Upbeat :: Blog

news from the team who builds upbeat :: the internet's music charts

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Upbeat Team's Favorite Songs of the Week

1. Sam Smith - Money On My Mind

2. Bit Funk - Soul Satisfaction

3. St. Vincent - Birth In Reverse

4. Aloe Blacc - The Man

5. Hayden James - Permission To Love

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Featured Artist of the Week: Bondax

Upbeat introduces to you a young duo out of Britain, who's electro-style is taking the internet by storm...and climbing the Upbeat charts.

Put well by Shawn Reynaldo (XLR8R):

Bondax has been simmering below the surface for a while now, but there's little question that last year's "Baby I Got That" took the teenage duo to a new level of recognition. Granted, the song is an almost impossibly catchy piece of sun-kissed electronic pop, but it's doubtful that anyone anticipated just how big of a single it would be. The duo has a clear affinity for funk- and soul-flavored pop, but also makes sure to include plenty of nods to the feelgood anthems of '90s house and garage. It's light, it's carefree, and it's unquestionably pop, but we're guessing that's entirely the point.

Check out Bondax's other shining, pop gem 'Giving It All' below and give it some love on the Upbeat charts.

▶ Play Bondax - Giving It All

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v2.0 Changelog

Here are the new changes for Upbeat v2.0:

- Site wide search for artists or songs (search)

- More genres (Blues, Jazz, Country) plus more subgenres

- artist biographies added automatically to submissions, and are displayed on the comments page for the song

- submission via link OR on-site search

- song seeking

- user inbox for all your submission and comment replies

- threaded comments for meaningful conversation about the music

- back/forward history for all the sections of the sites, without music interruption

- Reset password

- Remember Me 

- Better urls:

    - /g/:genre (e.g. /g/rock, /g/jazz/, /g/country) will show the genre

   - /u/:username (e.g. /u/phil, /u/datam0$h) will show the users submissions and comments

   - /s/:songid/comments (e.g. /s/23/comments) will show the song comments section and artist bio

- various architecture improvements

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Baby Come Back: Behavior of visitors from Reddit, Hacker News, and Press Articles

Data pulled from: Oct 11 - Nov 11, 2013

  Our favorite articles about startups use real data to provide insight into how businesses learn and adapt, and are devoid of the typical press BS with inflated user stats and cheesy CEO quotes. I’d like to present to you our findings through various popular user acquisition sources over the past month for Upbeat, the internet’s music charts.

Note: These stats only include direct referrals, the remainder of visitors were acquired via aggregator sites (feedly, wwwhatsnew, pulsenews, etc) and direct traffic.

Total New Users: 3,633

Total New Unique Visitors: 26,414

Time on Site (avg): 00:11:15

Time on Site (mobile): 00:02:58

Time on Site (for returning visitors): 00:13:16

Total Songs Submitted: 2,654

Locations: 130 Different Countries

In order of most visitors: USA, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Brazil, India.

Reddit: various posts to sub-reddits relevant to music/technology

Total Visitors: 14,631

Mobile Visitors: 777 (5.3%)

Time on Site (avg): 6:50

Visited a 2nd Time: 10,676 (72.9%)

Signed Up: 1,452

Hacker News: a post about how we got our first 1,000 users

Total Visitors: 419

Mobile Visitors: 26 (6.2%)

Time on Site (avg): 26:51

Visited a 2nd Time: 398 (94.9%)

Signed Up: 202

Mashable Press Article:

Total Visitors: 2,135

Mobile Visitors: 286 (13.39%)

Time on Site (avg): 21:31

Visited a 2nd Time: 1,096 (51.33%)

Signed Up: 568

LifeHacker Press Article: 

Total Visitors: 5,933

Mobile Visitors: 680 (11.5%)

Time on Site (avg): 13:57

Visited a 2nd Time: 5,479 (92.3%)

Signed Up: 1,411

Takeaways

1. We need to build a mobile app. Time on site for mobile visitors is less than a quarter that of desktop visitors and we know a huge amount of people are listening to music on their phones these days.

2. We need to drive more traffic to the site. Our average time on site (and user feedback) shows that there is heavy engagement -- but we need more people to make the charts more compelling and the ranking algorithm more effective.

3. Posting to Reddit is more effective than some press articles. Besides the traffic it drove, we also received a tremendous amount of good feedback from people all over the world which helped us prepare for bigger traffic spikes resulting from the press articles.

Upbeat is growing fast and improvements will be driven by the great community of music lovers that we’re trying to foster. We’d love to gain some more insights into our visitors and users and are looking into various analytics providers. Please send any recommendations/tips to [email protected].

Thanks for reading,

The Upbeat Team

Discuss on Hacker News

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Upbeat: Reddit for Music

How We Got 1,000 Users In A Weekend

Upbeat is the internet's music charts. We’ve bootstrapped the entire thing, and have already seen some exciting traction. We’d like to tell you about our experience so far.

Technology

Our application is built from the ground up with performance and scalability in mind. We use some of the latest, yet proven, technologies (Node.js, Redis, and Angular.js) to build a highly scalable and maintainable web app. We feel that it is critical to provided a consistent, sophisticated user experience across multiple platforms, so we created a mobile first responsive design with a minimalist, yet effective, UI. We are leveraging Soundcloud’s awesome streaming API and track database to allow user’s to submit songs and curate them by genre, utilizing a ranking algorithm similar to Reddit’s. This results in what we hope to be the internet’s live music billboard charts.

Our Plan for Getting Early Users

We are taking a calculated approach in to attract users to our new application. After researching how other startups gained traction in their early days, we know it is important to target a niche group of early adopters — for us, those are music bloggers.

We put together a list of about 300 blogger emails and have wrote personal beta invites to each and every one of them. So far we have had a great response (~10% conversion) which has given us great initial feedback on the app. After our first round of fixes we geared up for the next round of users.

Fortunately, I run a music blog/email newsletter called Noon Pacific, which has a subscriber base of about 15,000 people and is comprised of loyal music lovers, so it was natural to promote the app to them first. From one email blast to this list, we saw over 400 sign ups in one day (that’s ~2.6% conversion rate), which was incredible. We learned some scaling lessons on this day, and after a few more tweaks based on great feedback through email/twitter, we were even more amped to see what our next user acquisition plan would result in.

Reddit. I’ll just say we were beyond stoked when we saw it on the front page of /r/programming. We saw some insane amounts of traffic from our Reddit “hug” and came away with another 600 users and the sign ups are still trickling in.

And now Hacker News. We realize we are still hitting the early adopters of apps by hitting these select targets, but the feedback we’ve seen is too invaluable to pass up, and we’re learning a lot about scaling early on so that we can better prepare to ‘cross the chasm’, as Geoffrey Moore would say.

Where We’re Headed

We are solving a real problem: There is not a good channel for music discovery outside of what the major record labels pay to put in front of you. We think there is great demand, and a genuine need, for a democratic voting process for songs on the internet. We are going to be the ones who bring that to you. We’re passionate about music, technology, and experiences that can change the way you live and work. There’s a lot of work to do and we’re excited about every minute of it. We welcome any and all feedback and hope you are inclined to sign up!

  Thank You,

Clark // Shaun // Phil

The Upbeat Team

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