About this project

We built a website so that musicians with no money and very little technical know-how can still distribute their music, digitally.

Often described as "Flickr, but for musicians, and with the option to price your stuff, if you want"

We've built a solid working prototype, which we funded the development completely on a few bucks from family and friends. The plan was to get a working model in place and then try to get some venture capital, until we realized that it was too important not to let anyone take control of our project.

We don't want to build iTunes and we don't want to compete with the Amazon MP3 store. No. Our service is completely designed for a different, but massive audience.

We hope to create a tool for your local and independent artists. Musicians with very little financial and technical resources that are still driven to pursue making music.

Our goal is to provide a service that is free and easy to use, that will allow musicians to publish their own music, digitally, in a variety of formats, in order to share it with the everyone, not just their friends and family. Artists can then choose to share these songs for free or set their own prices for their individual songs and albums.

We believe this will be a huge boon to the independent/DIY music community and will further remove the necessity for a talented musician to need the financial backing of a traditional record label.

So what do we need the money for?

- More powerful servers
- Development of the iPhone and desktop component
- a once-over by a professional designer to zazz up the interface
- advertising and some stellar marketing ideas we've cooked up that will be cheap to execute and effective

Most importantly, we'd like to keep afloat at least until Feb 2010 so we can spend the Summer and Fall focusing on reaching out to DIY/independent musicians and fine-tune the service to become a highly marketable, viable service.

I should mention, that in an effort to get the word out for what we're doing, we posted our working "beta" at www.ossia.fm

Thanks,
Alex Stone, Lead Developer