Pud - when I look at your site, I see a marketplace for video music lessons. A tonne of people would pay $1.99 to learn a Radiohead song on piano, or get that perfect 'wub wub' sound in Reason. There's similar stuff on YouTube, but it's low quality and unreliable, and discovery is hard. Create a marketplace and you'll attract the best of the best.
Prerecorded video would be perfect at first, but you could happily expand to live, streaming lessons. I'm excited already. What do you think?
>A tonne of people would pay $1.99 to learn a Radiohead song on piano //
Sounds like a rights management nightmare as the location of delivery (assuming the location of production is the US) is likely to have particular rights groups that you have to handle. In the UK you'd need to get rights from the PRS, the artist (if you play a clip) the production company for trademarks and what have you and probably a few others.
Just a suggestion to look in to IP rights issues before you get too far along with things.
Not to mention that he would need a deal with the collection societies in each territory he wants to have business in, e.g. to serve UK users he needs a deal with PRS, in the US he needs to deal with ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, in Germany with GEMA and so forth. He would need to block the service in any territory where he doesn't have a deal with whoever is representing the publisher of the work in the given territory.
That's a good idea. There are people on Fandalism who are unbelievably good musicians, better than pros. I should ask them to do online lessons or whatnot.
(of course, just because they're a good musician doesn't mean they're a good teacher. but i could come up with guidelines to help them teach..)
That would be really interesting. Khan Academy for music lessons, except it would also be a marketplace, and maybe live video could be part of it.
I could imagine that all recorded videos and tutorials and stuff could be free, because of the community nature of your site, but it also provides 'advertising' if people want to also be teachers. Then you just provide an easy way to do video chats for classes, for cash, and that's where you collect a percentage. This is pretty easy with Google Hangouts, and there are other APIs one can use too.
This way you get to monetize the site without putting up paywalls, or changing the community ethos of the site. I think everyone understands that people deserve to be paid for their time.
That might really work. Every musician has a few tricks up their sleeve. And there are other categories like producer, sound guy, etc, where tricks of the trade are learned only if you're part of a scene somewhere. If you're a kid in your bedroom in suburban Idaho maybe you can get your parents to cough up some dough for some online lessons on how to be a DJ.
This could be very cool. I'm quite a good musician myself (varsity educated and all that), but lately I've really been wanting to learn some more solo production techniques (basically I want to make music that sounds like purity ring: http://soundcloud.com/purity-ring) as, despite all my education and experience, I don't really know squat about how to produce a good dance track. I would be really interested in somewhere where I could post a lesson request like "I want to make a beat that sounds like the one from Belispeak" and tag it with say "Ableton, production, purity ring, EDM" and someone answer it. Wouldn't even need to be paid - though perhaps you could do like a reward system: if the person who responds is awesome, you could tip them?
OT but anyway... consider it a validation of the idea.
>"I want to make a beat that sounds like the one from Belispeak"
The type of beat (and the melodic structure) they're using there is lifted wholesale from a subgenre of southern hiphop called "trap music," which takes its name from its preoccupation with methamphetamine retail.
The key is to take the classic 808 and 909 drum machines (ableton has emulations built in or you can get samples from anywhere) and put the right kind of rolls on the percussion sounds, you could try triggering them in some more unusual ways, perhaps with an arpeggiator. The "pop" sound stems from the layers of vocal processing. Tbh there's nothing terribly complicated going on production wise in their tracks, unfortunately that sound comes from having good musical ideas and the ability to execute them without fuss. That's not something you can really get from tutorial videos, but I guess your formal education will help.
I love that idea of a reward/bounty system. For example multiple musicians could try to make short tutorials and the bounty is shared among the top 3 voted submissions. That teach-me-anything and get a bounty system could work for quite a few other areas as well.
Judging by the success of games like Rock Band, everyone wants to play music. Traditional music tuition isn't suited to most people, since you start with pretty dull material, and you don't get results until you've been at it for a while. Most people will give up unless they feel progress straight away (I've spent my life doing this).
When a musician friend helps you learn a song, you get an instant rush of gratification. That's what all learning should be like. It fits the $2 impulsive-app-purchase model pretty well, and it works for any skill level.
Rather than focus on any single narrow field, why not add Q&A sections. Start with one section (like "how do I play song x?") and gradually add others ("equipment tuning", "computer generated music", "business questions", "technical stuff for narrow audience x" etc.)
With 400k users, you have the community to turn this into a Stack Overflow for musicians.
Prerecorded video would be perfect at first, but you could happily expand to live, streaming lessons. I'm excited already. What do you think?