Last week, the new micro-music video app Mindie was launched, creating a new platform for creating and sharing short videos set to song clips. Mindie steps into the mobile world with apps like Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, and the recently launched MixBit, but shifts the video focus to sharing and building communities through music. With an incredibly clean, full-screen interface, Mindie is easy to use and effortless to browse–pick a song from the iTunes database, record a video of short clips, and publish and share your new music video on Twitter, Facebook, and of course, Mindie.

We spoke to co-founder Grégoire Henrion about the concept, functionality, and future of Mindie, and why the app is creating its own space in the world of social media.

SoundCtrl: Can you tell us a bit about Mindie and where you’re from?

Grégoire Henrion: We’re based in Paris. We’re a little startup of four people working on Mindie, and we started working on it about two months ago. The parent company is called Ever.

SC: Do you have other projects under the Ever umbrella?

GH: Ever was a former project, it was our first app but we never really launched it. It was still in beta, then we decided to change the idea to make something simpler and based on music, so we came up Mindie.

SC: So how did the concept of Mindie come about?

GH: The idea of Ever was that you could make albums of photos, notes, and music, and we found that users loved associating music and images. So when we decided to do something simpler, we wanted to do something with music and images– we just had to find the right format. The music idea was perfect, because music videos are popular on YouTube but not widely used in social media.

SC: Are there any competitors or other apps from which you try to differentiate Mindie?

GH: I’m not sure we’re competing with Vine and Instagram because they are based on video sharing, and we are more like music sharing supplemented by video. It’s not the same gesture, it’s not the same thing that happens in your mind when you want to create something. So I don’t think they’re competitors. We are creating our own market that doesn’t really exist yet, but can grow very fast.

SC: It’s great to identify that opening. Do you think of it as a platform to promote artists?

GH: It could, of course, be a very good platform for promoting artists, but the first step is building a community and then seeing exactly what that community is. It’s a great opportunity for artists and brands because music is powerful vector of communication. So we’re definitely thinking about it, but we’re currently testing it on users and trying to see what they are doing with the app.

SC: What platform is the music coming from within the app?

GH: Currently it’s iTunes’ API. They offer a 30 second preview, and we take the first 7 seconds. There’s no violation.

SC: So there’s no copyright issue with that?

GH: No, we have access to iTunes previews, and there is a link to buy the song from the iTunes store. So it’s a closed circuit.

SC: Are you thinking of expanding to other streaming platforms?

GH: There are other possibilities like Rdio’s API, Soundcloud’s API, and Deezer’s API, but we thought about how we could work with those platforms.

SC: It’s amazing how many different interpretations there are of one song, are there ways to rank popularity?

GH: Currently we sort through the videos and tag the coolest ones “Best Mindie.” But later we’re working on a ranking system of popularity to make more possibilities to explore music videos through the app.

SC: Will there be a desktop or online app in the future?

GH: We currently have a web view, but a desktop app is not in our scope currently. We’re a little team so we have to focus on mobile as it’s very difficult to develop for mobile.

SC: The design is very clean, how did the idea for the interface come up?

GH: The idea is to erase the interface–we want it to be immersive and simple. We want people to forget that they’re on an app, and we want the experience to be very simple, like watching TV. So this is why there is no background and most of the interface is full screen images.

SC: What are the future plans for Mindie?

GH: Our app for Android will come in a few months, but right now we’re focused on ways to explore Mindie within the app. We’re also focusing on interactions between the users like sharing and mentions, so that we can really build a community.

The Mindie app is currently available for free on the App Store. 

 

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