I created a website that feeds you curated music news - but only for the artists you like and listen to. I'd love a few more testers!

I’m not an active poster here (I want to be upfront about that rather than lie and deceive!) but I would absolutely love your feedback on a pet project of mine.

I’m music obsessed. I used to start my day by visiting various music news sites like the NME, Pitchfork, and DiS. It took waaaaaaay too long. I like too many artists across too many genres, and I kept missing news.

So 2 months ago I launched www.muzeroom.com

You can import your artists likes and listens from FB, Spotify, & last.fm. MuzeRoom then feeds you music news, new releases, and music videos - but only for the artists you follow. It curates content from over 50 different sites (including DiS!).

I need feedback from real dedicated music fans, and I feel this is the perfect place for that. I’d absolutely love your constructive thoughts whether positive or negative! Cheers.

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This sounds like a really good idea. Can’t be bothered to check it on my phone but I will at some point.

Does it have options to also bring news for related artists? Like on last.fm?

Also how do you make it work (financially) for yourself?

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Thanks Jordan. We do not yet have related artists in the feed. Thats definitely on our roadmap in the future though because we want to encourage artist exploration. We aren’t monetising this in any way at this point. If we get to a point where we have enough users we will have sponsored posts in the feed.

Just given it a whirl. This is a really good idea and very easy to set up (which is always the main decider for me). Very straightforward to import artists from Spotify, Last FM and FB and also, importantly, to remove any manually that you maybe don’t want the newsfeed to be overloaded with (Had to unfollow Drake. Soz Drizzy.).

Is there an option to adjust the feed from tiles to a list?

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Had a little play around with it just now and it seems decent. Is it possible to prioritise certain bands over others? It’s treated all of my facebook likes as equal, when that isn’t necessarily the case. E.g. Miguel is on my main feed a fair bit when I’d rather they weren’t, because I’m not bothered about keeping track of that artist and don’t feel the need to check up on them. I’d also choose to have a lot less Radiohead, because someone like me who checks music sites on rotation will already have read that news a few times over whether I want to or not! For both of those examples, I’m not sure I want to delete them from my feed entirely. Would certainly like to prioritise bands that haven’t been heard from in ages or are relatively quiet e.g. Burial, Portishead.

Also the news sometimes picks up bands with simple generic names when it’s not talking about those bands e.g. Airs, Belong. Not sure how this could be fixed, obviously more likely to happen with the much smaller bands.

Overall though I think it’s cool!

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Thanks for checking it out! And yeah Drake does tend to dominate peoples feed sometimes! We definitely want to have a list feed like say Pocket or Feedly have to make it easier to flick through the news quickly. Part of a few design tweaks we desperately need to get to! Thanks again for your feedback.

Thanks mate! Yeah the feed weighting as you describe definitely needs to be fixed. What we’d love to do is you upvote the stories you love and that then tells MuzeRoom you are keener on those particular artists. And so over time you get more news (if available!) by those artists. We’ve heard this complaint a few times so it’s actually great to hear it again!

In regards to it picking up names like ‘belong’ - over time we are picking these out to deal with later. Unfortunately there are some band names (like ‘the’ for example!) that we simply have to block. Others we park to deal with when we develop a more elegant solution.

Thanks for taking the time to try it out!

Looks great, but not sure its bringing new stuff through for me? Granted my Facebook profile doesn’t include that many artists I like but I’d have thought Super Furry Animals would have had some sort of news more recent than January with another Greatest Hits coming out and all?

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echo chamber pop

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Hi Richie - thanks for the feedback and for giving MuzeRoom a go. Super Furry Animals have had multiple articles in August and September which you can see on their artist page - MuzeRoom - Music news, tailored for you. Are you sure you are following them?

great idea, i like it

not sure how i got Adele in my followed artists, or is it a rule that everyone has to have Adele!

I did like how there was a Lil Kim story connected to Ween (“tonight, Lil Kim will accept The Women in Entertainment Empowerment Network (WEEN) Awards”)

is there a reason you get multiple tiles for the one artist? Like i have about 5 for Leonard Cohen, and about the same for Prince and Bob Dylan

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This is really good! Great job!

Like the way it displays the different news and takes from Spotify, last.fm and Facebook as the sources.
The upcoming release calendar is good, this is the only place I’d think that “recommended artists based on your follow history” would come in use. That’d be overkill for the news section I think.
The videos section is strange, as it has a lot of old and new stuff spliced in there. Is it integrating with Vevo? I guess a lot of artists just periodically upload old videos too. Good for just having a dip into though.

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haha No I would not do that to all of my users! LOL. Thanks for the feedback.

Re: tiles per artist. If an artist is mentioned more than once in a 24 hour period it gets rolled up into 1 ‘trending’ tile to cut down on the clutter. If you are seeing multiple stories in different tiles from Cohen, they are most likely from different days. You will notice this less as you follow more artists. But it’s definitely something that we need to improve upon!

When Bowie tragically passed away our whole feed was dominated by Bowie obviously. We got really worried about that until I logged into FB and counted and the first 28 posts in my feed were Bowie related. I realised then there would be edge cases where it’s unavoidable, but for the most part we want to try and make sure that we eradicate any duplication or dominance in your feed by any one artists!

Thanks for trying us out and for the feedback!

We definitely want to introduce the related artists into all feeds. I think we can do this even in news but it will depend on the right design and UX.

Re: videos yeah we pull from artists official Vevo channels on YT. And yeah often this can be a weird mix as artists bulk upload old content like live performances etc. We are actually going to

It had pulled them through when I logged back in. Slightly weird though that I unfollowed quite a few of the artists pulled through from my Facebook likes (local folk who definitely wouldn’t feature in national news) and they’re back there again today. I’m guessing this is why you get multiple tiles for one artist - if you’ve liked them more than once on Facebook. Guess you need to find some way to bring them all together.

If I get a chance then I’ll try to import from Spotify / Last.FM - that would work better for me.

It’s a great idea though, hope it goes well.

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Think this probably ties in a lot better with last.fm than facebook, but that’s understandable. Don’t use last.fm as much as I did a few years ago, Id have rinsed this back then if it was still around.

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^was meant as a reply to Richie

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Yeah isnt it a shame how badly last.fm went downwards. It used to be such a fantastic service.

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Thanks Richie. Can I just understand something in case its a bug. You imported artists via FB, then unfollowed them on MuzeRoom. Next time you logged in, they had returned? That definitely shouldn’t happen so let me know if that was the case! Thanks mate.

Easy set up, liking the first impressions. Had to unfollow Britney Spears, my habit of playing ‘Toxic’ at parties doesn’t mean I want to read about her!

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