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Should Anyone Be Afraid of Myspace?

phillyfuture.org — Andrew Kortina, 23 year old University of Pennsylvania graduate and founder of PhilaFunk.com, is NOT. He studied philosophy and computer science at Penn and his website is in direct competition with Myspace. PhilaFunk combines the power of a social network with an online music store where artists keep $.80 for every $.99 song they sell.

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  • attila, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I enjoyed this write-up. It had some good details of a start-up that's local to me that's doing national and international business. I'm glad someone is standing up to these bloated networks and organizations that are insensitive to artists needs. It sounds like Andrew has a good head on his shoulders and knows how to treat artists with respect, I just hope his dreams aren't dashed by the immense competition he's up against with MySpace and YouTube.
    • invader, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2it was an interesting write-up.. sure painted a rosey picture and offered some pretty bold speculation, considering it launched a couple months ago.. but hey, it sounds like they have an expert analyzing the stats..

      "Based on the site's steadily growing functionality and popularity, it looks like PhilaFunk.com will prove to be a major player in the social networking space."

      so i decided to see who is speculating this.. two clicks later, i'm at http://www.iqrammusic.com/ surprisingly enough, this fancy write-up was by one of their [few] members.

      "[...] but PhilaFunk's clean design and ease of use distinguishes it from the social networking giant."

      oh, so now this guy is a web designer, too? alright digg users, raise your hand if you agree that philafunk's design is bland, lame, amateurish, or just flat out poor.

      "one Tuesday night. Wednesday, while I was eating lunch I read that YouTube just announced"

      yeah, because youtube would launch a competition overnight to compete with a site they've never heard of.... /sarcasm
    • garyh84, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sadly, MySpace's design isn't much better.
  • bpinard, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20I'm afraid of the horrible design, slow load times, tons of ads, spam/porn bots, clunky feel, and most of the people who use myspace.
    • attila, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Ok, what do you think of PhilaFunk though.. I think it has potential, especially if that $.88 for every $.99 deal is solid.
    • kortina, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7attila--actually, it's $.80 (not $.88 ) that goes to the artist. And it is solid.
    • aarons44, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3That's a tremendous deal for artists, considering that on individual song downloads they only get a few cents per song, and that's only to the credited songwriter.
    • bdurkin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8I think it has a lot of potential and I love the philosophy behind it. I think it could use a little makeover to not look like a blog but I think the 80 out of 99 is great and the simplicity of it is nice. I think the one problem is that the reason why there are so many people using myspace, is because there are so many people using myspace. As far as a networking site goes, the more people the better. It is the reason why so many people dumped friendster and tribe and hi5 and so on and so on. It is the sheer number of people that you can keep in touch/network with that makes it so popular. The design sucks, the ads suck, the load times suck and thats if the page even loads at all. The two things that make it popular are the customization and the number of users.
    • ThePDW, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4http://www.philafunk.com/DaNica/ Well, at least some of the artists aren't too bad looking :-)
    • ucg1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2PhilaFunk would be nice if the song samples had more than a half a second of music so that I could actually hear the music to judge whether to buy or not. I'm not exagerating here, either, in most cases (though not all) I click play and only hear a half second of sound.

      Same problem exists on cruxy.com which someone mentioned below.
    • Ryosen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@ucg1

      Must be you. The very first song I clicked on provided a 1 minute sample, which is more than most sites seem to give you. The PDW posted this link, http://www.philafunk.com/DaNica/, which worked for me.

      If it's true that they pay the artists nearly 80% of the receipts, then I'm going to try and find some songs to buy, just out of principle.
  • flaakmonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Microsoft is coming out with a new Social Network now too.
    • bleaknik, on 10/12/2007, -8/+1Microsoft ... New Socialism Network? Wait a minute. That sounds an awful lot like communism.... :)
    • fishcymbal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Yes, I've been a member for a while. It's called Passport. You must sign in after you've signed in for permission to sign in. Its motto is, "All your base are belong to us."
  • vandread, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Everyone should be afraid of Myspace. Be very very afraid!
  • mouthster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8"is NOT."

    Whoa buddy, you're serious about this.
  • profix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Check out Cruxy (http://cruxy.com) - new startup with same general feel as Philafunk but much faster, better looking, some flash/blog widgets, no ads, and support for wav, flac, ogg, video, pdf's and more.

    Philafunk and Cruxy are both on to something for sure - people love to be social about their music and musician's should get paid their fair shake, so combining those features into one service is a great idea.
  • clinko, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Credit cards take typically 7% unless you're a major company like MCDONALDS.
    99 - 7% = $.92

    Take away the 80 cents
    $.92 - $.80(artist) = $0.12

    Minimum wage = $5.15

    So he'd have to sell 43 songs AN HOUR to make minimum wage.


    • clinko, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2BANDWIDTH:

      so, if each song is 5mb.

      43songs * 5mb = 215mb/hr or 5.16GB a day

      30 days = 150gb/mo.

      That's private server territory... $150/mo. or 1,250 songs to break even.
    • kevinrosesmom, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2While I appluad the mathematical efforts, you are of course forgetting about the revenue from ads.
    • Ryosen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't know what credit cards you're accepting, but mine take 3.2%. Amex takes a flat $5.95 (was $5 even til Oct) for the first $5,000 in annual sales, and about 4% thereafter. Restaurants get the largest fee hit from credit cards, with Amex going as high as 6% iirc. I'm reciting this off of the top of my head but, if you're that interested, I can pull the numbers from my merchant account agreements.

      Surprisingly enough, some of the best rates that I found for credit card processing was from Intuit's Quickbooks Merchant.
  • paragonmatrix, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4whats funny is when you view a profile and start playing the tracks, the others dont stop when you preview a new one.

    so you can get this crazy mix going of your own!
    • Jaria, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3thats the hidden remix function :P
      its even cooler having multiole FF tabs open :D then you can get some mixing going on

      p.s the site could use a more apealing layout really
    • Ryosen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1The design and premise look very close to PodShow's.
  • imakecomments, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Under most conditions, artists actually get 53c out of 99c.

    The 80c out of 99c thing is misleading. Do you think it means that the artists get 80c out of each 99c song? Wrong. The artists get 80% of NET Revenues, once taxes and merchant fees are deducted.

    PayPal merchant fees are 30c + 1.9 to 2.9%. Details are on PayPal's page. That means that net revenue of a 99c song is 99 - 32 = 67c. 80% of that is 53.6c. Taxes and other charges come out of that too, but the MOST an artist can get from a single 99c song sale is about 53c.

    It can be more if a purchaser buys more than one song in a transaction.

    From the Artist Terms of Agreement:

    "1.7. Royalties:

    1.7.1. Philafunk will pay you eighty percent (80%) of any and all Net Revenues, from the Music Download Service sale and delivery of downloadable music files embodying the Licensed Recordings.

    1.7.2. For the purpose of this Agreement, "Net Revenue" shall mean the gross revenues Philafunk receives from such sales, less only sales, use, value-added, or similar taxes, and merchant fees. Philafunk customers pay for downloadable music files by purchasing songs several ways, including one song for $0.99 (USD), 20 songs for $14.99 (USD), and 10 songs for $7.99 (USD). Royalties that Philafunk will pay to you are calculated as 80% of the Net Revenue derived from the total number of downloads per month attributed to you.

    1.7.3. Philafunk will provide quarterly reports for you listing total number of downloads per quarter for each of your licensed recordings. "

    If I've misunderstood the terms, please clarify.
    • imakecomments, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3It seems I may have been a little hasty.

      I haven't purchased a song from PhilaFunk, but I just read in the FAQ that the way you purchase is by first buying "PhilaFunk credits". You can buy $10 worth, or $20 or $40. You then use your credits to purchase songs.

      It would seem then that the PayPal transaction fee is spread over the number of songs purchased with your credits. It's not entirely clear, but it appears that it's nowhere near as bad as I had initially concluded.

      Sorry for jumping to the wrong conclusion! Please clarify, though.
    • kortina, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@imakecomments:
      You are correct when you say that PayPal does take a percentage, but they take it from PhilaFunk's part of the revenue, not the artist's. If you join as an artist, you'll see that you keep $.80 per $.99 song. The way we defray PayPal costs, is as you say, that we only allow users to purchase credits in units of $10, $20, or $40. That way we're not getting nailed with $.30 for each song.

      If anyone else has any doubts about the deal for artists, I can assure you that this deal is for real. Feel free to contact me at andrewkortina [ at ] philafunk [ddot] com and I'll try to answer any questions you may have. Peace.
    • Ryosen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+253 cents out of 99? That's still better than the 5 to 10 cents RIAA contracts pay most artists. And what were they getting from iTunes sales? Something like 8 cents on the dollar?

      Even if half of the gross revenue went to costs, that would still leave 40 cents on the dollar going to the artist. Still sounds like a good deal to me.
  • YourTechSupport, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3While I'm personally not afraid of MySpace. I do feel my browser quiver in fear when I hover over a link going to that particular site. I don't blame it.
  • phatalbert, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Don't particularly like the look of the site.

    It's a good write up of a promising start up though.
  • cpawl, on 10/12/2007, -4/+0Philafunk is hardly an orginal concept, it's poorly designed and implicated, it has a terrible name that doesn't relate to anything not "phunking" outside of Philly... and they are sure to go broke. I know everyone loves the underdog, but a kid with an idea that builds a site that appears more like a WordPress Blog rather than a service site, needs to understand that just cause your an underdog doesn't mean your crap don't stink.
  • ardellin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Interesting idea, but they must really take artists for idiots. They list iTunes (along with Windows or OS X) as a firm requirement for uploading music, so they can list one set of instructions for encoding mp3s.

    I guess that kills any future music career for me since my OS doesn't support iTunes and there are no other ways to encode mp3s...
  • jennkortina, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I don't particularly like the site style either, but I congratulate them on trying to make a site that lets new artists get exposed and make a little money. For all you guys finding little nit picky things wrong with the site take it easy. There are only two people programming the site who both have full time jobs. When I call them wasted on the weekend they are programming. They are a hell of a lot more devoted to this site than most people are to anything. At least they are trying to make something good, I just sit my ass all weekend.

    @ardellin -- not everyone reads digg and is as smart as us ;)

    • ardellin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Good point (about the devotion of the creators and taking it easy). I actually would like to see this succeed, but just thought it was funny of how iTunes is listed as a must in order to encode mp3s. But anyway, kudos to them for fighting for artists and hopefully they take off without getting sued like mp3.com.
  • Noloco, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I personally don't like the name and if it does have attachments to Itunes I probably want have anything to do with it. Also it wouldn't accept my passwords for nothing! It was very annoying. As I put the chars it wanted and how many,etc..It kept repeating it's errors..So I kept changing variables. Ah!
  • smohan123, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3i went to the philafunk's websites. even though i still can't stand the myspace stuff, i think philafunk will do well. i won't be joining, as the extent of my social networking profile is facebook, but i it's got that new website advantage of flexibility and quick changes. i like how the artists get the lion's share of the profits for song downloads, too. it'll have a lot of up-and-comers onboard. also, there are some 10/10 chicks on the front page.
    • ohmytodd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1FACEBOOK IS SOOOO DUMB NOW. Totally sold out.
  • xenubaba, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2but it's on RAILS!!!
  • lemonobrien, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0you guys should check out tamago (www.tamago.us) its a new type of p2p network that allows artist/authors to set the royalty amount they want to make; and pays people for distributing content...
  • psantora, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0How does this compare with Amie Street ( http://amie.st ) ?
  •  

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