I've been working on an AI detector for the last few months. Updated it to handle Suno V5 on Wednesday - looks like it's very similar to V4.5. Am curious to see how this Studio version impacts the model I've trained.
After login it's free. But my site has been targeted by a lot of spam/abuse over the last decade, and login is something I've needed to set up to avoid that :(
I make my living off these platforms (primarily the second). So in essence, my discovery-centric services are viable products. That said, I'm not sure that's 100% what he was after in the Twitter thread this article was based on: https://twitter.com/jherskowitz/status/1466078600822677513
I’m a musician and Indie Shuffle was my first “break.”
It gave about 20,000 plays which BLEW MY MIND at the time. Nothing like waking up to a huge increase
Today I’m a modest success. Several songs have 1-2m plays on Spotify and I make $800 / month from streaming. It’s just something I do in my evenings for fun.
I owe my success to outlets Indie Shuffle and SubmitHub—- I’ve found Spotify really privileges discovery for major label artists.
I appreciate the counter-take — it seems like almost every take I read on the modern music business is coming from people who don't actually know what the reality on the ground is.
And gd submithub is awesome, I have been sucked right in, making submissions, buying credits, rating songs. It's taken up my whole morning, well done!
Sounds like a perfectly fine mismatch between proper bootstrapping and the mindset of growing investment fueled by some hypothetical value proposition.
Is submithub what I think I am seeing? Basically a solution to a spam problem by offering a channel that requires the equivalent of stamps so that senders rate-limit themselves, focusing a bit more on quality over quantity? If that's not a complete misperception I like it very much, great niche-spotting!
What I thought "Discovery" was is finding new music given some other music preferences - like Spotify's curated playlists or Song Radios. Submithub doesn't fit that to me - it's more like a social network (and I guess you make your money the same way, via advertising).
As someone who pulled this off, it was less about discovery and more about being part of it already. The problems are much easier to understand and address when they're actually problems you're facing yourself.
Mine isn't anywhere near paying the bill yet, but it's at 60+ customers for $20/year.
It's exactly as you described. I had a pain point which was trivial for most, but not for me. No existing solutions solved it properly so I decided to make it myself.
While searching for a solution, I found that a lot of other people had the same problem. It was bad enough for them that they took time out of their day to write their complaints online.
In solving my own problem, I was creating something that other people might've pay for. And they did!
I quickly learned that marketing was the most important part of the process.
Hey, two quick suggestions, mostly related to the actual beatoftheday.org website:
1) Put some info on your homepage about what this actually does. When I first landed I wasn't sure what the purpose of the website was.
2) Resize your images! For example your header logo is massive and took a good 5+ seconds to download. You have a max-width of 994px, but the image itself is a whopping 14,976px wide!
Some info would go a long way. I'm still not sure what kind of collaboration you are referring to. Are we talking collecting mp3 files? Curating playlists? Or creating music?
There's a link tucked away in the upper right (on desktop) labeled "Info" that explains the site. I agree with you though that at least a sentence or two on the main page would be smart.
I'd like to be able to sort by 'liked' and by 'baked'. If I'm looking for a new track to collaborate on I want to see the ones with the fewest 'baked' ratings.
Also, I'd love for there to be a way to see the full lineage of a given track. Perhaps even be able to fork it if, e.g., I liked what contributors 1, 2 and 3 did, but not #4, I could work off of #3's rendition.
SubmitHub is not paying to get added to playlists. It's paying to guarantee that your song is considered by the playlister - with no promises that it's actually shared. If they do decide to share it, no additional money is required.
You're basically saying: "Hey, if you give me 3 minutes of your time to listen to my song and let me know what you think I'll give you $1."
For reference, roughly 1 in 5 submissions end up getting shared. So if you send to 100 playlisters, 80 of them will say "thanks but no thanks" and roughly 20 of them will add it to their playlist for no additional cost.
Hey, SubmitHub founder here. Sorry for the confusion. You get two types of credits: standard (the 2 you saw) and premium (which you have to buy). Your standard credits refresh every 4 hours (assuming you use them).
When going through the submission process you'll see it prompts you whether you want to use your standard (free) credits or premium credits. If you don't have any premium ones -- and don't want to buy them -- make sure you stick to the 'standard' path.
The core idea behind SubmitHub's "model" is that for decades it's been near-impossible to catch the attention of bloggers/playlisters/curators/whatever. Our system dangles a carrot (~$1) in front of them to guarantee a response+feedback about your song (with the ideal outcome of course being that they share your song - no additional costs involved).
And I appreciate you are matching musicians with audiences, super valuable service. This particular credits ambiguity registered as a pretty grey pattern. My expectation was just say "$10 to put this in front of an audience of x," or "share a song with our network and then buy premium features," instead of breadcrumbing the incremental commitment screens before the hard upsell to complete it. I'm sure your mixpanel or other metrics show your abandoned carts data and if this pattern is working, it's working.
For pro musicians who are committed to your product as a promotion path, perhaps they don't care about that credits ambiguity because they go in with a marketing budget and know what they're going in for. For me, I will stick with making music for fun. I wish your team success at their mission.
Hey, SubmitHub founder here. Top tip is to do a bit of research before jumping into it - it will dramatically improve what you get out of it. Here's a really good recent podcast by an artist who managed a 68% approval rate: https://pod.co/bandhive/submithub-success-strategies-steve-m...
I'm wondering if this is also be applicable in the case of a closed combustion wood burning fireplace? (internally, at least). My understanding is that they create quite a tight seal when all closed up.
> Wood burners cause less indoor pollution than open fires. “But every time you open the door, you reduce the stove to an open fire and particulate matter floods into the home,” he said. The peaks take an hour or two to dissipate. “But by the time it comes down, someone opens the door again to refuel and you get spike after spike,” Chakraborty said. Some burners have filters, but these only reduce the pollution being vented outside.
I did a 20% project for Google Music back its early days, circa 2012. I was working on the Executive Compensation team at the time, but running a music blog called Indie Shuffle on the side. It's a long time ago, but I seem to recall naïvly hoping they'd embrace me with arms wide open and invite me to join their team + revamp their strategy.
I met with a couple members of their team who were open to entertaining me given my background with a music blog. I remember being really excited about it - and I spent a lot of time preparing a deck about how exposure provided by the Google Music blog could be used as leverage to give the platform legitimacy in the eyes of independent artists (something that SoundCloud was doing really well at the time).
A few senior leaders agreed to let me pitch my ideas, and after a fair bit of head-nodding, nothing actually happened.
I ended up leaving Google about 3 months later to take my music blog full-time (still up and running at https://www.indieshuffle.com, and eventually started a much-more successful music venture called SubmitHub - https://www.submithub.com). I count myself fortunate to say I have no regrets leaving Google.
Reflecting on the idea of 20% projects, I do appreciate that my managers gave me the opportunity to explore alternate opportunities within the company, and that the Google Music team was receptive to me poking my head into their affairs. I think it holds a lot of potential when it comes to retaining top talent that's at risk of jumping ship for something different, and made me feel like I was part of the larger company rather than simply stuck in a silo.
We're getting way off topic here, but I'm curious what your thoughts on the current state of the world on music blogging is. I was pretty big into following the music blog/hype machine scene in 2010-2014ish, and it seems like the other streaming services (particularly Spotify) have more or less killed that world with the exceptions of the biggest blogs, which seems pretty unfortunate to me.
Loaded question! I've done a lot of podcasts/interviews lately where I touch on this subject.
Spotify did indeed take away a lot of the "regular listeners" from music blogs, but they're not alone in the downfall of music blogs as a whole. I think a lot of that can be pegged on the way the internet has shifted in general. Music blogs lost a lot of things in that 2013-2015 era, including (but not limited to):
- A steep drop in advertising revenue (we used to charge $5+ CPM - but folks learned Google/Facebook were far more effective). This wasn't specific to the music blogging industry - pretty much all independent publishers went through this.
- Google giving 50% of their real-estate for song searches to a giant YouTube thumb. Killed SEO for music blogs overnight.
- Technology: Spotify just does music-listening tech better than any independent music blog could ever hope to.
So, in an age where Spotify is king and everyone's buzzing about TikTok, where do music blogs fit? And are they even relevant?
Heck yes they are! Thing is, music blogs are where people actually go to discover music. Spotify, on the flip side, caters toward "passive" listening experiences where they make sure you never have to think about it for yourself.
Net result is that for artists a targeted blog promotion campaign is still quite important as it can lead to valuable exposure within the industry: A&R teams at labels, Spotify editorial staff, and festival bookers (RIP) still look to music blogs to do the grunt work of sifting through the 25,000+ new songs coming out daily.
In 2015 I launched https://www.submithub.com/ to help music blogs deal with the hundreds of music submissions they were receiving daily. That platform has since taken off - recently passing its 16 millionth submission (in less than 5 years).
We allow artists to easily connect with blogs, Spotify playlisters, YouTube channels, Instagram/TikTok influencers and more -- and compensate those curators for the time they spend listening to and considering each submission. And believe it or not, one of the most-targeted outlet types on there is still the humble "blog".
I could go on for hours, but I'll leave it at that for now :)
Love this back and forth. I think I remember submitting a track with a collaborator to SubmitHub years ago and thinking it was neat that it even existed.
Was there an exit interview? Was any one curious about your plans?
In my future perfect alternate reality:
Google Ventures, GoogleX, or even just thwarted & bored midlevel manager aspiring to become an angel investor, would offer seed capital to any one turning in their badge.
"Hey @jasongrishkoff, if you ever need some cash for an idea, please talk to me first."
In my mind, that parting offer is central to Silicon Valley's magic. There's an apocryphal tale about a much disliked boss offering seed money to mutinous employees. I thought it was Shockley and the Traitorous Eight, but I can't find a cite.
They were very supportive of my departure to pursue my own business, and I've kept in touch with a number of folks there over the years. I was offered a "sabbatical" of sorts (assuming things didn't work out), but I declined that on grounds that accepting it would convey that I didn't have full faith in my ability to make it on my own. Thank goodness it all worked out in the end :-D
We helped the CEO and SVPs figure out how much to pay the company's top ~100. That meant we were hands on with performance bonuses, equity packages, hiring negotiations, promotions, and more.
> I suspect successful 20% time projects are the ones where permission is not required, and don't need someone else to implement?
Part of my proposal was that they bring me on to help them run their fledgling music blog, so it wasn't so much that they needed to execute much themselves -- more that they needed to decide the music blog was worth having a dedicated employee. At the time I think they were more focused on trying to get all their licensing ducks in a row.
The executive compensation team is really interesting – if you read this and have a moment, I'd love to hear anything that you're up for sharing such as:
* Was the purview of the team to craft a compensation "system," or to handle specific decisions / one-offs for exec comp?
* Was there a technical/quantitative aspect to this, ie were you all trying to make data-driven decisions on how to pay executives based upon pulling data, testing what comp packages worked etc, or was it more of a general analyze-the-market-and-make-recommendations process?
* To what extent were you advising CEOs/SVPs vs. actually making a call on what their reports would make comp-wise?
I didn't realize that teams like this (specialized comp analysis for top executives) existed, I always figured that it was baked into existing compensation-focused teams.
Some of this, for the top 5 to 7, is public in the annual proxy; not just at Google but everywhere. Due to the principal agent problem the public data conforms homogeneously due to the retention of consultants to “benchmark”. However it would be fascinating to hear the OPs answer.
Many many years ago I started as a junior employee in a big company together with a close friend. I was in finance, she was in HR. From time to time we had a drink to catch up and while I was doing unglamorous grunt work she was dealing with things like compensation packages for VPs, a short-list for a new regional CEO, the yearly ranking of all employees, etc. From time to time she gave me morsels of confidential information (like the salary a VP was getting or where they were planning to move the offices).It was a totally different ball game. That's why (among other things) it is very very unwise to cross off or even to confess stuff to HR, they are at a different level.
A petty thing I noticed with the years is that in HR, even very junior people will treat you with condescension and a sort of disdain. They know your salary and know where you were in the corporate ladder,they deal with the CEO packages so you are just a mediocre fish in the pond for them.
Skillful HR people also create a pretty solid network so if they leave the company they usually land sweet gigs in other companies or they can start a consulting agency. Out all the places of a corporation HR must be one of the best to be. (Cue hundreds of actual HR managers refuting me)
It's kind of interesting that the ~100 people would have a whole full-time support team just for assisting the decisions (not even making them) of their compensation.
Legally, you’d hire consultants anyways, so the cost basis is irrelevant. If you are required to have insurance or a specific license but you could avoid it through a costly self education process, you end up in the same place.
Going back, let’s say the top is $100M, let’s say the bottom is....(not sure how to guess this)....
Ok, so, the 7th executive made $20M based on this dated public doc (1). So let’s say the top slate is $250M. Going from $20M to $1M for everyone else is ... $900M? Anyways so $1.15B.
The real thing though it’s probably not the cash expenditure part. It’s probably the GROWTH you can get by designing it correct. You’d be okay to spend for results.
Anyways at a high level, let’s say you have 5 FTEs at $200k, plus overhead at 100%, that’s $2M on $1B or 0.5%? Meh, it’s a transaction cost.
I just wanted to say thank you for creating Indie Shuffle - I discovered some of my favourite songs on there! I've found music discovery to be quite hard, and Indie Shuffle has been a great source for my taste.
Glad you plugged indieshuffle. I checked it out and love it so far. I'm going to make a point to listen to music through it for a bit and see what I find. So far all the songs I've heard are Soundcloud and it's hard to find any information on how/where you source the material. Is it soundcloud-only? Any interest or plans for integrating a site like Bandcamp that's more oriented around me eventually supporting the artist by buying something?
Great story, thanks for sharing. What is it like being on google’s exec compensation team? I had no idea that was a thing and would love to listen to any more fun stories (only if you’re allowed to share).
Exec comp is definitely a little-known function of most major companies. Normally folks would outsource that type of work to consultants, but Google was big enough that it needed 2 of us full-time.
We helped the CEO and SVPs figure out how much to pay the company's top ~100. That meant we were hands on with performance bonuses, equity packages, hiring negotiations, promotions, and more.
The coolest part about it was getting to frequently join Laszlo Bock (head of People Ops at the time) when he met face-to-face with the CEO (first Eric, then Larry) and the SVPs to discuss all of the above. It got to the point where they all began to recognize me, which was pretty darn cool as a 20-something-year-old.
A byproduct of all that exposure was that I ended up being privy to a huge chunk of the "corporate drama" taking place in the upper ranks. It's been 7 years since I left, but as I'm sure you can understand, getting into details is probably a bit of a no-no :)
I'm so envious of your experiences. Geek me was completely oblivious to all that practical stuff.
Scott Galloway (?) has observed that successful entrepreneurs and CEOs are nurtured, just like all other professionals. So 20 somethings doing leadership stuff are more likely to be pretty good once they're 40 somethings. Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Michael Dell, many others are pretty good examples.
You could argue that Valve' s stated policy is 100% time. I'm not sure what the reality of it is but it seems like they really do want to let you work on whatever, although it might be more directed towards things that are valuable for the company and that you're good at, not just anything you desire to do on a whim. Employee Handbook: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...
It depends on the need/success of the project. My first 20% project was a disconnected caching filesystem back in 2005 and it was rapidly shifted to my 80% project as it solved a real need in our infrastructure.
If you want to test it, here's the link: https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker