July 1 marks the soft launch of the music collaboration startup YouPhonics. The brainchild of Aidan Nulman, YouPhonics allows users to record, share, and compose tracks together via a web-based interface.
A musician himself, Nulman created the project to help address some of the obstacles that musicians sometimes face when they want to collaborate: distance between musicians, a shared interface, knowing the right musicians and being able to access one another’s skills. “When I moved away from my band in 2006, everything fell apart,” says Nulman. “I haven’t really spoken with the guys since then, even though we practiced and performed together week-in, week-out for over two years.”
Stems and Sounds
YouPhonics allows you to record or upload tracks. These become “stems” that you can share, download, listen and edit. Stems – yours and others’ – can be mixed in order to create new tracks. No surprise for a collaborative site, the site places a lot of emphasis on the community aspect, with a social profile, comments and “like” features. And Nulman says YouPhones plans to add more social integration options soon.
Personalized Beta Invitations and The Scalability of Nice
YouPhonics is built with the help of Toronto-based Jet Cooper and BNOTIONS, but clearly the project rests on Nulman, who was once called the music industry’s Zuckerberg.
As a solo entrepreneur, Nulman take a very personal and personalized approach to publicizing YouPhonics. (He wrote an apology to me last week, for example, when he didn’t have a press kit ready when I signed up for the beta.)
Will being nice scale? Maybe not, but when I asked Nulman about all the personable and personalized emails and invitations, he said it makes for more “meaningful interactions.” Since meaningful interaction and collaboration are what YouPhonics hopes to foster musically as well, it seems like a good philosophy (and hey, good manners).
YouPhonics’ competitors include other companies offering online music collaboration services, notably Indaba Music and Kompoz. YouPhonics has raised Friends and Family funding and is considering angel funding at this time.
