All 100 ideasAudio and music
#66 of 100 · Audio and music
Music discovery you can steer
Music recommendations they can tune, based on the sound itself, human curation or genre digging, not popularity or sponsored picks.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay0%
- Want it local or private0%
- Object to subscriptions0%
- Want it open source or self-hosted0%
- Want AI to do it0%
Share of the 9 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Built, still asked for59 Show HN launches do this job, and 26 more do part of it. People still ask, so the launches are missed, unknown, or not what they want. Ask what they’re missing before you build.
- 2u.fm is a social music discovery site, my side project for over a year2012 · 121 pts
- Discover new music through an infinite suggestion graph (React/Redux)2016 · 108 pts
- SoundMoose – open source music discovery app based on Angular 2, Redux2017 · 45 pts
- The Artist Hunt – An intuitive way to discover music2014 · 31 pts
- muffon – Desktop music streaming browser2022 · 14 pts
- On A Loop: A community where people can recommend and discover music2019 · 14 pts
- Music recommendations in less than 5 taps, with Spotify Premium2018 · 13 pts
- Plug, the best way to discover new music on Mac2013 · 8 pts
Instead of: Spotify, YouTube Music, Rdio
The idea, as matched
A music discovery service that recommends by musical features, human curation or genre exploration, with user-tunable recommendations instead of popularity-driven, sponsored algorithms.
Jev first matched 11 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 9 of 11.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Mostly Spotify users frustrated with its suggestions.
- Feb 2025Wants a non-profit music site that auto-queues songs from listening history without sponsored tracks. Read it: a comment in “How Spotify Killed Lo-Fi Hip Hop”
- Apr 2024Wants recommendations driven by a track's chords, tempo, rhythm and mood rather than listener overlap. Read it: a comment in “When do we stop finding new music?”
- Feb 2024Wants power-user tools to organize and dig through music, and offers to help build a Spotify alternative. Read it: a comment in “The day I canceled my Spotify subscription”
- Feb 2024Wants a music streamer with a customizable front page and tunable recommendations, valuing full albums. Read it: a comment in “The day I canceled my Spotify subscription”
- Nov 2023Wants a service that helps explore jazz subgenres broadly, since automated radio keeps collapsing into the same artists. Read it: a comment in “Oink's Pink Palace”
- Feb 2021Has long sought music discovery beyond algorithmic suggestions and joined a waitlist for one app. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: A social music app that lets you share peak moments in songs”
- Aug 2017Wants a way to stop Discover Weekly repeating songs they have heard and a better recommender service. Read it: a comment in “Spotify preps to go public with 60M subscribers”
- Apr 2013Wants recommendations driven by trusted curators rather than popularity, spanning decades, countries and genres. Read it: a comment in “Twitter Music will integrate Spotify, Rdio, iTunes, Soundcloud, Vevo and Youtube”
- Nov 2010Wants an indie music discovery web app for use at the office and home. Read it: a comment in “thesixtyone (YC 09) explores a new direction on iPad”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.