Are you also a music junkie like me who always make a long collection of playlists on iPod? For instance, “Classic Piano” is for quiet nights, “Crazy Techno” for party and “Jazzbaby” for lazy afternoons? We surely want various music styles at different moments. But how to find the right song at the right time without the pain of sorting and organizing? Jing.fm might be your solution, the music start-up lets people find songs by tags describing occasion, music genre and most importantly, how you feel.
Jing.fm is designed in a minimalist way, which looks just like a radio app. Type key words into search box, for example “Female voice + Classical”, Jing.fm will present you with the songs it thinks fitting you. It’s like you are talking to a smart DJ, and he is only playing the music for you.
Jing.fm playing music
Choosing music by tags
Recently we had an interview with the founder Shi Kaiwen, and he shared the story of this product and some insights into Chinese digital market.
Shi himself is a big music fan, he plays the piano, and majored in electronic music producing in college. He can be called a music entrepreneur for his life and work has always involved music. Jing.fm is not his first startup project, five years ago he had founded two other music startups, respectively focusing on social music platform and music recommendation. Throughout all these years, he gradually taught himself coding language and developed an in-depth knowledge of the digital music market.
Jing.fm allows users themselves to describe the music they want and choose the right songs according to certain algorithm. “This kind of service has never been done by any music sites ever. “said the founder. When speaking of another popular music product Douban.fm, he commented that, “It’s very nice though still sort of monotonous in that users’ needs for music styles can be very changeable and spontaneous sometimes. You can not meet their demands by just analyzing the listening history.”
Though still in beta testing, the service was warmly welcomed by lots of music fans. The team now has only 10 staff including coder, editor slash musician, system architect and even psychology researcher. Shi advised entrepreneurs on that,” If you do not really understand the digital music industry, please don’t try it impulsively. The problems of copyrights and bandwidth can be much more troublesome than you ever imagined.”