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Startup Review : Uhooroo.com
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( The following Startup Review is being done with help from Harshal )
What is it about?
Well, Uhooroo describe itself as :
- A platform for musicians to show case their talent & get feedback from the music community on their auditions,
- A platform for the music community to explore undiscovered indie/amateur/professional musicians,
- A platform for the musicians and the community to network, offer/hire services, search/form/join bands &
- A platform for musicians to compete with their peers in periodic contests in order to realistically evaluate their progress.
I remember reading the lesson that an entrepreneur had learnt from one of his failed startup and it was - “If you pitch starts with it’s a platform for…, make sure you have billions of dollars in your bank, for that’s how much it takes to build a platform”
Uhooroo team seems to have included too many platforms in its About Us page.
The page further explains that
“Uhooroo is designed to encourage musicians to completely free themselves & lose themselves into their art - show case their talent, promote their music, network with other musicians, offer their services for hire and take up music as a serious career & business. Uhooroo is designed to allow musicians to reach out to and get noticed by a growing music community.”
So, in a nut-shell, artistes can upload their work to Uhooroo.com. People can sample their work there and even rate it. Based on ratings, new visitors can decide which music to download. Artists also have a chance to network with each other. For the artists, there are real-time analytics about what the people say about you.
Further, there is also a contest, where in the artistes can showcase their works and get rated by the audience. Based on certain algorithm, the Uhooroo system decides the winner. Uhooroo claims that it has in-built fraud detection system to check the various malpractices that might make a particular artiste win.
An interesting feature is the interestingness of a song. Based on certain parameters, Uhooroo rates the interestingness of a song.
The Experience
The UI is quite pleasant and very easy to use. The homepage is very compelling and makes the user sign up without giving a second thought. The iPhone like slide music surfing interface is sleek and takes your breath away, but needs to be more browser friendly. It crashed a lot on Firefox (in our test). Also, there is no captcha to kep the spam bots away. In the long run, this can be a problem for the webmasters. Neither was there any email verification. It also does not tell you when you are ready to use your account, after the sign-up. It’s up to the user to figure it out. For example, even when I had registered, I was being shown the box asking me to “sign up”. For some unexplained reason I was unable to upload my music.
For artists it’s a great platform. You get comments on your work, you get real time analytics on how your work is liked by the audience and what do they think about you, etc.
WAT Suggests :
1) Playlists - It’s a music site right? It would be interesting if I could add the songs to a playlist and then listen to it the next time I visit Uhooroo.
2) I would love it if I could keep the current songs/playlist running and surf the other songs like Phulki offers me to do
3) Why video why not get the music section working better and good
4) No albums. Why do I have to get a dif album art for each track? Can’t I use the same one for one artiste or album?
Overall the site is a very good attempt in its category and if some of the bugs mentioned here are taken care of, has the potential to be the eBay of music, for India. (If it’s not the intended model, I would request the founders to consider it)
Conclusion
Overall with the potential of this site and the way it could have been if it had a better navigation, it would have been a great place to find new music and artists. I would still love to go to this site if they have the playlist feature so that I don’t have to go searching again for the songs I like.
It’s a 6/10 for this one. -2 marks for small bugs like the uploading bug and the signup bug and -2 marks for not having the playlist feature.
(Thank you Bharath Madhusudan, Founder, Uhooroo.com for providing the lead.)
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Hey Ankit,
Thanks a lot for the detailed and balanced review. Some notes we would like to point out:
1) Your points on the overuse of the word “platform”, lack of sign up confirmation, and upload usability issues are noted and well taken. We will get to these right-away. Regarding captchas, we actually removed them to keep the sign-up process quick and easy. We will probably re-enable them once comment spam does become a problem.
2) Regarding playlists & being able to listen to tracks while browsing through the site - these features actually make a lot of sense for sites that stream non-indie, commercial or film music. On Uhooroo, listeners seem to focus on exploring new talent (artistes and tracks) instead of sticking to a certain set everytime. Further, we actually want the listener to provide some implicit/explicit feedback on each track/artiste before she moves on to another. This is one area where we intentionally pioneered a unique set of features and a design, for an indie-music focused service, that go beyond the usual comments/ratings - e.g. “Go Live” (focuses on airing one track at a time), “Anonymous Ratings” (listener doesn’t need to be logged-in or even registered with us to rate.. and this translates to 10x or 100x fold increase in user feedback.. and even then it’s not possible to rate a track more than once if someone intends to abuse this..), “Playedfully” and “Airtime” (we actually count how many times each track was heard substantially instead of just randomly landed-upon, and also the total seconds of airtime it got), “cover-art” to visually identify each track etc. These set of features, and the fact that we are focused on Indian music is what differentiates us from other generic networking sites out there.
However, we do realize that these features you mention are almost universally good features to have. So far we were focused on getting indie musicians on board and getting them to network with each other. Playlist type features is something we will consider as we try to blow this out to a general audience of listeners.
3) As far as the business model is concerned, we do have some ideas about where we are going with this and we will be sure to hit you guys up once we are ready to pursue monetization. It’s definitely not the usual suspects (paid accounts, selling indie music).
Vinay & Bharath
(Co-founders)
Nice review harshal!
Nice WEBSITE design. Looks cool.
Jus a doubt. According to cmpny info, founders are still wrking in another company. So, Is Uhooroo a regd. compny ? Unless so, does it really deserve to be called a Startup ?… Could be more aptly titled ‘a music website review’….
Nowadays every new WEBSITE is a Startup…!!
@hari well just to tell u that not every website is called a startup…but Websites which have the potential to lure the users and prove themselves as a good product is called a startup.So the founders have build a good product on which they could now form a company..
The website looks nice and UI is great.I have a few questions though:
1. How would it be different from a site like Muziboo which has a large user base and is an older player compared to Uhooroo.
2. Though the Blog article mentions a partnership, how would Uhooroo help the Amateur musicians to reach the next level since, many guys who upload on the site might want to pursue Music as a career and they might be in search of partners who can play other instruments.
How would Uhooroo help facilitate the same or is it in the plan?
PS: A humble request to WATBlog Team, can you add SUBSCRIBE TO COMMENT in your articles so that readers can keep a track of the replies.Thanks in advance.