Why we began.

MVP for IndieMoves

Let’s go back to the start. When you’re starting out, writing your first song can be tough. What follows is tougher. “Is this song any good?”, “How do I find an audience beyond my friends where I can safely play without being laughed at?” and many such questions show up. As independent musicians we experience this. If you’re not from a metro city, things can be discouraging. Yes, social media is an option, but that comes with its own set of challenges. When you’re starting out, what you need is like-minded people who you can work with, exchange ideas, learn from and rely on. A community.

Then if you work on getting past that phase, there are a whole new set of questions. When as an independent artist, you decide to release music and give this thing a shot, things can get overwhelming really fast. There is just so much to manage. Questions range from “How do I record the music?”, “How do I release my music?”, “How do I market the music?” to “What format should the artwork be in?”, “Do I need a website?”, “How do I get gigs?”

We have spoken to musicians and songwriters and they unanimously say that they rely on the internet for guidance. There are blogs and books written on this topic. Good. Except these blogs and books are not written in the Indian context, so it is easy to have your expectations go for a toss when you really start following the advice.

From our conversations with artists, there is a hole. It is not that it cannot be done, but it is hard for most people, and it can be made easier.

We have been working towards building a solution for independent musicians in India. A lack of audience (more on this in future posts) is bad enough, artists then have to spend their time managing their operations. Our goal with IndieMoves is to automate a bit of that, one thing at a time and free up artists to do what they do best: create.

To start, we needed to create a Minimum Viable Product to get artists on the p̶l̶a̶t̶f̶o̶r̶m̶ website.

Towards the MVP

Feature

So now that there was intent, the question was what do we build first? One of the easiest things to build was the EPK, so we did just that. EPK is the Electronic Press Kit that is a must for every artist. EPK is used by organizers, press, etc. when they want to get information about the artist. It contains things like the biography of the artist, high-res photos, tech-riders, press articles, links to music, links to videos, etc. Bands would usually hack together a pdf, use Drive/Dropbox (permission hell), build their own websites and/or pay EPK building services. Some are even unaware of the value of keeping such a document available.

Tech

Now that we had decided we need to build an EPK service first, we started building. For the tech-aware, we built the whole thing in Python (Flask) with a Firebase backend. Hosted the application on the Google cloud.

Actual development took about 3 weeks. I built the whole thing during my cab rides to/from work, about 75 minutes every day. I asked a friend Arjit Sahai, to be the first artist on the website and he agreed. So 3 weeks later, we had a website with Arjit and Company (the band) on it.

We did not build an artist onboarding workflow into the app since we would be curating artists (only artists with released music) and it did not seem like an important feature for the MVP. All we have to do now is to build a JSON object with artist detail and do immutable sync to the Firebase database. It worked well.

We wanted the artist page to be available through a subdomain, like for Arjit and Company (AnC, as they call themselves) the profile page would be available at anc.indiemoves.com. Flask supports subdomains out of the box, so this was not a problem. On the web-server though, I had to write some rules to configure the redirects. It worked.

Another thing was to ensure high-res, downloadable images were available on the website. Putting high-res images on the website was a bad idea because the page took forever to load on cellphones. For this, I wrote a script that would resize images, upload to the Firebase storage, update the artist JSON and do an immutable push to the Firebase back-end. Worked well.

For the SSL, we used Let’s Encrypt. Always works well.

Towards the release

For the release, our goal is to onboard about 50 artists on to the website. I have been writing scripts to automate this process and will be done soon. Once we have them on board, we can make version 1 live!