Releasing music on Spotify? Join here (100% perpetually free with no strings attached): https://brew.fm
I'm a software engineer and work at a HR startup in NYC. I started in music, first playing keys in a band in Europe, then building soft synths, which got me in touch with Korg, who got me in touch with Red Bull, who turned me into a game developer, and before I knew it I was a software engineer living in the US. Not sure how all of that happened, but the truth is, I miss working with artists.
Brew.fm is an attempt to help others turn their dreams into reality where I couldn't: make a living from music.
I started with a collaboration market place, after interviewing dozens of artists, and realizing some of them had a huge leg up compared to others, because of an early collab with an established artist.
It's pretty straight forward: you log in with Spotify, verify your artist account, and Brew.fm automatically imports all your tracks and turns them into collab requests. It will detect future releases as well, so no manual labor from your side needed other than those 2 steps. People can reach out through private chat after which you decide to share personal info (eg email) and arrange the collab.
So far 79 people signed up, very open to feedback.
What about royalties? I made thissongplantstrees.com . it's a 31 second spoken word track that plants trees. 100 streams = 1 tree. So far it's planted 7500 trees (with another 1000 coming this month). I would love to get some remixes made but can't split the royalties (otherwise can't afford to plant trees)
Love this idea. How the royalties are split is completely up to the involved artists. When Leo from Camel Power Club created an edit for Pedro Blue's track Get Down, Leo asked Pedro to join his label, who took care of distribution including the royalty split. In most other cases the artists discuss the split in the chat, often before they start the work.
I'm hoping to simplify this process, or at least educate users about common practices. Still talking with a lot of users before I feel confident enough to build a tool or a FAQ for it.
I am working with an heavily collab oriented-project, Cosmoose, which released a remix album one month ago (also active on Indie Music Feedback community).
The problem we have with this is: sharing the stems (one song will usually be some gigabytes of storage), organizing, making splits.
It's a lot of administrative overhead that can suck out the pleasure from music-making itself.
And what people burn out on is that a lot of these collabs go poorly because of artistic differences, or one people being not serious (for good or bad reasons).
So if the collab is off-site, that eliminates the completion rate you have on a platform like skeb. IMF solves this by being more a community and so you get to know people more before working with them.
So I'm not sure it is solving really anything, and the approach does not seem sustainable (one email per new track per user? how long before everything goes to spam). But I'd love to be convinced otherwise :-)
Thank you for the feedback! This is definitely something I have yet to overcome. A few users asked for features that will allow Brew to head in this direction. I'm exploring solutions, and might even introduce a Pioneer.app like program, but for artists.
On the scalability: I'm a big fan of not overcomplicating things early on. However, I'm planning to build a feature that lets you select a daily/weekly preference so you simply get a summary of what was added that day/week. I'm also planning on auto-tagging genres based on the track previews using essentia.js, so I don't have to spam metal heads with EDM daily. Lots of room for improvement, but waiting for it to become a problem first.
Also, I got carried away and created this interactive 3d graph tool that lets you discover similar tracks based on Spotify listening behavior: https://www.brew.fm/track/5jRaNtkJrlg2Xh7PuMhcif/Get-Down---.... Inspired by good friend @drpancake's rephonic.com graph tool to discover podcasts. Might be interesting for non-artists as well, to find new tracks.
Yes, exactly. I've talked with artists about how they arrange collabs, and tried to follow what works for most of them. The benefit here is that you get a steady stream of tracks in your inbox, of which you know the involved artists are open to collaborate. The most common problem of the artists I talked with was how much time it takes to find people to collab with.
I might update the copy on the website, realizing there's not a whole lot of explaining going on :)
Weird bug (I think?): the progress bar when playing a song (#seek-slider) goes back and forth every second or so, instead of going only in one direction (FF 96.0.1).
I'm a software engineer and work at a HR startup in NYC. I started in music, first playing keys in a band in Europe, then building soft synths, which got me in touch with Korg, who got me in touch with Red Bull, who turned me into a game developer, and before I knew it I was a software engineer living in the US. Not sure how all of that happened, but the truth is, I miss working with artists.
Brew.fm is an attempt to help others turn their dreams into reality where I couldn't: make a living from music.
I started with a collaboration market place, after interviewing dozens of artists, and realizing some of them had a huge leg up compared to others, because of an early collab with an established artist.
It's pretty straight forward: you log in with Spotify, verify your artist account, and Brew.fm automatically imports all your tracks and turns them into collab requests. It will detect future releases as well, so no manual labor from your side needed other than those 2 steps. People can reach out through private chat after which you decide to share personal info (eg email) and arrange the collab.
So far 79 people signed up, very open to feedback.