Monetizing a Music Discovery App
Last month I released a music app I made that utilizes Spotify's API to make music discovery more data-driven: http://www.syntheticapp.tech/
Basically, you apply filters to different playlists and can preview songs and add them straight to your Spotify library.
I made it more for myself but the traffic is still trickling in, and I've begun to get a few emails from Indie bands and artists that want to promote their song through the platform or add their songs to my playlists. I'm wondering if I could charge them for it or how I could go about making some money off the site.
I launched on Product Hunt (https://www.producthunt.com/posts/synthetic) and got some feedback, I don't have huge intentions of growing it out into a business full-time but I'm interested in maybe advertising or promoting content to make a few dollars to deal with hosting.
I'd love to hear anyone else's experience or even general feedback on the app (if there's a feature you want I might still get around to adding it 🙂)
Your site looks good. Nice job! I've always been interested in making a better way to discover new music, but it's so hard. Kudos for building something that does that!
I like the idea of having indie bands (or big labels) have a sponsored song appear every so often. I don't think that would be too invasive to the experience, especially if they were a decent match. With this approach you card charge a much higher CPM than a regular banner ad and the ad would be tailored to the content.
Another idea would be getting native ads from Ticketmaster, Shazam or other music apps. There budgets and minimum orders are probably really large, but it's worth a try :)