Hi! I'm Andres, the CEO and founder of humm. It's a pleasure to e-meet you all here.
I've created two music startups, and in the course of building our previous venture we constantly heard a similar thing: while several streaming services are making an ever bigger push for premium customers, no-one's taking care of the music fans who can't afford or don't yet want to buy a premium subscription. Also, the sites that do focus on the free experience aren't specifically set up as music players.
That's why we built humm. humm is a music streaming service that combines a catalogue of tens of millions of tracks, a kick-ass recommendation engine and a simple interface to create a free and seamless music experience. You can find pretty much any track you're looking for, create and import playlists, and do without those irksome ads that interrupt the flow.
humm has a great onboarding process that helps suggest music tailored to your taste. When you search the name of an artist or song, the interface brings up the best-quality tracks, albums, videos and cover versions, any of which you can add to playlists with a simple drag and drop. Soon, we'll have a pin function that lets you add any music you come across online!
We realise the product isn't 100% perfect yet, but we'd love to hear your feedback. I'm at your disposal for any questions.
HI @joshdance it´s a question of how you embed the content. We use third party APIs and it´s the way they work. For example Youtube omits pre-roll ads if the size of embed has a small size.
I just had a terrible experience - I typed in "Foo Fighters" hit play - and the first song I hear is a terrible wannabe cover - surely for a band like Foo Fighters this service can match against a myriad of sources to find the song being played by the actual band (screenshot of random dude playing foo fighters song in upper left http://cl.ly/image/3s022P2C3n3d) - I mean gosh, if you're going for user generated covers at least serve up this epic foo fighters cover with over 26 million views - - I know the product isnt "100% perfect" - but I was so bummed to just such a bad match to a very popular and well known band with a HUGE footprint online. Good luck - as of right now, no idea why I would switch to this from Spotify.
Hi @hemeon, we are sorry for that. As you know this a Beta and you may still find things that don´t work properly. We are indexing and cataloguing all the music available in internet (not just asking APIs) and is an ongoing and complex process. We got more than 40 millions tracks at the moment and we run continuos cleaning processes to avoid things like the one that happened to you. In any case thanks for your input, it´s good to know that this should be a top priority for us as the last thing we want is users as disappointed as you´re.
@hemeon You´re totally right about Foo Fighter. You´ve a good number of albums in there but the popular songs are wrong. We´ve included the option to report "wrong content" so we can fix errors and keep improving the catalogue. We like to think in Humm as a tool for the people and we´d like to have the people helping us to make it better. With a bit of time and use the content will be much more accurate.
As you probably know The Beatles are really tricky as most of their catalogue is not available in any streaming service. Happy that you found Radiohead. In any case, here´s my compromise to fix the Foo Fighter content asap and go back to you with just quality content. Again, sorry for the inconvenience.
@andressandaza@hemeon but why as a user do I want to waste my time cataloging and improving your data when I can just get the right stuff on itunes, spotify or even pandora - who has time to do this kind of crowdsourced work - also what on earth do I get out of cleaning your data?
Great stuff Andres - the UI is lovely, much better than the Spotify web player. Are you using Soundcloud as your music source? And, if so, do you foresee a potential problem being that users won't be able to find the biggest tracks, which often aren't on Soundcloud?
Thanks @edrex_. At the moment we are sourcing all the content from Youtube though we want to add other sources too so that you find any track you like. If a track it´s not in Youtube we could source it from Spotify or any other legal sources.
@andressandaza Ah - got it. So can I find, for instance, Uptown Funk (or insert another chart-topper here) on Humm? And, if so, how are you getting around licensing issues?
@edrex_ Re - searching for tracks, sure you can! In the search just hit Show All and it'll come up: http://alpha.myhumm.com/showall/.... The result you're looking for might be on the 2nd or 3rd page of the songs results.. Still needs to be optimised but we've got you covered ;)
Thanks @antoinem, great comment coming from someone working on the same space. Cheers, A
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Awesome UI. Website looks good and features (although not new) are packaged well.
I noticed you're using YouTube's API and may potentially add other music services' APIs. How do you intend to scale Humm on APIs that have limitations on use when using competitor's APIs (specifically, Spotify and SoundCloud)? Also, I'll assume that you don't have any licenses. What is your commitment to rights holders? Free is never really free. Lastly, how does Humm intend to monetize?
Hello @daeboganmusic. Thanks for your comments and really insightful questions. We are using third party APIs but we are building our own database with track information about artists and so on. As you said we´d be adding content from other services. Whenever someone plays a song sourced from Spotify, for example, the artist still get their cut. We are not going to cross any red line, we are 100% legal and view ourselves as a gateway to premium music streaming services. We want to work with those services and provide them with the biggest potential amount of premium users. We are not going to monetise through content, we are thinking more in Big Data and through the use of our own scalable API for third party developers. Hope this clear things up. Cheers, A
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@andressandaza Ok, so the goal is to monetize through an API service to third-party developers (similar to OneMusicAPI, Metable, Medianet, 7Digital, Omnifone, Consolidated Independent, AudioSalad, etc.). Therefore, the burden of licensing will be on the developer for his/her new product. Gotcha. The fact remains, however, that Humm will need to be properly licensed the moment you add an API other than YouTube. YouTube is the only service with a "through to audience" stipulation in its performance license in the US. Spotify, and the others, do not offer this...a challenge that many of my music startup clients have faced once they've earned enough traction for rights holders to knock on their door. I guess these questions are more of a "heads up" for you. (Shameless self-promotion www.daeboganmusic.com)
Hi @daeboganmusic, good points. Trying to answer your statement: There´s no burden of licensing for developers using Youtube, as following their API specifications it isn´t required. Developers will get the burden of how to monetise the services, apps or solutions they create. Regarding other APIs, there are a few cases, like Bop.fm, where they reached agreements with music streaming platforms like Spotify to use their API with no limits cause they brought new users to those platforms. We see ourselves in a similar way. We want to turn casual listeners (using our platform) in premium users of services like Apple Music, Deezer or Spotify. Take into account that today there´s only 1% of the global population that pay premium. We want to be a pathway to premium.
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