There’s no shortage of websites that enable you to tune into electronic music streams (Digitally Imported leaps to mind), but that doesn’t mean there’s no way to better the offering. Just take a look at Play.fm for example, which we covered favorably earlier this year when they launched their public beta.
A new serious contender that is making its debut today is Mugasha (from ‘music-gather-share’), and its strategy is to focus on the top DJs in the world primarily rather than having the largest collection of sets.
The upstart positions Mugasha as the ‘Hulu for electronic music rather than YouTube’, indicating that it focuses on quality rather than quantity. If you’re into dance music, you’ll dig the DJs the fledgling company has managed to persuade into collaborating: Tiësto, Markus Schulz, Andy Moor, Matt Darey and Menno de Jong are some of the names it’s launching with.
As a recovering electronic music addict, I enjoyed testing the service a lot and the content – which includes both DJ sets and music podcasts – really is high level. Mugashan, which started as a small project at Startup Weekend in Portland, sports a very intuitive interface and a couple of nice features. For instance, you don’t need to register for the service to stream music, only if you want to express your opinion on sets or even individual tracks by ‘liking’ or commenting on them.
You can subscribe to shows and the artist profile pages include links to their other social networking presences, to allow you to dig deeper into specific artists’ work and personal life. When you click through to a specific set – e.g. Francesco Pico’s Magnitude – you’ll notice that you can jump from track to track using the playlist or by sliding the bar on the timeline on top. You can easily share a set or individual tracks on a variety of social networks, and you can also head straight to iTunes or Amazon to buy the music you’re listening to. It’s very slick, and the only thing I thought it lacks is a decent search box on the homepage.
Mugasha aims to make money, apart from running advertising on the site, by collecting affiliate fees on digital music sales originating from their website. It’s notably hard to generate any serious revenue that way, as countless online music startups before them have already proven, but at least the project is entirely bootstrapped by founders Akshay Dodeja and Justin Thiele which means they don’t need to worry about investors breathing down their necks as they make their way. As the title reads: if you’re into electronic music, you’ll be loving this.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some Tiësto sets to go listen intensely to.
