This Article was written by Justin Kan, an internet entrepreneur, the co-founder of live video site Justin.tv and the renowned live-streaming gamecast service TwitchTV. We're huge fans and are thrilled he was able to give us this look into his take on electronic music discovery!
A month ago I launched The Drop, a brand new EDM discovery platform. If you’re a fan like me, you’re always looking for the best new tracks out there. If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of producers out there, you’re always looking for better ways to get your music heard. The Drop is our solution: a daily list of the coolest new electronic tracks submitted, moderated and voted on by our community.
You can spend hours a day trying to find new music and still not discover everything awesome. Artists are posting their tracks to Soundcloud, but it’s hard to find new artists you aren’t yet following. Spotify doesn’t have the latest remixes and bootlegs. Pandora is for my mom. Even great blogs, like this one, have other content like videos and tour info interspersed with the music. I wanted a place where I could just press play and get turnt up to new stuff, every day.
When I was running other startups, I found I was too busy to find new music so I would just listen to the same playlists over and over. This year, when I found I had some free time again, I decided to build a solution to my own problem. I teamed up with my brother Damien and my friend Ranidu (who is a producer / DJ), and we hacked up The Drop over a weekend for our friends.
Our first version of The Drop was just to test if there were other people out there who wanted to discover music like we did. It turns out that there are: in the first week we put it out there we had visitors from all over the world tweeting at us telling us that they loved the site. We went back to coding, and we just launched a brand new version that is faster, allows users to save their favorite tracks, and filter by subgenres, so they can filter everything but Tropical House out.
I’ve started a bunch of companies (Justin.tv, Twitch, Exec) and I have been asked how this relates to my other startups. I’m taking a lesson to heart from previous startups: focus on building a great community. At Twitch, we succeeded in building a place where gaming broadcasters wanted to come, because at every step of the way we helped them get to more fans and we worked hard to make their lives easier. At The Drop we want to do the same for producers everywhere.
As a partner at the technology seed fund Y Combinator, we look for founders who are solving their own problems. That’s why The Drop is only for electronic music right now, the genre Ranidu and I listen to and enjoy the most. I decided to take my own advice and solve my problem.
Despite our early traction we’ve still got a ways to go to actually solving our own problem. I created the site with the goal of being able to use it to find the newest, dirtiest trap and dubstep songs around. Instead, the community has taken over and the front page is constantly flooded with tropical house :/ But, we still love the site and are working hard to make sure bass music fans get represented :)
Here are some of my favourite new trap/future songs that I found on thedrop.club :D
Checkout the site at www.thedrop.club. Post a new drop, tweet out your favorite tracks and feel free to email us your comments at [email protected]
- Justin
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