The future of information is in discovery, not search

That’s why we’re taking a big gamble on MusicBox

The music discovery and consumption industry is a bit crowded at the moment, you could say. Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, Beats, the just-announced Milk Music, and so on and so on. That’s not even mentioning the music maps, the forums, the sub-reddits, Shazaam…you get the idea. So why in the hell would we start a ridiculously ambitious music discovery service that’s going to take a ton of manual work to even validate the concept?

Because we believe the next wave of information delivery will be customized, right-to-your-door, concierge style, resulting in surprise and excitement. And that’s what MusicBox is about.

We’re not necessarily talking about anticipatory delivery here, a la Amazon. (Though the concept is quite attractive.) We are more interested in addressing the availability overload many consumers are feeling — or the tyranny of choice , if you will.

Our approach with MusicBox is based on the edict to search less and discover more.

We believe the current system of searching for music, even though it’s all out there and readily available, is flawed. You’re less likely to discover truly new and exciting tunes if you are left to your own searching process. Even sites like Pandora and Last.fm typically direct you to artists that are almost too close to the ones you plug in, almost too safe.

We’re aiming to expand listeners’ horizons by hand-picking and hand-delivering awesome independent music that’s juuuuust on the periphery of your comfort zone.

The flip side of the service is that up-and-coming independent artists get a brand new distribution channel that places their music directly into the inboxes of listeners who may not otherwise have found them. Theirs to download and own.

Will you join us? Jump on board here and as always, let us know how we’re doing.

UPDATE: We’re now at over 7,000 users and a few Boxes already sent out. We’ve received a ton of kick-ass feedback — including super insightful feature requests — and we’re full steam ahead. Exciting things on the horizon…thank you to all of our early adopters!