Change management comes to musical collaboration: MixLuv

MixLuv is a new subscription-based cloud platform that’s launching on Kickstarter.

The idea is to give musicians who have a part of a song a way to share that part and express what they are looking for to make it whole.

For example, say you play keyboard and sing. If you had a song and recorded those two tracks, you could post them and say you were looking for some guitar and drums.

In order to incentivize that sharing, the system also makes it possible to publish music, sell it and distribute royalties to all contributors. So this isn’t just a sort of Kumbaya, “let’s make something together” project. It’s meant to expand musicians’ capacity to do this stuff as a business.

The pain point the team is solving corresponds somewhat to the pain point GitHub has been solving for developers.

“We want to bring the social music creation process a platform to ease the disconnect of fragmented messaging, mix version management, and collaboration communications headaches,” Mike Zolfo, head of product for the project, told us via email.

When people are working on a track together, you end up with lots and lots of versions of the mix. It can get hard to find your versions across various laptops, Dropboxes and whatnot. The idea here is that all those versions can be kept in one place built for music, which gives collaborators “the ability for all stakeholders to provide feedback at every step along the way, our messaging and alerting components would allow for this,” Zolfo told us.

Up to this point, it reminds us somewhat of BandHub, the YouTube based platform for remote musicians to jam together.

The reward levels of the Kickstarter campaign allow you to preorder memberships. The levels of membership correspond to the amount of data you can store in the system. Memberships range from free to $125 a year.

Zolfo used the phrase “minimum viable product” several times in describing where the project is now. As MixLuv builds out, in may go deeper into the area of royalties management and sound mixing. For now it’s keeping those elements simple. Musicians will still have to take shared tracks offline and edit them locally, for now. Moving all that into the cloud would be a huge undertaking.

Zolfo described MixLuv’s team as “a dozen or so.” The team is talking with potential investors now, he said. Much of the team is working from Clinton Hill.