Comments on post “Muru Music”
Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
Pandora already does a pretty good job of creating a playlist you'll love, imho. Is Muru Music just better or how would you so it compares to other music discovery services in the market, @niccjohnson? What I'm really curious to know is where you'd put it in a market matrix but that's a lot to ask. 😊
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Nicc Johnson
@niccjohnson · Chief Musicologist, DJ and Tech Founder
@rrhoover thats a good question and I would agree with you that Pandora does a great job, but it does have its limitations.
See below - but in a nutshell it sits in the sweet spot between lean back (Pandora) and on demand (Spotify)
A Pandora station (or Apple, Spotify and others) is "single seed" which means you pick a starting genre/artist and based on that it will create a station with a set of songs.(playlist). After a while you will notice a similar pattern of songs and will hear repeat songs in that same station.
Muru has a multi seed algorithm, and the user selects a start and end for their journey (playlist). This comes back to the DJ principles and actually allows for a more diverse path but also allows us to progress through genres. Every song that is selected in that journey, fits perfectly with the previous and the next and all the songs are connected as a whole (like when a DJ selects their tracks for a set).
So in Muru you can say " I would like to start with Blues and end with Deep House and have a set of 2 hours". Within seconds Muru starts playing music and your journey will natural progress from Blues through connected genres till it reaches Deep House. On top of that you can modify your journey through a series of sliders - Tempo, Energy, Popular and Era. Simple adjust the slider to suit your needs and the music will automagical update in real time. - It's like you would have the DJ in your room playing your favourite music and you being able to tell the DJ " Hey, can you actually bring it down a bit and play something more mellow" "Dj, pick up the pace, im about to head into a food coma, so I need some uptempo beats to snap me out of it"
When selecting your Pandora station the next day - you will get the same set of songs (repeatability is an issue due to their relatively small catalogue) with Muru you can create a preset of your favourite journey and every time you hit play it will follow the same path (Tempo, Energy etc.) but find new music you will love - this is our very own "discover weekly" feature that is ingrained into our recommendation engine.
Lastly - Muru has its own genre assignment system -which means you can throw 30Million songs into our system and it will assign them to our own genre map. That is pretty cool in my humble opinion and it allows for some pretty crazy stuff in the future.
In a nutshell it sits between the Pandora lean back and Spotify On Demand experiences. It is designed to be just as powerful for an audiophile like myself and for a first time user that knows nothing about music.
All I can ask for, is that you give it a go and let me know Ryan :)
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Adam Marx
@adammarx13 · CEO, Glipple, Inc.
@niccjohnson @rrhoover This is intriguing. The multi-seed algorithm is an interesting play, and something that could possibly carve out a little bit of a different niche than the other big players have at the moment, depending on how you all evolve it.
What I'm most curious about though is your content acquisition and retention. Because licensing deals between the big players (Spotify, Apple, etc.) and the major labels are always in flux, building on top of those API's can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's a faster implementation. On the other hand, however, if they change the access point to their API, or if licensing deals fall through/stagnate, it can drastically affect services which sit on top.
Thus, consistent access to material can be challenging, and I'm curious how you all think about that long-term. Cool hunt!
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Nicc Johnson
@niccjohnson · Chief Musicologist, DJ and Tech Founder
@adammarx13 @rrhoover Very good point Adam and definitely something we had to think about carefully from day one. One choice was to focus on a service that sits on top of streaming platforms, rather than getting into music licensing etc.
Streaming is here to stay but it needs a lot more premium subscribers in order for any of these businesses to be around for the long term. This is where I think we can add significant value.
We want to partner with these services and through our app help them convert free users to premium subscribers.
Apart from that we will have an autonomous ecosystem in the long term - with a particular focus on people who have not converted to streaming yet, but see the $9,99 a month and the complexity of some services as a major hurdle.
We will also be partnering up with hardware manufacturers to offer the Muru experience across a range of music services and content providers.
With Muru we want to focus more on the user experience than anything else and ensure that you as a music listener get the best music, best recommendation and above all, the most flexibility when discovering new music.
Hope this answers your question, but happy to chat more about this @adammarx13
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