Tastebuds.fm is a dating website for music lovers, by music lovers. Your potential match’s music interests aren’t just a minor part of your profile, tucked away beneath other items; they’re the main event. SoundCtrl writer Jason Epstein had a Q&A with Tastebuds.fm Community Manager Máriusz Bari to speak about the site’s community, features, and future.
SoundCtrl: How important do you feel a couple’s musical compatibility is?
Máriusz: Fairly important, I’d say. I’ve been working with music communities for more than a decade and based on that, I’d definitely say that sharing music is a great way to make people meet or even base relationships on. It can greatly strengthen a bond if a couple can go to a gig, show or festival together – still, their tastes shouldn’t completely overlap – so that either of them can show the other something new from time to time. We’re also in the process of posting testimonial stories about couples who met on our site and got engaged or married, so I’d say musical compatibility is a great thing to have. I’ve heard a number of our female users actually saying that they often ignore messages from guys whose musical taste is completely different.
SC: Using Tastebuds.fm, will you ever be able to meet people based on the music they play, if they are artists as well as music lovers?
Máriusz: Good question! So far we only match people based on the music they listen to and not the music they play, although these would naturally overlap to a certain degree. There are lots of users within our community who are solo musicians, band members, DJ’s, etc. and they love to pimp their music on their profile pages – so if you happen to love their music, you can contact them straight away!
SC: How are you able to offer such a niche service for free?
Máriusz: We’ve recently raised a round of funding to enable us to build out the product and scale our userbase – while testing some premium features with some great results! Also – I wouldn’t say we’re a niche service, festivals and gigs throughout the world would definitely underline the fact that people loving the same music can end up in great fun together!
SC: Can you tell me a bit about Tastebuds.fm’s community?
Máriusz: Oh, sure – they’re a great bunch of music lovers! They’re madly sending messages to each other at the rate of over 10,000 messages a day. Then they’re also debating more publicly in our forum section that we call “The Soapbox”. We hit 100,000 registered users at the end of last year and we’re growing quickly. Users are contributing to our blog articles and we plan to include more of their creative outputs, ideas and products into the site to make it as much theirs as it is ours at the moment. Definitely a friendly community who are about listening to more music and finding new great stuff to live by, so I’d love to hang out there even if I wasn’t working with them.
SC: What are some of Tastebuds.fm’s newest features?
Máriusz: Hmmm let’s see…we’ve recently tweaked our search algorithm to give our users a more accurate list of people who share their music taste. Our unique radio feature lets you discover new music that people just like you are listening to, right now. Now we’re preparing for our next Hack-A-Thon around Valentine’s Day where we basically have 36 hours to add a new feature to the site, which is…well, you have to come back a little after Valentine’s Day to see what that feature is, but it’ll be fun, I promise!
SC: What’s next?
Máriusz: We’re chiseling out a new design, a new real-time messaging system, new profiles… we basically have one wall of our office filled with post-its full of ideas, so it’s more like we’re coming up with a temporal expander and then have 48-hour long days to fill with more feature-o-matic awesomeness! We want to give our users a more seamless experience of communication and new ways of finding new people based on their tastes to have fun with.
Check out our original interview with Tastebuds.fm founder Alex Parish right here.
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