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Sunoh.fm launches platform for social discovery of Indian music
Sunoh.fm is a new social networking and music discovery platform for Indian music fans. It is essentially a social networking site, where you can connect with friends and view the music library of your friends. In the process, you discover new, interesting music from your social graph. Information aggregated from all the users (number of plays) is used to determine what artists are popular and what music tracks are currently ‘hot’.
They also provide a desktop client, which is essentially a Windows Media player plugin, that enables to stream music to the desktop.
Think of it as an Indian version of last.fm.
My issues and concerns with the site:
The cursor pointer and site navigation work in a funky way at times. Instead of the traditional cursor that you’re used to while clicking links, you still see the pointer — that kinda leaves you wondering at times if you indeed clicked the link or not.
A bigger issue is that the site does not have a music library of its own. So, for starters, not all tracks are available for listening on the site. A limited subset of the tracks are available, but they too simply launch the track from an external site (MusicMazaa). I’m not sure if that is the long term strategy for the site, but if so, I think its a huge drawback.
I think its a good attempt & it will be interesting to see how well they execute.
The site is currently in limited beta and I have a few invites. Leave a comment with your email if you want a beta invite.
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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Comments
9 Responses to “Sunoh.fm launches platform for social discovery of Indian music”
I agree I wasnt able to click any link..about us or anything on Safari.. this is lame.. pls stop making such lame rip-offs.
From vBharat.com » Sunoh.fm launches platform for social discovery of Indian music…
Sunoh.fm is a new social networking and music discovery platform for Indian music fans. It is essentially a social networking site, where you can connect with friends and view the music library of your friends….
I have to agree that the site needs a lot of usability changes. To start, display the stuff in a ‘normal’ manner. They probably have great javascript hackers working for them, but guys cool javascript is of no use if I don’t know if a link is a link.
There are some kind of bars along with each song in an album. I have no idea what it means. No permalinks, no SEO. No matter how good a product is, you need SEO strategy as well as users ’share’ content on your site. Apart from other things, the site is slow (they are using S3 for static file hosting). It could be because they just launched and may not have planned for the spike.
As Pranav mentioned, the music library is missing. If I want to play the most popular songs, there is no way to play all those songs in playlist. It can be done in one click on Dhingana from homepage.
IMHO, Sunoh’s team concentrated too much on technology and perhaps tried to code things toughest possible way (Programmers Ego!) and spent less time on usability, SEO.
PS: Just realized there is no ‘Back’ functionality. Closing the browser now, will certainly visit the site once they have figured out basic usability!
Pranav,
Thanks for your feedback. Yeah the cursor is funky
Basically when the cursor is up, it means server is processing your request. Currently the app is slow due to few backend issues. But over time you are going to see less of the cursor since the site would load faster. As for music library, i would like to clarify that we are a social music discovery site, and not a typical online radio. We want users to discover artists and music their friends are listening to. So the best way to discover music at Sunoh.fm would be by visiting artist profiles or friend profiles.
Gaurav,
As for permalinks, we do have permalinks to artist profiles. It’s just they are not displayed on the front-end. Should be fixed soon. As for SEO, we are still looking into it. As for the slowness, that should be fixed by month-end. And as for being able to make playlist of songs of you like - as mentioned above, Sunoh.fm’s focus is on discovery. Discovery of Artists and their music. In other words, there is very less likelihood of us delivering a playlist kinda functionality.
“There are some kind of bars along with each song in an album.” - Please try clicking on the song name or that arrow. When you would that, you would see lot of cool stuff
COP
You need to be logged into the site before the links work.
Great application, concept Vivek. Would love to see a Facebook app around this.
Best.
Idea sounds good. However, I have to agree with others that lot of work needs to go. Some of the basic links are not working on page. OR, they are working, however I am unable to figure out..
If implemented well, idea has potential to rock!!
cheers
@vivek,
I understand the social discovery part, but if the user cant listen to the tracks on the site, they’ll need to jump else where for listening to the tracks. I think thats a big no-no. For all your efforts to bring folks on to your site, you want to keep them there.
Another aspect related to social discovery is that social music discovery makes a lot of sense when it comes to international music, just due to the variety of genres and artists out there.
However, when it comes to the Indian music scene, there isnt a whole lot of variety out there. Bolllywood and pop music dominate and normally, the better soundtracks always surface to the top somehow. So, for an average user, he’s not going to uncover anything different than what he’s gonna come across on Raaga or Indiamusic online.
Probably, the site will serve well for those interested in the long tail.
Thanks for the clarification, Vivek. I did click the bar and saw the info related the album/song. However, I still am not sure what those bars mean.
I have exactly same views as Pranav.
Sunoh.fm w/o music is similar to Google providing title and summary on its SERPs without any links. I agree with Pranav that Indian music industry is very different than US. There is barely any Indi music that needs to be ‘discovered’.
Most of the music is out there. The best a service can do is ‘remind’ users of music from the past, which they have heard (and perhaps liked) in the past but haven’t heard the song in a while.
IMO, the current concept is good, but most likely the timing isn’t. This kind of app is too early for Indian market. Obviously, it can be evolved into something more interesting may be something desktop based.