Guitarati.com (Chicago, US) - an innovative music site, launched in private beta on February 14th, 2008 and in public beta on April 8th, 2008, introduces a new approach to music. That is through our perception of colour. Guitarati asks us to look within our soul and discover the colour that corresponds to our feeling at any given moment. Similarly, colours that correspond to a particular musical element will be discovered and then begins this interesting relationship between colour and music.

I had a chance to talk to the creator of Guitarati Sonal Pandey, who also brings to the table her software industry background, this is what she had to say:

Why is your site different than your competitors?

Guitarati provides an offbeat, intuitive way of music discovery based on music-color co-relation. Amidst a world of music discovery dominated by tag clouds, 1-10 rating systems and so forth, we wanted something that enabled users to easily find music that others had ‘felt’ the same about. In this way, we work orthogonally to the heavy number crunching music discovery algorithms and other social music discovery methods out there.
 
What is your business plan or model?

Users can listen to full length tracks for a cent, and these cents get deducted from the download price when they download the song. Or they can listen to free, high quality samples. Guitarati provides multiple means of revenue for bands and labels, as they get paid for song downloads as well as streaming. Bands and labels decide the price of their music and retain 75% of the earnings. We earn money through a cut of the music streaming and download sales.
 
Why did you start this website?

We want to create products and services that are fun, unconventional, perhaps even bizarre. Music discovery is one such step. On a serious note, we think that the future of massive data classification could be more intuition based. Of course, we don’t mean intuition in a woo-woo new-agey scaring-people-off way, but in a way that lets people follow their instincts. People use their instincts so often, may be more than we realize, that making a choice of music based purely on what color they feel attracted to at any given time is not so far-fetched after all.
 
Music color relation has been studied for ages and explored by the likes of Newton and Plato. Research and experience show that music and emotions are tightly coupled. The thought of color based music discovery occurred to us one day and then we started reading up on the this intriguing topic. And so we began working on the website 6 months ago.
 
How are you planning to market it?

We believe that simple, quirky means attract people’s attention better than somber campaigns costing thousands of dollars. We are using the power of social media and since our target visitors frequent social websites, we are benefitting from this approach. Other than this, we are regularly being written about in blogs.
 
   
Any other information that you believe is relevant to your startup?

We utilized the private beta period to invite bands and record labels to upload their music while we parallelly tested and finished our back-end systems. The website is now open to everyone who has an interest in music or color or both. Responses from website users have been ranging from ‘love it’ to ‘I don’t get it’ and everything in between. But the bottom-line of all feedback has been curiosity. That we think is a good start.
 
Certainly Guitarati is an innovative and interesting approach to music that will definitely build hype among music enthusiasts and surfers alike. In this day and age, building sites that cater to a different perspective on a known concept or perhaps an entirely different concept is a promising approach. Also, having a sense of creativity and a honest desire to present ideas and concepts in a different light are really praiseworthy. In that regard, I have much anticipation for Guitarati and the curiousity it creates.

Jey

In the mist of planning for a new startup, it is easy to forget the “customer satisfaction” component of the business plan. Securing funding and other ”must do” items will take up most of the time and energy; however, you must keep your “target” - “your customers” - “your visitors” in mind at all times. Don’t follow the startup examples of those who would work so hard to secure funding and then burn through it by spending on advertisements but don’t even think about satisfying their customers to retain them - to make the customers visit the site on their own. In this article I am going to discuss about one thing that you must plan as part of your rollout plan for your new business ventures. 

Have you ever shopped at amazon.ca? Amazon follows up with their customers through email whenever there is a new book related to their previous purchase. E-mail marketing hasn’t gone anywhere, what has gone is the way someone writes messages to the customers. Too many spam messages with no content. You should have a plan to engage your customers as you grow from day one - appreciate them for joining your venture, thank them when they buy a product or sign up on your site, send them frequent updates about the new things that are happening on your site and definitely ask them for feedback. When you write, make sure to present a “message” in a way that the customer will actually read. 

I have made e-mail marketing a key component of my rollout strategy for all of my new ventures. I try to send out a newsletter once every two weeks to my visitors/customers containing recent updates and some freebies to make them appreciate knowing my business. E-Mail marketing, in sort e-marketing is really one of the most effective ways to keep your customers knocking on your door at all times. It has also become cheaper to do e-marketing with all of the competitions out there. The key is to create messages that your customers will actually read.  Make your message compelling - short with catchy words. Stick to your core business, don’t try to sell or write about something else, if you do, you’ve just lost your customer. They will feel that they have just signed up for a spam site or business - encourage them, not discourage them. 

Basically it should be customers first, then the operations and revenues for any new business. Building customer relationships and loyalty is very important for startup businesses - it will be the glue that will make you grow in no time.

Yesterday, TechCrunch wrote about a rumour about a possible announcement of FBOpenSource; today they’ve confirmed that Facebook will indeed go Open Source for their one year old platform.

What does this mean for you?

Well if you are operating a social network site, users can now run Facebook’s applications on your platform. This is a great news for the creative minds. A year ago Facebook launched their platform where it allowed users to create their own applications to run on their platform, which allowed other users to use many applications to interact with other users.

This is probably a response, a strategy to fight back to the “Open Social”, a Open Source Social Networking platform which is backed by Google, Yahoo and MySpace.

Facebook has issued the following statement:

“We’re working on an open-source initiative that is meant to help application developers better understand Facebook Platform and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running their own test servers, building tools, or optimizing their applications. As Facebook Platform continues to mature, open-sourcing the infrastructure behind it is a natural step so developers can build richer social applications and share what they’ve learned with the ecosystem. Additional details will be released soon.”

Stay tuned folks, lot more details to come in this fight to hold the ground in social networking.

This really means, the face of social networks will soon be changing to even a more comprehensive, more effective tools that will be available for the people who will continue to use it everyday. This really is good for the end-user.