I created a website that feeds you curated music news - but only for the artists you like and listen to. I’d love a few more testers!

[inCubuS14]

I'm not an active poster here (I want to be upfront about that rather than lie and deceive!) but I would absolutely love your feedback on a pet project of mine. I AM a vinyl collector if that helps! [Discogs]

I'm music obsessed. I used to start my day by visiting various music news sites like the NME, Pitchfork, and DiS. It took waaaaaaay too long. I like too many artists across too many genres, and I kept missing news.

So 2 months ago I launched www.muzeroom.com

You can import your artists likes and listens from FB, Spotify, & last.fm. MuzeRoom then feeds you music news, new releases, and music videos - but only for the artists you follow. It curates content from over 50 different sites. 

I need feedback from real dedicated music fans, and I feel this is the perfect place for that. I'd absolutely love your constructive thoughts whether positive or negative! Cheers.

[scottheisel]

But how would I discover new music if I'm only reading about music I already like?

[dnl]

All of those sites just repost articles/stories from the other sites. Next thing you have is a feed with the exact same story. For example: the only thing in the Green Day feed right now is their Trump chant. Every single post. 

 

Just follow the bands you like on social media and you'll be fine.

Edited November 22, 2016 by dnl

[nancy_raygun]

Quote

I need feedback from real dedicated music fans, and I feel this is the perfect place for that.

You'd think - but that hasn't really been the case for similar posts in the past

[TheGhostOfRandySavage]

13 hours ago, inCubuS14 said:

I'm not an active poster here (I want to be upfront about that rather than lie and deceive!)

Edited November 22, 2016 by The Ghost of Randy Savage
Yup, we can all see the number 1 next to your post count.

[kgry]

Longest first post title ever.

[daegor]

As far as I am concerned, this is an entirely redundant service that will make the redundancies already present worse (see Green Day above).

 

 

UNLESS you incorporate two features:

1. The ability to weed out duplicate articles (ideally pointing back to whoever actually posted the original article)
2. A true social media feed (elaborated below)

I just follow social media accounts of all of the bands I like, but there are some issues with this approach.  I have to jump to different platforms to get the full picture (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, sometime artist websites, etc).  Pulling all of these sources into one feed would be great.  Especially if you could overcome Facebook's inherent filtering, give me everything they post on their Facebook.  Also, give me the ability to add the social media accounts of the band members if I want.  Or maybe an artist has a Facebook used for promoting the band, but their Instagram is all dog photos, so let me have Facebook on and Instagram off.

 

If you could pull those sources and I could customize my feed to that level I'd probably turn most of my social media accounts off immediately.

[¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

im a fake dedicated music fan, is my opinion okay?

[inCubuS14]

Hey guys - AWESOME feedback. Love it. Jokes AND valuable feedback = winning!

Thanks for taking the time. Let me address a few of the points (sorry it took a while, been sleeping here in Oz!). 

 

9 hours ago, scottheisel said:

But how would I discover new music if I'm only reading about music I already like?

Definitely a good question. For now we are a portal dedicated to what you CURRENTLY like. We would like to have 'similar artists' as part of your feed in future though because we all know how fun music discovery is. We'll know who you are following and can make suggestions based off of that. 

 

8 hours ago, dnl said:

All of those sites just repost articles/stories from the other sites. Next thing you have is a feed with the exact same story. For example: the only thing in the Green Day feed right now is their Trump chant. Every single post. 

 

Just follow the bands you like on social media and you'll be fine.

Yeah there is definitely duplication of articles. In your newsfeed we put them in the same tile under 'trending news' which has helped massively. On the artist page however we haven't done that yet - http://www.muzeroom.com/artists/green-day - although that is on our list of things to do. This page should be more interactive and have less duplication. We are going to also add videos and releases to this page. 

 

In regards to social, Facebook is a joke. In a week long test I saw updates from 1.36% of the 210 artists I followed (more on that here if you are interested- https://medium.com/cuepoint/the-facebook-music-test-proof-you-are-missing-updates-from-your-favourite-artists-a5fe2094da9f#.n1ll3slti)

 

3 hours ago, daegor said:

UNLESS you incorporate two features:

1. The ability to weed out duplicate articles (ideally pointing back to whoever actually posted the original article)
2. A true social media feed (elaborated below)

Re: 1, we are definitely working on this (as comments above). We were never going to be able to solve it straight up. It's going to take some time to get it perfected. 

re: 2 this is an interesting point we have spoken at length about. We are definitely keen on FB and Instagram. I LOVE the idea of letting the user turn this on/off per feed. We wouldn't do Twitter because there is jut too much 'crap' on that platform ie Kanye just tweeted he likes burgers! yay. If an artist tweets anything of note, someone will write about it and we'll pull that in. The idea is definitely to have a feed that is music only and fully customised for you. 

 

For some reason this quote is stuck at the bottom of my reply. Yes, all music fans welcome! I don't care if you are a fake Kenny Rogers fan, or a real Katy Perry fan tbh!

2 hours ago, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ said:

im a fake dedicated music fan, is my opinion okay?

3 hours ago, kgry said:

Longest first post title ever.

This made me giggle!

Edited November 23, 2016 by inCubuS14

[inCubuS14]

6 hours ago, nancy_raygun said:

You'd think - but that hasn't really been the case for similar posts in the past

Feedback on this post thus far has been superb, so thank you all. 

[Freki]

Spotify already recommends artists AND I can check them out there. You can't compete with them on that feature. Don't obfuscate your main purpose with shit that others are already doing better than you'll be able to. 

[inCubuS14]

5 minutes ago, Freki said:

Spotify already recommends artists AND I can check them out there. You can't compete with them on that feature. Don't obfuscate your main purpose with shit that others are already doing better than you'll be able to. 

I think we can actually take that data and use it on our site. The bonus of that is that we encourage users to follow MORE artists. The more artists you follow on MuzeRoom the more likely you are to continue to use it. I think rather than having it as a feature, we build it in as a nice add-on to the newsfeed experience. 

[deafening]

22 hours ago, inCubuS14 said:

I'm not an active poster here (I want to be upfront about that rather than lie and deceive!)

 

[Shitty Rambo]

1 hour ago, deafening said:

 

 

To be fair the OP's account was created on Sunday at 07:52PM. That's a 1.33 post a day average so far.

1 hour ago, deafening said:

 

 

To be fair the OP's account was created on Sunday at 07:52PM. That's a 1.33 post a day average so far.

[dnl]

18 hours ago, daegor said:

As far as I am concerned, this is an entirely redundant service that will make the redundancies already present worse (see Green Day above).

 

 

UNLESS you incorporate two features:

1. The ability to weed out duplicate articles (ideally pointing back to whoever actually posted the original article)
2. A true social media feed (elaborated below)

I just follow social media accounts of all of the bands I like, but there are some issues with this approach.  I have to jump to different platforms to get the full picture (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, sometime artist websites, etc).  Pulling all of these sources into one feed would be great.  Especially if you could overcome Facebook's inherent filtering, give me everything they post on their Facebook.  Also, give me the ability to add the social media accounts of the band members if I want.  Or maybe an artist has a Facebook used for promoting the band, but their Instagram is all dog photos, so let me have Facebook on and Instagram off.

 

If you could pull those sources and I could customize my feed to that level I'd probably turn most of my social media accounts off immediately.

You have the right idea. I would use the service if it was more in the likes of this. One place for everything.

 

I spent a few minutes testing out your site and here are some thoughts:

• The layout of the news feed isn't very inviting. An option for a list view would be great. The 3 columns/large tiles requires too much scrolling. If the list view is possible, options to mark news as read would be great also. 
• Needs more sources for news. I only followed a handful of artists but I know majority are missing recent news and some artists have nothing showing up in the feed from the past few months.
• Needs more options for importing artists. I use Groove Music on Windows and not Spotify. I'm sure there are other sources such as Apple Music that people may use. Importing artists from Discogs would be ideal. 
• The option to remove sites as sources is great. Maybe add an option to add sites manually.
• The releases are not complete for every artist. This could a cool idea. I'm already using an app that notifies me when artists I listen to release new digital music so I probably wouldn't need a page like this.
• Mobile app is needed.

I appreciate the idea of a service like this and would definitely use it once you have more of the kinks ironed out. I do spend a bit of time daily searching for any new news from my favorite bands, so this would be incredibly useful. Currently I have a twitter to only follow bands, and getting news is really hit or miss. Not every band is active enough on twitter.

I also use feedly as my primary news source. The issue is I follow multiple sources on the chance they'll post about a band I'm interested in. What you've done on your site is basically found the articles for me from these sources, but I'm not a fan of how the articles are presented. If your site could be designed more like a reader, it would be a huge improvement. Hell, if you could find a way to make a user's custom newsfeed an RSS feed that can be added to a site like feedly, then that would incredible and I would definitely continue using your site.

[inCubuS14]

9 hours ago, dnl said:

You have the right idea. I would use the service if it was more in the likes of this. One place for everything.

 

I spent a few minutes testing out your site and here are some thoughts:

• The layout of the news feed isn't very inviting. An option for a list view would be great. The 3 columns/large tiles requires too much scrolling. If the list view is possible, options to mark news as read would be great also. 
• Needs more sources for news. I only followed a handful of artists but I know majority are missing recent news and some artists have nothing showing up in the feed from the past few months.
• Needs more options for importing artists. I use Groove Music on Windows and not Spotify. I'm sure there are other sources such as Apple Music that people may use. Importing artists from Discogs would be ideal. 
• The option to remove sites as sources is great. Maybe add an option to add sites manually.
• The releases are not complete for every artist. This could a cool idea. I'm already using an app that notifies me when artists I listen to release new digital music so I probably wouldn't need a page like this.
• Mobile app is needed.

I appreciate the idea of a service like this and would definitely use it once you have more of the kinks ironed out. I do spend a bit of time daily searching for any new news from my favorite bands, so this would be incredibly useful. Currently I have a twitter to only follow bands, and getting news is really hit or miss. Not every band is active enough on twitter.

I also use feedly as my primary news source. The issue is I follow multiple sources on the chance they'll post about a band I'm interested in. What you've done on your site is basically found the articles for me from these sources, but I'm not a fan of how the articles are presented. If your site could be designed more like a reader, it would be a huge improvement. Hell, if you could find a way to make a user's custom newsfeed an RSS feed that can be added to a site like feedly, then that would incredible and I would definitely continue using your site.

This is awesome feedback! When I hear things like this I know I'm on the right track. As you quite rightly point out though we need to iron out all the kinks, of which there are many,. This is inevitable in the early stages of a startup unfortunately, especially when we are not funded. I wanted to address a few of your points:

1. List view - this has been requsted a number of times and I completely agree with you here. We should give the user the option! 

2. More sources - 100%. We actually envision the site having hundreds of sources, just like Feedly. It's not feasible to do this straight away though as we are still working out how to deal with duplicate stories

3. Importing - had not thought of Discogs. Looks like they have an API though so good shout. We also would like Google (play music and youtube).

4. App - we 100% want this when we have the funding. MY ideas is that it would detect what you are playing on your device too, and then display the most recent news for that artist. That would be hugely valuable I think.

 

Thanks for taking the time. These are all things that have come up in conversation so its great to hear them again to know that they are important! Let me know any other feedback if it comes up as you use the site. Cheers! 

[daegor]

You seem to have a good head on your shoulders, this is me filing the name of this service away to look up again sometime next year.

 

 

Good luck!

[One Hundred Fifty-Two]

[BuzzersonKillwell]

UX designer here with a long history of start-up consulting.

 

Not entirely sold on the value of this service at present but I'm happy to step in as a beta tester and provide feedback. PM me if you want. 

[inCubuS14]

On 11/24/2016 at 2:18 PM, daegor said:

You seem to have a good head on your shoulders, this is me filing the name of this service away to look up again sometime next year.

 

 

Good luck!

Thanks mate appreciate those kind words. We still have a LOT of work to develop this to get it to where we want it to be. Which is why I'm thankful for helpful forums like this where people truly give a shit about music, and are kind enough to take the time to feedback.