Imagine RYM with mobile apps, TV, and "scrobbling": Announcing our stretch goals!

30 November, 2015

Update: Since reaching our campaign goal, we have revised our stretch goals downward - we're already $7k closer to the first goal! Read the latest update for details.

In only the 6th day of our campaign, we hit the 50% mark. And we still have 30 days to go!

Conventional wisdom states that the majority of a campaign's funds are earned in the first and last couple of days. However, our campaign has been steadily earning around $2,300 per day since the initial spike and hasn't yet shown any signs of slowing down.

We feel that there's a great chance that we could now exceed our original target, so we wanted to finally announce our stretch goals!

Goal 1: $75,000 $68,000 - Rich API + Mobile Apps August 2016 (API), September 2016 (Mobile apps) Summary: An API is a way for people to write their own programs/sites that interact with Sonemic. Reaching our first stretch goal will allow us to build a much better API. Having a much better API will allow us to make mobile apps. We'll build both if we reach this stretch goal. New API endpoints: Updating your profile Writing/editing reviews Accessing data on albums/songs/films/games Obtaining statistics about your collections/ratings Creating custom charts Accessing notifications

Native Android & iOS applications

Faster and more responsive mobile experience



Rate, tag, catalog, review items



Online and offline access to your catalog, ratings, and reviews



Push notifications for new messages and notifications



Create custom charts and save them for offline access More details

Goal 2: $100,000 $90,000 - Television June 2016 (beta) / August 2016 (release) Summary: Our second stretch goal would allow us to build a TV site. We would focus on detailed data on series, seasons, and episodes. Support for rating, cataloging, and tagging shows, seasons, and individual episodes

Pages for series, seasons, and episodes, with credits and extensive metadata

Custom TV charts, with the ability to find the best episodes/seasons/series by year/decade, genre, language, popularity, and more!

Ability to filter and discover shows by availability on streaming services (e.g. Netflix, Hulu)

Reviews and commentary for both seasons and episodes More details

Goal 3: $125,000 $110,000 - Music, Film, Game, and TV logging (a.k.a "scrobbling") August 2016 Summary: Our third goal would allow us to add support for tracking when you listen to music/watch a film/series, or play a game. We'll call this "logging" rather than "scrobbling"; for example, you'll have a "Music log", a "Film log", etc.



Our approach will be different from existing implementations: your listening and other data will be more accurate/clean, but will require some intervention on your part. We will give you more freedom in manually entering data, and will display detailed statistics about your listening/viewing/gaming habits. We will seamlessly integrate listening data into the rest of the site, such as displaying your # of listens next to a review, in your catalog, etc.. We won't have a "loved/banned" system since we already have ratings. Support for automatically logging your listening data.

Support for importing previous listening data from other scrobbling sites.

Support for manual tracking of films, games, tv shows, songs, and albums.

Ability to manually curate your listening history going as far back in time as you like.

Detailed statistics on your tracked media

Integration with your catalog and reviews (show # of listens within your catalog, next to your reviews, etc)

Custom charts for "most listened", "most watched", etc.

Recommendations based on listening habits in addition to ratings

Additional APIs for accessing/exporting/querying tracked data. More details

Goal 1: $68,000 - Rich API + Mobile Apps

An API is the #1 most requested feature for RYM, and has been in the top two for years. With Sonemic, we are launching a beta API that contains endpoints for searching, as well as managing some aspects of your collections and lists. We felt that this was robust enough to be useful for many applications (such as importing data), but we simply don't yet have the resources to build a full API.

Reaching this stretch goal would allow us to hire additional developer resources so that we could build a richer API. A rich API would be great for 3rd-party developers, and it would finally enable us to implement another top-10 request: mobile applications.

Mobile apps have also been highly requested for years. We've always told users that we can't build mobile apps until we build an API. During the development of Sonemic, we've placed a large focus on ensuring the site works well on mobile phones and tablets, since usage with those devices often accounts for up to 40% of our traffic. However, native apps provide a better experience. They are faster, they can interface directly with the OS to provide things like push notifications, and native apps make it easier to cache and process data offline so that you can have a better experience during those times that you don't have internet access.

With this stretch goal reached, we will have a rich API that will allow us to build these apps. We will focus on the core experience of Sonemic/Cinemos/Glitchwave: That is: rating, reviewing, cataloging, tagging, researching music/film/games, making charts, creating/editing lists, and communicating with others.

What we won't initially focus on for the mobile apps is database moderation (such as fixing mistakes on album pages, submitting album art to an album page, etc). You would still need to use a desktop or the mobile site if you want to contribute to the media databases.

Goal 2: $90,000 - Television

Television, books, and games are the most commonly requested additions to RYM. We decided to make a game site first because it was the most anticipated, and because we thought it had the least amount of representation online - although there are some game databases online, there are none that match RYM's feature set.

We feel that TV is the second-best choice in this regard. There are already tons of book sites - and while we think that our own book site would be a great competitor in this space, we think that TV is the most natural choice to expand after games, especially given that we have a film site already.

Goal 3: $110,000 - Music, Film, Game, and TV tracking (a.k.a "scrobbling")

$110k is an ambitious goal, and we feel this last stretch goal is only possible to reach with significant outside support: that is, from people who are not already members of rateyourmusic.com. That means that it's essential to spread the word about the campaign if you'd like to see this implemented!

Overview

When discussing stretch goals, some people mentioned to us that it would be awesome if they could combine the cataloging/rating/reviewing functionality of RYM with the "scrobbling" functionality of sites like last.fm.

We discussed this internally, and after much discussion and testing, we feel confident that we could implement such features as part of this campaign if we had just a small amount of additional resources. Our implementation would be based on our own ideas about how such a feature should work, and would thus be fundamentally different from other implementations - and we think that's for the best, because if we offer a feature that's already available on other sites, we want to differentiate ourselves and make the best version that we possibly can.

Philosophy

The word "scrobble" vs "music/film/game/TV log"

We're not going to call it "scrobbling", as we want to make it clear that we are not associated with last.fm, and that we are creating our own implementation, our own terms, based on our philosophy. We would call your history of listens your "Music log", your history of watching films your "Film log", etc. And as a generic term for the feature, we'll call it what it actually is: logging.

Structured vs auto-generated music database

If our understanding is correct, Last.fm takes a "submit first, add to database automatically" approach to tracking your music listens. This works on their site because the music database is essentially automatically generated based on scrobble data.

Sonemic would take a different approach. When you submit logging data to us automatically, we would only match what we know is an actual song that exists in our database. Any plays that didn't match would be pending, and you would have to resolve them manually in order for the song to appear in your statistics (they would appear in your list of recently-listened songs, though). Resolving a song involves either pointing to a song that already exists in the database, or adding the song to the Sonemic database yourself. Once a play is resolved, all future plays will be properly filed.

This approach has the advantage of having a clean, correct log of your data that correctly references the music in question. If you log a song by "Nemesis" then Sonemic will know that you like "Nemesis", not "One of 20 different bands that are named Nemesis".

The downside is that you'll have to spend some time going through your pending items and finding the relevant songs or adding them to the database if you want a 100% complete record of your listening.

We feel that this approach is better suited for our database, and is an approach that many people would prefer.

Rules, "cheating", weighting, and manual editing of data

On last.fm, there seems to be a lot of discussion around users who are cheating, about the "30-second listen" rule, and other similar things. At Sonemic, we already have a comprehensive system for detecting abuse, called the weighting algorithm, and we would apply it to logging as well.

That means that on Sonemic, we would allow more manual entry and manipulation of your listening history. After all, it is your listening data. There's no reason not to allow you to tell others that a certain artist is your most listened-to, just because your logging software wasn't working. We would allow you to log listens manually, and log listens that precede the introduction of this feature (or any date in the past!). If you want to construct a history of your listening habits going back to the time you kept them in a paper journal, you're welcome to do that.

To combat manipulation, we would simply rely on our weighting algorithm. This gives users more freedom over what their listening data looks like without worrying about compromising aggregated statistics about such data.

"Loving" vs rating

Challenges

Sonemic already has a 5-star (half-star interval) rating system, which is more comprehensive than a "love/ban" system. If you love or hate something you're listening to, you can simply rate it. If you want to make a list of things you love, you can add songs to a playlist titled "Songs I love." We'll add a rating interface directly in your list of recently-listened songs.

In general, the largest challenge is going to be solving the dozens of minor edge cases that other logging sites have already dealt with and solved (things like strange tags being submitted, untitled songs, etc). This is a natural stage in software development; it will just take some time before the experience is as smooth as it is on other sites.

It should also be noted that it will be difficult for us to get certain third-party apps to add support for logging listens on Sonemic. We're thinking of Spotify on iOS in particular - for Android and Desktop apps, there are simple solutions that allow you to change the host you want to send data to, but in closed ecosystems it might be more difficult

Budgeting

After fees and perk fulfillment, 100% of the revenue for the first and second stretch goals will be dedicated to hiring more development and design help, whether it's in the form of contract work or employees.

$8,600 of the third stretch goal will go toward servers and cloud services, which will be used to provide a "scrobbling" API that is compatible with that used by post.audioscrobbler.com, allowing many existing plugins and apps to work with Sonemic. The remaining funds raised as part of the third stretch goal will go toward hiring more development and design help.

What if we don't fully reach a stretch goal?

If the final amount of funds raised is in-between two stretch goals, the funds will be spent as follows:

Between 50k-68k: We will focus exclusively on APIs first. If we still have resources leftover, we will begin developing mobile apps.

Between 68k-75k: We will place the additional funds into making better mobile apps.

Between 75k-90k: We will cut some of the features of the television site in order to fit available resources, and launch the more limited version. We'll add the rest of the features in a future update.

Between 90k-100k: We will spend this money on general improvement of the Sonemic network, as voted by users.

Between 100k-110k: We will first focus exclusively on the basic music-related goals: import of previous listening data, manual and automated tracking of listening data, and providing statistics on listening data. If we still have resources, we will allocate them towards tracking other media (film/TV/games) and detailed statistics. Any remaining resources will be spent on implementing as much of the rest of the stretch goal as possible.

Next update

This has been a long and comprehensive update - thanks for reading everything! Our next update later this week will focus on our two new Project Managers. Both are really excited about the new song-related features in Sonemic, and want to make sure they are as useful and interesting as possible. So songs will be the main focus of the next update!

Posted by Hossein Sharifi on November 30, 2015.

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