Earbits Brings Its Independent Radio Service to iPhone | Web Design Magazine

While most streaming radio services pay artists each time they play one of their tracks, for Earbits Radio the artists are actually the investors.

The service is available on the web, and it launched an Android app earlier this year. Thursday it added an iOS [1] app into the mix as well.

See also: Top 25 Free iPhone Apps of All Time [2]

“Our vision for Earbits is to create a streaming platform that is specifically designed to help artists acquire new fans and market their products and live events,” CEO Joey Flores told Mashable. Artists can pay Earbits to get their songs played more heavily in a station’s rotation. For $39, an artist gets 1,300 plays, and $159 gets 8,000. A listener has to make it through 30 seconds of the track in order for it to count against that tally.

“Rather than sell ads or subscriptions, we focus exclusively on ‘How can we people to join a band mailing list, become their friend on Facebook?’ We track all of these stats and we share that information with the bands,” says Flores.

Flores says the vision is to drive more value and traffic for individual artists. Earbits makes money when artists pay to be played more often, something Flores says they’ll often do right before a tour or album release to drum up attention. Artists can be put in rotation for free.

For listeners, Earbits works much like other streaming services. When you launch the app, you’re given channel recommendations based on the songs stored on your device. Your tunes are then blended in with Earbits’ 380 existing channels. So, your Lumineers album will play mixed in with tunes by similar artists you haven’t heard of.

As a listener, if you hear something new you like, you can share that track with friends on social networks, sign up for the band’s mailing list, and even buy merchandise from right within the app. Supporting the artists earns you “Groovies,” a kind of currency than can be used within the app to listen to that track â€" or any other you’d like â€" on demand later for free.

Channels within Earbits are organized by genre, the whole experience is ad-free, and all of the artists represented within the service are hand-picked by the Earbits team.

“We do a lot of our own outreach,” says Flores. The company often reaches out to artists after reading reviews of songs or albums in magazines, or seeing them perform on the festival circuit. “We get a lot of artists who submit to us on their own, and then we have an editorial department that listens to everything that is sent to us to determine what is radio-ready.”

All that works together to create an interesting mix of artists on each station, most of which you’ve likely never heard of â€" a win for you as a listener and for the artists who are looking to connect with new fans.

Earbits is available now for free from the App Store [3] .

Image: Flickr, The Daily Quirk [4]

Links

1. ^{^} iOS (mashable.com)
2. ^{^} Top 25 Free iPhone Apps of All Time (mashable.com)
3. ^{^} from the App Store (itunes.apple.com)
4. ^{^} The Daily Quirk (www.flickr.com)

source: boodesign.org