With the highly successful launch seen by Pandora’s iPhone app, streaming digital radio seems ready to finally go mainstream. Unfortunately, as great as Pandora is, its music recommendations can shy towards music you already know – you may like the song that gets recommended, but there’s a good chance you’ve heard it before. For listeners looking for something that’s entirely new, there’s StumbleAudio, a streaming music service exclusively for indie music that is launching today with a catalog of over 120,000 artists and 2 million songs.
As the name implies, StumbleAudio is designed to help listeners discover new music, rather than find their old favorites. The site uses a search format very similar to streaming music services like Jango and Pandora. Instead of searching for a specific artist or song, users are asked to name one of their favorite bands. The site then generates a new “station” comprised of similar artists (but usually not the one you asked for).
Once a song begins playing, users can either assign a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘down’, which helps the system generate a more suitable playlist. If you don’t like a song, you can click “Stumble”, which shuffles to the next recommendation. And, unlike Pandora, there’s no limit to how many songs you can skip. But the best thing about StumbleAudio is that it lets you listen to an artist’s entire album – just click the arrows on the CoverFlow-like album art to skip to the album’s next song.
If StumbleAudio has a weakness, it’s its recommendation system, which doesn’t seem to be particularly accurate (unsurprising given the huge volume of content available). Fortunately, the ability to skip through tracks indefinitely makes this more of a nuisance than anything. The service’s other weakness is that it is currently only available through its website – there isn’t any external music player or compatibility with mobile devices (both of these are in development and are expected within the next few months).
StumbleAudio will see competition from a number of other players in the music recommendation space, including Meemix, Pandora, and to some extent, Last.fm.
Cool site. Personally I’m a fan of Jango out of the services mentioned, but I like the idea behind SA.
Sounds just like what Yahoo music has been doing for years…
Great interface… but no sound so far (”lost connection to streaming server”).
Does it work for anyone outside the US?
Yeah it does
there is only one exit here and it’s name is pandora and they already built this themselves…dead pool
For me SA is only one way cause i always see this at pandora http://www.pand....com/restricted
Jango?
What fool still uses Pandora if there’s the better last.fm?
Nothing from the office, it might be blocked. Really, though, someone explain to me the “indie” music scene. Is it really more effective to ghettoize this music? Wouldn’t it get more listenership mixed in with “mainstream” music? If I heard a performer I liked on Pandora, I wouldn’t care whether or not it was “indie”. Or is snob appeal really that effective as a marketing tool.
I’m an intermitent indie rock fan.
And actually mp, no one believes the indie thing anymore.. indie is just a name attached to a certain style of music now, it’s a genre. I’m not sure what you mean by ghettoize though?
So your point about not caring if it is indie or not implies that ‘indie’ refers to the intent/business behind the band, but that isn’t really true any longer. It’s a genre just like classic rock–and while a band like The Darkness isn’t technically “classic rock” in terms of age, it is still charactorized as classic rock sometimes because it sounds like classic rock. So it really is more about the sound (for me anyway) then the identity.
I found this site a few days ago – great indi music recommendations and you can mix them in with one of the best playlist generators that I’ve used to date and import to iTunes.
http://www.yooglimusic.com
The iPhone has about a 1% market penetration among US cell phone users.
Is that REALLY mainstream?
Love it. Quick and easy to use. iTunes should have done something like this.
That’s great for indie musical artists. Hopefully the service will last because its tough for anyone other than Apple to make money from music online. Who has? Anyone?
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“but there’s a good chance you’ve heard it before”
Huh? I use Pandora exclusively to find new music. I completely disagree with that statement.
I don’t know where they are pulling their tracks from, but they have some of my music on there and I never licensed it to them. If they are playing tracks without permission or pulling them from someone else’s servers, they are definitely headed for the dead pool.
I agree with the pandora fans. SA sounds like an upgrade, but I really love my pandora and their music choices are definitely indie for the band stations that I create. Will check out SA.
Thanks for the tip!
Selling independent or other new music is tough.
I know a guy who’s an SEO genius who is floundering at developing an independent music site. He can dominate the relevant search terms (say the name of a band), but who’s looking for the name of a band that they haven’t heard of?
If you do give people a selection of new music they’ve never heard before, most people will hear a few songs that they can’t groove with, then they’ll turn the channel or leave the site and that’s the end of it.
I grew up listening to “classic rock”, which has had longevity because it is youth-oriented music. It sounded good to boomers when they were growing up, and also sounded good to many Gen X’ers, like myself. Boomers stopped listening to new music, so the dial in my area is dominated by stations that play the same Doobie Brothers song on the morning drive in and on the evening drive out.
When I hit 30 or so I got really sick of “classic rock.” I started looking for something fresh to listen to: “fresh” can be from pretty much any time that decent recordings are available: anything from 60’s psychedelia to the New York Rap of the 80’s. The main thing is that it can’t be something that plays on the radio 10 times a day.
The formula that works, both on the radio and on the web, is to make a healthy mix of “music you’ve heard before” and “music you haven’t”. The latter can be a mix of music that’s really new and music that’s old and obscure.
I think last.fm plays too much popular music. That’s a general problem of social reccomendation systems, since they have a bias towards popular items. I think Pandora strikes a better balance, because it’s reccomendations are based on a feature set of musical characteristics and doesn’t have this bias.
hey techcrunch team…
this has nothing to do with this article, but does have to do with your site load times….
my god man.. have you guys done any kind of site/timing analysis regarding the amount of time to load your site into a browser (firefox/IE/Etc…)
the fact that you have god knows how many 3rd party ads you’re pulling in, makes the load time garbage…
i’m sure i’m not the only one who’s noticed, but maybe just the only one who gives a damn… remember the user.. the guy who has to wait for a few secs until this garbage gets loaded… unless you want plugins that completely remove jscript/ad network placed ads to really grow in popularity…
peace
Ummmmm……Pandora IS “the pandora of indie music.” Do you even use the service?
I still say contact your local college music radio station. If you take the human out of music recommendations, no matter how good, you won’t get something you’re looking for.
Sounds exactly like Last.fm to me… What’s different?
Very cool design indeed, but I agree with Mike, robots recommending music without any human intervention just aren’t very efficient. I personally had a very hard time finding something I liked on SA.
And as far as finding “indie hidden treasures” (that whole debate about what is indie is pretty pointless – it’s pretty obvious what’s on display here is not-Madonna, not-Coldplay, not-Garth Brooks, and that’s a sufficient definition), I vastly prefer Jamendo.com. No links to iTunes and Amazon there, you can just download the music on the spot, for free!
The one thing they’ve done well here is identified a popular niche to provide their services. In terms of specializing in Indie rock, I don’t think there is a tremendous amount of competition out there. This is a risky space, however, with a leader like Pandora…. http://www.read...ex.php?RTA=web2
Very cool, though I think they’ll need more content on the site to generate SEO traffic and new users.
Just ’stumbleaudioed’ Xavier Rudd and got some good results.
This looks cool! I love Pandora, but as an unsigned artists, when I tried to get my music on there, I couldn’t because the required a physical cd with a bar code. No mp3s sent over the web!! Shocking, no?
So, assuming that StumbleUpon’s submission policy is different, this will be a powerful resource for unsigned/diy artists to get some exposure, and cultivate a fan base.
Recent web happenings seem to make something clear: unsigned artists need ways to collaborate on music online, cultivate and engage a fan base, and profit from their works. There are millions of these artists, and it’s about time they got some exposure.
Going to check out stumble upon, hopefully their recommendation system isn’t too bad:)
Note that this product/service has nothing to do with Stumbleupon. You’d think the author of the article would have checked that.
I don’t think the author implied that at all.
Related link: http://digg.com...ns_StumbleAudio
You’re retarded. Pandora is skewed towards your musical taste. So if you like poppy shit, that’s what it plays for you. All I get on Pandora is stuff that’s unheard of.
What if I wanted to hear indie artists that sound like the poppy artists?
Nice post, you got some good points there – thank you.
I can not hear any thing, nothing plays. Is anyone else having this problem
This site gets a big thumbs down from this indie music snob. I tried to search for recommendations on some very popular indie groups like Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, The Dodos and The Duke Spirit….nothing. While I do find Pandora’s music recommendations limited and redundant at times, at least they have these artists catalogued!
Well, StumbleAudio is indeed a good news to all of those independent musicians out there. However, it seemed like there’s got to be some technical problems on the website. I hope they’ll fix it up.
It’s nice, but I use Meemix.com, it’s quite similar to Pandora – but get’s my taste in music fast. this is just a whole bunch of music thrown in together…
Naming is very confusing vs StumbleUpon… hope the creators of StumbleAudio reconsider their branding before they get a C&D from eBay (who aren’t likely to be as forgiving as the StumbleUpon crew themselves would be).
FYI:
1) Stumble is a generic term, not trademarkable.
2) They don’t have any patents on the process (if there could be any) that StumbleAudio is infringing on
3) Look and feel is not patentable or copyrightable as lawsuits of Apple vs. Microsoft showed.
The real question is – should people now stop doing everything afraid that the big bad wolf (eBay) will come to sue them.
I found a similar public site Project Playlist where i can listen the music and i can download the mp3 file, i hope do you like it.
I wrote something more here
http://www.navi...oni-e.html#sres
If you like Stumble, check out http://www.toprockstar.com.
Doesn’t work. The stream won’t play.
Works like a charm. Maybe your firewall blocks RTMP traffic (flash streaming protocol).
Surprisingly, SA works for me way better than Pandora. I have found many songs I like very much. To be able to change the song without ant limitations and its simple interface makes SA favorable.