Musikfly Helps Bloggers Cut through the Noise to find What’s Buzzing

By Kira Grunenberg

MusikFly is a new service that aims to connect independent artists with writers and critics. Launched in beta just this past March, MusikFly is the product of several music-loving students from the University of Colorado at Boulder, who recognized a basic dilemma musicians face when attempting to grab the attention of blogs – how do you avoid spamming writers whose inboxes are already jam packed?

Many music startups coming out of the developmental woodshed focus on helping artists stimulate their consumers and fanbase. But a large Facebook or Twitter presence doesn’t make a career, as plenty of high numbered accounts with mediocre interaction will reveal. MusikFly’s engagement with the music blogging community tackles fan growth from a far less approached and highly desirable angle.

MusikFly gives artists a fluid method for submitting songs to a wide assortment of music blogs, listed right on MusikFly’s main site. Each is organized by name, location, and stats. A genre section breaks down the preferred style of submissions for each blog, ensuring a quick method to determine whether a blog is appropriate for your music. This bit of info alone cuts down the irrelevancy factor for bloggers and instantly helps an artist’s chances of getting a listen and hopefully, a review.

Similar support is provided to bloggers themselves via a Musikfly widget, which sends submissions from their own site directly into their Musikfly inbox. Material from either YouTube or SoundCloud is sorted together in a neat, uniform list. Any track selected instantly provides bloggers with the artist’s information from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or SoundCloud pages. All submissions from the widget AND from the artists that are using the Musikfly site go directly to one feed, ensuring the blog can manage all of their submissions in one place.

Founder, Fletcher Richman, explains that he and his team are using the MusikFly widget as their current growth strategy, while working on other system-wide requests to mutually support artists and the blogs:

“Blogs already receive so much traffic, so having our widget on their submission page makes us visible to a wide range of artists and blogs. We released the widget just a few weeks ago, which has led to a very consistent stream of submissions. Combined with the network effect of [online press,] our growth has been fun to watch. One other growth strategy we are working on is to require Artists to either Tweet or like the blogs Facebook page in order to submit. This isn’t finished yet but its in the plans! That will help grow our audience as well as the blog’s audience.”

One question is whether the platform should focus its attention more on artists or bloggers in these early stages. Right now, MusikFly is of the stance that the latter is the priority.

“Artists are already doing whatever it takes to submit to a blog so our primary focus has been to build a platform that blogs love. We want the MusikFly submission process to be so great that blogs can no longer face their email inboxes.”

Use of the previously mentioned widget, a mobile friendly feed and a streamlined submission process are all driving forces supporting this goal.

When contemplating future developments for MusikFly, Richman also points out that artists can get a well-rounded impression of the blogs working with MusikFly via “a snapshot of [their] social influence.”

A screenshot of the blog Indie is Not a Genre‘s submission page (utilizing the Musikfly widget), shows their SoundCloud information, Facebook fans, YouTube stats, and Twitter followers. Data divulging additional elements like average response time, number of posts per day, and percentage of feedback are in the pipeline for the future.

“This will create accountability for the blogs and encourage them to give better feedback [to submitting artists.]”

The other idea for the future that Richman is passionate about involves the hope for an eventual partnership with popular music blog / mp3 aggregator, The Hype Machine.

“[We’d] love to work with them… they have the same mission of getting great independent musicians heard and giving credit to the amazing blogs who find them.” 

One of Richman’s specific strategies that he believes would function well in tandem with Hype Machine involves “…creating a way to track and give credit to the blogs that post about an artist first, and then see the flow of how songs are picked up by other blogs. I would love to integrate that into some of the incredible data that Hype Machine has.” 

Artists and bloggers can sign up for MusikFly here.

Kira is an old school music nerd with a love for all things creative; always searching for music’s common ground. She graduated with an M.A. in Performing Arts Administration from New York University. Drop her a tweet @shadowmelody1