Tracks Flow: goals, objectives, principles

In the last article “Fidel - everything” we made a small teaser for the new musical project Tracks Flow . Today, I would like to elaborate on the goals and capabilities of the service, as well as share the statistics.

We have been working in the music market for a long time and experience has allowed us to single out those tasks, without solving which, a successful business in this market is hardly possible. So:
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1. It is necessary to provide the user with a single window of access to all music content of the network.
Music is 2 components: metadata and files.
Metadata. At first we thought that the Last fm API would be enough to access all the musical metadata. But this is a mistake. So, for example, discography at last fm is frankly crooked, new items appear late, well, etc. The most complete and correct base for discograms on Discogs, so we had to sweat a lot to negotiate with them. But it was worth it, now on the artist's page you can see what kind of full-fledged albums, singles he has left, compilations in which the artist participated. By the way, from a technical point of view, the task turned out to be not as trivial as it might seem at first glance. But about this next technical post.

Now the files. Where are the music files stored? We have identified the following sources:

* In social networks. Given the specifics of our market and the availability of one site, we decided to start from this segment. Now Tracks Flow can play music from tumblr.com , soundcloud.com , something from ex.fm , and, of course, vk.com . The task is to expand the pool of sources. In the near future, we will have the PROMODJ catalog available. Thanks to them for providing xml. We are also in the process of negotiating with junodownload.com and with thankyou.ru for indexing databases.
* On users' computers. While we are not going to tell the whole idea, but the desktop application is under development.
* In cloud services.
* On platforms from copyright holders. The last item on this list is absurd, of course, but it is. The money that asks the copyright holder, no one is able to pay. Therefore, it is necessary to go to negotiations having weighty arguments in the form of traffic, for example. It is necessary to convince them that by reducing the cost of content they will receive, in the end, more.

Thus, we want access to all metadata and files.

2. Further, the entire catalog needs to be delivered to you on any devices, to play at any time, regardless of the Internet connection, in any place. Mobile applications with offline mode solve this issue completely. The application for iOS, we have already sent for consideration to Apple, we are waiting. As it becomes available, we will inform.

3. Must be free. There is a feeling that while in Russia it is too early to talk about paid accounts. We have different ideas on how to monetize this project, but it’s too early to talk about it.

4. You need to pay royalties to artists. Otherwise, everything is empty. Difficult and big subject, about it separately if interesting.

These are the principles we are guided by creating this service.

Now some statistics. In fact, the only marketing activity that we had was the announcement of the service in Habré.
The article looked - 36 738 people.
Invites requested - 6,000
Activated - 4 500
Registered - 3 000
Every day goes 17% of registered users. The average visit lasts 66 minutes, during which time the user manages to view 16 pages, listen to 11 tracks and add 1.5 tracks to a favorite.

And we have open vacancies, who are interested, see the relevant section .