vibedeck

Vibedeck (Updated)

Pok­ing around Sound­cloud the other day I hap­pened across their “app” sec­tion, some­thing I’d never checked out before. This led me to Vibedeck, a music shar­ing and sell­ing plat­form with built in Sound­cloud inte­gra­tion. It lets you cre­ate sets of your music, much like Sound­cloud, and offers a num­ber of dif­fer­ent sell­ing meth­ods, includ­ing a “Fan Sets Price” option. There are also a cou­ple promo-driven options, like “Tweet for Down­load” and “Email for Down­load”, which auto-generates Tweets and Emails respec­tively and serves your music to the user once they’ve fol­lowed through.

The inter­face is slick and easy to use, upload­ing is a snap, and you can even import sets from Sound­cloud. If you choose the lat­ter option, a “Buy This Set” link auto­mat­i­cally pops up in the set on your Sound­cloud page. Pretty damn nifty!

Even though I’ve been mak­ing music for 15 years, I’ve never felt very com­fort­able sell­ing it. It always felt like a “work in progress”, and to ask money for some­thing like that never sat well. I saw other artists come out of the gate with fully real­ized, very solid releases, and I wanted some­thing like that before I con­sid­ered pass­ing round ye-old prover­bial hat.

Lately it’s been less about the qual­ity of the stuff I’m pro­duc­ing and more about just get­ting it out to peo­ple. Sound­cloud has been great for that, and Vibedeck is the per­fect side­car. I’ve re-encoded all the tracks I’m really proud of as FLAC and added them to sets on Vibedeck, either with a “Name Your Price” option or “Tweet for Down­load”. I don’t expect to make money off this endeavor, and I’ll con­tinue to offer lots of music up for free on Sound­cloud. But, it is a great win­dow into what’s pos­si­ble down the line.

Check out my Vibedeck here, vibedeck.com/jeremyblake/, and check out a set from my page below.

UPDATE 081311

Turns out what’s good in the­ory isn’t nec­es­sar­ily good in prac­tice. I’ve decided to scrap my Vibedeck page after spend­ing some time today try­ing to get it to work. Which it didn’t do. Or it did, but way too slowly. So it didn’t.

All deliv­ery meth­ods were either slow or bro­ken (email for DL, Tweet for DL, and Pay­pal for DL). A friend was able to pay for my album, but the site made him wait a good 10 – 15 min­utes before it dis­played a valid down­load link. He was then able to copy and paste the URL for that con­fir­ma­tion / DL page into mul­ti­ple browsers and get it to work again and again. Not super secure.

The “Tweet for Down­load” but­ton gen­er­ated the Tweet like it should, and then took you to Pay­pal and tried to charge you for a com­pletely dif­fer­ent release on my page. “Email for Down­load” claimed it would send you an email link to down­load the songs, but that’s yet to hap­pen after about 20 minutes.

I’ve scrapped the page and gone back to giv­ing every­thing away for free on my Sound­cloud. It’s a shame, because I was truly excited about the service.

UPDATE 081411

Vibedeck CEO Lior Shamir has con­tacted me in hopes of work­ing out the bugs men­tioned in the pre­vi­ous update. Will keep ya’ll posted.

Related posts:

  1. Sound­cloud Copy­right Fail (Updated 3/4/12)
  2. “Push My But­ton” Remixes On Sale
  3. Gus­tav Mahler Remix Contest
  4. The Big Music Post : Part 1
  5. White, Karka­nen, & Blake — Ever­long [Foo Fight­ers Cover]

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