add profile pics, but the hard part would be finding artists similar to previously “liked” ones.
Is there a foundation model for music yet? If so, I think it’s just a matter of sticking an embedding for each audio clip into pgvector or whatever.
Anyway, since the gui has no text, you get internationalization on day one!
The internet would have never existed with that kind of thinking.
Imagine if every website needed to be translated to 500 languages before you can order a domain.
Esp ironic, since I absolutely hate seeing my native language (icelandic) in UI translations... It's rare and when it's translated I have to translate the text to the English counterpart in my head before I grok the thing.
I didn't want to release the app without proper translations for the target countries.
Not a valid reason. No-one in my country cares whether an app is translated or not. In fact, I find it kind of patronizing that you feel the need to shelter us like that. I always set the language to English even if the app has first-class translations.
I haven't yet implemented the feature to toggle off "local-only" artists.
That's a valid reason.
I’m not going to install this because I’m not looking for a band, but it would be cool if you could keep in mind solo musicians often need to hire a band in order to play
This could be a good way for people to find that when they don’t have other musicians in their network who can fill that role for them.
seems like something a website could do and not require an app. I hope the dev learned a lot about making an app while building this, as that seems the only purpose for app only to me. Unless they want to get at all of that precious data hoovering money potential. I have become so callused and cynical from malicious devs, that's my first thought on anything that is an app instead of a website
I think the "app" form-factor is preferrable to a "website" for a lot of people. Almost every website I've built over the past 10 years (summing to ~900k-ish users) has had constant streams of users always requesting an app alternative to the website, quote "even if it's just the regular website in an app".
You just described a web app. Go forth and sin no more
People don't like web apps and don't know how to install PWA's (by design of the OS manufacturers that make money from developers needing to pay to be on their hosted platforms). Like it or not, if you tell someone you have a product to use on their phone, they're going to want it to be in the App Store.
Web apps should be able to be listed in the app stores. I understand why people want to find things in the store. Younger generations don't really use the internet the way us old farts did. Discovery is no longer something that SEO and ad driven search makes organic any more, so discovery is nearly impossible. Instead of Yahoo style search of webpages, we have the curated search of apps via stores. Not that the app search is amazing, but it's still a smaller subsection than all of the internet which makes it easier.
Why not both? Assuming it's running off a DB in the cloud, it should be simple enough for the developer to write a web front-end for it.
I try to keep my phone lean and mean, and I'm not inclined to install an app for something I don't use all the time. Heck, even if I were to use this all the time, I would much rather use it through a web interface.
A good chunk of my motivation for building this was to get learn React native and get experience with building out real-time messaging.
I downloaded the app, but running into an infinite spinner on the main "Artists" tab, so can't really comment on the what the app is like...
What I will say is that it seems a little unfortunate that so many "matching" apps take the tinder swipe model these days when it really makes the matching experience worse.
I have a friend who's a drummer in central Illinois. He's used https://www.bandmix.com to find multiple groups that he's been jamming with for a while now. The UI is such that you can see a grid of all the bands/artists matching your criteria, and can facet and filter your search in the sidebar with a lot of other options including distance, commitment level, genre, etc.
Why does swiping make it worse? Is there a better alternative?
Why not just list everyone... tables and filters for the end user
Filters are useful to narrow a list but they're useless for actually recording a decision against each item in the set. They're just not a mechanic for assigning a (boolean) value. Swiping is, and that's what's happening here.
You give up on a lot of data you could otherwise have collected by doing that, data which could have helped the product in other ways.
The swipe feature, while familiar to users, may not be the most efficient way for musicians to connect and form bands. A UX that allows creating a band and receive applications could prove more effective, then perhaps you can use the swipe to accept or reject them into your band.
By swiping you force people to ‘rate’ everyone they see. You can then use a method like the Elo rating system to match musicians of similar skill levels (or desirability?) more easily.
Thanks for checking it out. Ugh, I thought I had fixed the infinite spin, but it seems to happen on the first app open occasionally still - its related to permissions dialog
I intend to add filtering, but didn't initially because 0 people use it currently, and also wanted to get an mvp out quickly
How does this differ from Vampr and Bandmix, which claim to be the same thing?
Haven't used Vampr. I made this in part because I did not enjoy the "retro" UX of BandMix and the fact that you have to pay money to send a message.
It's literally a Tinder-style swipe interface for musician matching. I recommend taking a realistic look at your competition.
From what I can tell, it's worse than Vampr, but also has a smaller network.
Can we page the owners/devs of the app to at least explain what they've built and at least answer some questions about it?
Hi, I'm here. I built this as an alternative to city-based Facebook groups (for people who don't use it) and in part to learn React Native.
It lets you create an artist profile, view nearby ones, match with them, then have a real-time chat with your matches.
Added a "nearby concerts" tab mainly so that the first adopters in new areas would have something useful besides a blank screen.
Did you try/build on other frameworks ? What made you choose ReactNative?
That's effectively what 'Show HN' means - someone is posting their own work and is around to talk about it.
Can’t download of find it on the iOS App Store. Based in Uk
Ah sorry - initially only launched in the US/Canada because I don't have translations set up. I suppose there is no reason to not make it available in the UK though.
Yes please
Updated both app stores to make it available in the UK, might take a bit to take effect
Congratulations on yet another novel attempt to apply the swipe-based matching algorithm that has so effectively revolutionized hookups to the world of music creation. It's heartwarming to see how technology keeps pushing the boundaries of human interaction, from love and sex to now forming musical collaborations. I can just envision the future where we'll have swipe-based tools for finding roommates, jobs, and even toilet paper preferences. But seriously, best of luck to all the aspiring musicians out there, may BandMatch bring you one step closer to your musical dreams.
RoomMateMatch, JobMatch, and ToiletPaperMatch are all in the works, I just have to copy paste the repo and find-replace the brand names.
Plot twist: ToiletPaperMatch doesn't use a swiping UI.
Yeah, more of a pinch and twist.
Please provide desktop or web app. Not everyone uses iOS or Android devices.
I'm not disagreeing; they should do this.
But I would like to point out that these days, releasing an app as mobile-only really doesn't disenfranchise that many people.
• iOS apps can be installed and used pretty transparently on Apple Silicon Macs;
• and Android apps can likewise be installed and used pretty transparently on both Windows 11 (via Windows Subsystem for Android) and on ChromeOS.
So by choosing to release an app as mobile-only, you're "only" excluding people without (even a very old!) smartphone, who are also:
• people with only Intel Macs;
• people with only Windows PCs, who are stuck on a previous version of Windows;
• or Linux users.
That's... not too many people at this point. (And most of them live so far behind the curve that they wouldn't be interested in installing some bleeding-edge mobile app anyway.)
And, separate point, tangent to this:
I would guess that probably most people in that state of "no smartphone and no modern Windows/macOS/ChromeOS device", who would also actually care about installing some random bleeding-edge app, are people who are in that state by choice — i.e. they're not unable, but rather unwilling to use a mobile app, due to being extremely concerned with their privacy/anonymity.
And being that kind of person, is actually kind of incompatible with being a "member in good standing" of a matchmaking service (whether the matchmaking is for dating; for getting a band together; for finding a babysitter; for renting a condo; etc.)
Matchmaking apps only "work" insofar as they 1. can prevent catfishing, 2. can allow users to permanently block others who are harassing them, and 3. can allow users to report spammers/scammers/etc in such a way that a bad actor will be permanently removed from the platform altogether. Matchmaking apps that don't make these guarantees, end up being negative-experience generators and go down in bad-PR flames.
With the rise of botnets that use proxy IP addresses to register massive numbers of accounts on such services for nefarious purposes, the only way matchmaking services have been able to survive, is to require the user to at least complete initial registration through a device that can give a remote attestation that the user is not in ultimate control of the device — i.e. the device has a Trusted Computing Base and has not been rooted — and so the app is not being tampered with or fed false device metrics. (See also: browser integrity.)
Wanting to have absolute privacy/anonymity, is fundamentally incompatible with using a device that's able to make such guarantees.
Installed to give it a look, but, sadly, as expected, nobody in my area, and concerts are basically non-existent.
I considered making my own profile visible to everyone regardless of distance.
Would be cute, kinda like MySpace, but I think would detract from the experience if there are people in your area, unless it was always the first one to show up, and only ever when you first open the app
Does anything like this exist for friends? 40+ is a lonely existence. I have seen that at this stage the number of interactions with friends are dwindling...
I used bumbles "Friends Mode" and found some cool dudes my age to chill with...but.. then I realized I didn't actually want to make new friends I wanted to be less lonely, so I just started volunteering instead.
Right? Can we just have tinder but for cool projects and friendships?
The League of Legends role selection screen comes to mind...
Is that a good or bad thing?
Running joke that if you pick support you'll match in 1 second
I play guitar - never played live with any group. Has anyone played in a "virtual band" does that even work or does the latency kill it?
I did this during the pandemic, using Jamulus. I'm a jazz bassist. I felt that the amount of latency was a mixed bag, depending on your Internet service. Just because you're in close physical proximity to other players doesn't mean your latency is short.
Also, it works as advertised if you play an electric instrument and can block out the natural sound of your instrument with headphones. For this reason, electric bass was a lot easier than upright bass for me.
Many of the musicians are not techies, and explaining these details is impossible. "I took my headphones off because hearing the mix was messing me up" is a constant refrain. Trying to maintain a sense of time under those circumstances made it mentally fatiguing to play, and no fun, so I eventually gave up and started just working on my technique and improvisation.
Jamming with people outdoors was a lot more fun.
Having a backing track is a great way to practice. You can replay the tune over and over to practice, the band 'members' never get tired...ever. Being able to program/ write backing tracks (on computer) is a sneaky way of getting into programming too (editing vsts etc).
What a dumb app
Found the guitarist
As a guitarist I tend blame the bass players of the world.
Wow, I had a similar idea back in 2018 and I created a visual prototype for it with bunch of screens and did user interviews.
I didnt get chance to look into the app fully yet, but my idea covered musicians and people ( like restaurant owner/mgr or other ) to hire musician, I also handled a way to find other band members too. Would love to share my idea and details in case you are interested
In my spreadsheet of possible expansions, I do have "artist", "band" and "venue" specific profiles and some way to provide value to them, but I haven't really thought it through.
Damn this piques my interest, would love to hear more:
jhg7nm at Virginia.edu
Just a comment - love the idea, going to use this, I think it’s a good idea not to lead with “Tinder for X”. At this point Tinder occupies a pretty bad lexical territory of being one of the classic examples of anti-user practices and enshittification.
Ah, I wasn't aware of the connotation. Luckily, this post is the only place where I've described it in that way.
Yep, just 2 cents from me! Excited to see how the app develops!
Ease of recording has made remote bands and collaborations very common, you can trade stems with people anywhere and make music.
This would be a million times more useful without the geographical restriction, although I concede if the true intent is to make in person bands then sure, it's useful. Just consider the wider market.
A lot of people have mentioned this, so I'll add the toggle to disable "local artists only" to the top of my TODO. Though I suppose genre filtering would need to be built first, or it would be obnoxious.
Genre is probably a prerequisite, yeah. I wouldn’t want to use something that basically firehosed every metal guitarist on earth into my feed when I’m looking for someone who’s into post-rock (or whatever)
I'm not exactly sure what you were expecting - the app has been live for a day
awesome app! how did you source the initial musicians before launch?
Thanks! I suppose the answer is that I didn't. It's pretty empty right now, besides friends and the results of a recent Meta ad campaign.
Love the idea, but I've tried similar apps in the past and they all suffer from lack of critical mass, and/or lots of accounts with little activity. I'd love it if this one were different, but Craigslist has been the most consistent way I've found to connect with musicians.
Other services I've tried are Hendrix (gohendrix.com) and Vampr
Yeah apps like this are kinda doa unless you got a huge marketing budget
I love this idea, two things:
1) You should have "drum machine" or "sampler" as an instrument option for hip-hop/electronic producers looking to connect with other beatmakers, I get it's for live band type stuff but plenty of electronic-based production teams double up and form teams.
2) The email entry box on the first screen of the mobile app is some non-standard input. I had to manually type in my email when every other app autocomplted with 1password
Ah thanks! I don't know how I missed #2, but both are easy fixes and I'll knock em out.
Can't believe you don't have the UK :/
Updated both app stores so it's available in the UK and Australia. Unsure how fast it takes effect.
What's the equivilent of marketing/engineering matching, for founding a company?
Have you tried YC's Co-founder matching tool?
I think this would be awesome as a normal search classifieds kind of thing, not as a Tinder thing.
Tinder's selling point isn't the swiping mechanism itself, but that it's taking something publicly taboo, harem culture, and enabling it by taking it private, with a discrete, subtle, and low-stakes mechanism for participating in that culture.
There's nothing to hide when it comes to finding musicians to jam with, so that's why I think a more traditional search & filter thing would be better suited for this.
There are already tons of "find a bandmate" classified ads sites that work exactly like you describe. E.g. https://bandmix.co.uk/
I find that the more music creation and distribution is gamified, the less gratifying it is for me. Discovery of the music and people who share your distinct musical passions is such and important part of the process of enjoying music and it's creation. On first look I thought, interesting, why would they go ruin the best (if also one of the more frustrating) parts of music creation. No thanks, too derivative and solving a problem in a way that feels icky to me.
So true. get out there, go to shows, find/attend jam sessions by asking around, visit studios, make friends in person.
I can finally pretend to be pretty and able to play guitar
Neat idea but the musician directory seems buggy. After scrolling once through a few musicians I can’t seem to return to them. Eventually the entire list disappears and I get a “no musicians in your area” message. No documentation, user guide, or support that I could find. It would be cool to see this working or to understand how to use it… i’m an amateur musician who has thought of looking for others to jam with.
I would rather see a playlist of musicians filtered by style and experience and then skip through the playlist as I listen and have a contact button. A tinder interface doesn’t really make sense for music.
I don't know how to play, but I would like to.
I'm the kind of person that needs stuff to be a group activity or I lose interest very very quickly.
Clone the app and call it L2Play, there's a bunch of noobs just like me.
edit - Lock it geographically, but not temporally. I'm as interested now as I was 6 months ago and will be 6 months from now.
Nice! How is this different from Vampr? [0] they use (or at least, used) the same tagline: ‘Tinder, but for musicians to collaborate’
I’m loving the feedback everyone is posting here. While there are some cynics, you all have posted a treasure trove of useful insights for this creator. And for people like me who are constantly trying to improve user experience for the products they make, reading these comments has been incredibly insightful.
Great idea, I always wanted to build something to do with music and musicians but never did I think of this case. I can see it useful and a website instead of an app to begin with will make it easier for many to try and test.
Lovely! When will this roll out in the EU?
I joined a similar app .. it has a lot reviews in the app store (not to say those are real lol) and i was excited to join and meet fellow local musicians.
If you thought online dating was hard and judgemental ... finding musicians to play music is even more judgemental .. if you are a good to great singer for instance these apps will keep you busy. Personally i just wanted to connect and play music without the judgement (tho do want you to be able to actually play an instrument fairly well .. strum chords on guitar and lets sing along as we strum together).
I posted songs i wrote where professional singers were singing them and those got people reaching out. Their messages were like good song and did you sing that (i noted i did not) but they became disinterested when they truly realized i was not the singer.
Is this country filtered? iOS->latest Update->not available in Germany...
Great, I was looking for a baritone sax player for a demo just yesterday. Look forward to seeing it available in my part of the world.
Needs a GDPR statement to be legal in EU and UK.
Make sure you check the name - there is a website called bandmatch already, which is a somewhat established platform (granted, it's I think only for DACH meaning: Switzerland (primarily), Austria, Germany, and is a traditional blackboard style site, but naming conflicts are never fun). Unless your affiliated with them of course: https://www.bandmatch.ch
funk yes!
Looks good. Wish it was a website though.
Notably an even higher risk of VD than Tinder, sources say.
I tried the app and have a bit of feedback
Since it’s designed to have people meet up, it’s important to require a photo. It’s a safety thing.
This seems like it would be the first feature (what photo-swipe is to Tinder) but it would be nice if, when the card is displayed, you heard a sample of the musician’s music. It’s odd that the cards are silent. The entire app should be a sonic experience. Linking to YouTube is fine but why send people away from the app?
Also, sad but true, don’t forget to populate every major city with a few really good looking and sounding fake profiles. There were just 5 blank profiles near me.
This has been done before, and it was free. It was called “Grouptones”
It was cool. Sadly it’s no longer up.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/grouptones-help-to-bring-...
This is such a good idea.
I saw down below that you’re not familiar with Vampr, which is very similar to what your screenshots suggest.
Moments like this always make me sad. Even a cursory web search would have surfaced Vampr, along with several other find-a-bandmate sites.
Weeks or even months of work because Googling was too much trouble.
So what happens now?
Do you let sunk cost dictate your actions and force you to continue working on an undifferentiated and far less feature-rich product?
Or do you stop working on your app and just start using Vampr?
Too bad this one never took off - it looked amazing at the time
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/3/16082864/treble-fm-social-...
BandStand, Sideman, SoundMate... or eHarmony.
I found recommended concerts useful.
Using this terminology you might as well call Uber: "Tinder" but for finding a cab driver.
ugh. had this idea more than 14 years ago with nothing to do it for. hope the concept takes off.
Timbre was right there.
Please allow switching to Online Collaboration. I'd prefer to find someone local, but until then, I'd be open to online connections.
Great. A whole new trend of exaggeration and outright lying on social apps.
ISO - band. Lead guitar player, regularly practices Yngwie Malmsteen songs.
How can I use this without a smartphone?
I think this would work better if it had 2 modes, one built by scraping/bots from public listings, sound cloud etc, which would let you discover and reach out on those platforms.
And one powered by "list yourself" where people would create their profiles to make themselves easier to discover.
This would avoid the issue of not having many users initially whilst also making it interesting to use.
It's been awhile since I've seen one of these. The Tinder of ________ is a vintage meme in tech entrepreneurship.
wait, why isn't there a dating app that has this?
Because then people would drill down and either find their perfect partner quickly, or figure out there's nobody compatible with them on the app quickly; and either way, delete the app.
Dating app monetization creates a principal-agent problem: both subscriptions (for paid apps) and advertising/data-brokering (for free apps) are revenue streams that depend on people engaging with the app as much as possible — which people who actually manage to find solid romantic relationships won't do.
The only good dating app monetization model, would be a one-time-fee model. This would induce the correct incentives: as long as people are on the app, they continue to be a cost burden on the service with no further revenue — so, like people hogging a table at a restaurant, the service would be motivated to satisfy them and get them out the door!
But AFAIK, nobody has ever done this yet. (I think it's just because such a site would make so much less money than the traditional "milk your user base eternally" type of dating site. And people who build dating sites are usually in it for the money.)
We need an open dating platform. "OpenHinge"?
When it first started, OKCupid was about the perfect dating platform until Match.com bought it and totally killed the functionality with monetisation.
I don't know if the timeline of events supports that entirely. Match.com bought OkCupid in 2011. OkCupid didn't start becoming Tinder-like until Match merged with Tinder in 2017.
There was also very little changes made to OkCupid core functionality between 2011 and 2016. Most monetized features predated the match.com acquisition, though I think the price increased at some point.
In the world of dating, "open" doesn't mean what you think it means.
"AjarHinge"?
Sounds like Alovoa: https://alovoa.com/ / https://github.com/Alovoa/Alovoa/
Because they all used to be that (see old OkCupid, match.com, Plenty of Fish, etc), but swiping apps stole the majority of their user base when they came around and every app had to become another swiping app to attract users. 9 times out of 10, the person being approached is gonna look at the approaching person's pictures and "basic stats" (age, height, kids, religion, job, education, pets, smoking) and decide yes/no. So what's the point of all the other stuff?
LokiList.com[0] is a free, anonymous online personals site intended as a replacement for Craigslist's Casual Encounters. It also allows searching by A/S/L[1].
[0] https://www.lokilist.com/about.php
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age/sex/location
Yeah, swiping is a dark pattern employed by dating apps.
Even with millions of users, there's better ways to match people up than a simple swipe. It's to keep people at the mercy of an algorithm where spending money is the only way to get any sort of control over what you see.
It exists only for shady monetisation.
Actually if you use the same interface for recommendation systems for content (say RSS feed items, videos, etc.) you get much better results than western content recommenders which don't get accurate negative samples. It finally hit me the reason I didn't understand a lot of the recommender literature is that it doesn't make sense and it's transformative to treat recommendation as a classification problem the way TikTok does. The real Dark Pattern is that YouTube and every other western app looks like
https://marvelpresentssalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/id...
where you can't conclude anything at all because a user didn't click on an item. (That and the scan-ignore-repeat UI paradigm that has kept RSS readers thoroughly out of the mainstream forever)
Even if you want to have a search-based UI it would still make sense to show you one match at a time and let you thumbs up and thumbs down and have the system remember your choices so you can come back next week and look at new items without the considerable cognitive burden of ignoring. But say “see something once, why see it again?” and people look at you like you’re a psycho killer. The whole advertising economy though is based fundamentally on spamming you with the same crap over and over and a ‘dislike’ button that works (negative sampling) would end it overnight, i guess there’s a reason why you can’t explain something to a person whose paycheck is based on not understanding it.
Treating recommendation as a classification problem has all sorts of flaws, mostly down to normalizing the user's indications into a larger model. People will be more passive sometimes and more engaged at other times. Sometimes they'll blindly accept and watch everything that comes along (or blindly swipe right on every match, etc); other times they'll be very choosey.
It's kind of the same problems that asking users for star ratings has — people interpret the meaning of "one star" or "three stars" or "five stars" differently; and there are selection biases on when people will bother to vote at all. (The Netflix Prize was a challenge for a reason!)
You can avoid all these temporal and selection biases, though, because content recommendation is actually ultimately a ranking problem: any recommendation algorithm ultimately wants to generate a subjective ranking of its universe of items, such that everything gets put in a sequence, with the thing the user would most like to see next, first.
And conveniently, we already have a mathematically-perfect way to do ranking: ELO. Or, in app UX terms: the classical HotOrNot design, where you're presented with exactly two options, and you have to pick one as being better than the other. And you get to see the each option several times, paired against different other options each time.
In user-engagement terms, a HotOrNot interface would be just as much of a "dark pattern" as a Tinder interface. But in recommendation-tuning terms, the backend of a HotOrNot-UX app could build you a subjective scoring function that's much more accurate, much sooner.
The real negative signal that sites like YouTube (and to a degree, TikTok) use, is landing on something though a more passive engagement action (e.g. auto-play next) and this inducing engagement in a previously-passively-consuming user to "get away" from this content.
Classification gives you calibrated scores that you can use together with other information. A classifier may not be the ideal recommender by itself but it is a good component.
A probability score for “will he like it?” works as a ranking score in my experience with some caveats which aren’t so much about the score as a score but that recommendation is really a sequential problem. That is, if I get different versions of the same news article that all score 0.9, it might be OK to show me one or two articles from that list. I believe people’s satisfaction with an article is greatly influenced by being spammed with too much of the same thing and that is not so influenced by ranking scores.
I’ll go so far as to say full text search should also be treated as a classification problem, in particularly you need a probability score if you want to make a service like “Google Alerts” where you tell people about new marching documents. Also if you are trying to combine several radically different searchers (like IBM Watson did back in the day) the probability score is essential.
I mean. Tinder is pretty awful in general. But the UI does have some merit. It’s exactly the idea of not filling out pages and pages of details about yourself that is great. And likewise, being able in principle to randomly find potential partners that you would not had you gone the route of manually tweaking a bunch of search parameters that your potential partner has to fit.
Swipe UI is not the problem. Tinder is separately awful independently of its UI.
The UI has some merit for attractive people.
Furthermore, this photo-forward interface design pattern presents candidates' physical attractiveness as the most salient feature. While this is desirable in a dating app, this is probably not very relevant for assessing people for their potential as musical collaborators.
From the top of my head, I'm going to guess people want (1) personable and agreeable bandmates with (2) compatible music styles, (3) musical talent and skill, and (4) can play instruments or roles that a band is missing.
So the interface should support users in presenting and finding these traits. If I were to design it, I'd have:
- Auto-playing music sample gallery. This is the most important thing to present. The current design asks the user to dig into Youtube and Soundcloud links — which is very high-friction and would have the user jumping between this app and other apps every few seconds.
- One-minute self-introduction video. This helps the user grok the general 'vibe' of someone.
- Allow users to connect their Spotify or other music accounts. Then show users their shared music interests. This can provide another clue about having compatible musical personalities.
I agree with pretty much all this. I avoided in-app videos because of the complexity and cost of building a transcoding/streaming system. But I suppose audio-only wouldn't be too bad.
I like your ideas, and I feel like tiktok/reels would be the better base for this type of app than tinder
Considering how important style is in most genres, I think the swipe interface could be a good way to quickly find better potential matches, assuming there's a pre-filter based on your selected genres.
If I was looking to start a band today, I'd definitely give this kind of thing a try.
Good point, I do intend to add genre and instrument filtering. I figured I had some time to do that since there are barely any users. Not much point of having filtering if there are 5 people in your area.