After months of building the foundation for Harmonic, we’re excited to invite our first users to test it out! Before diving into what’s next, here’s a quick overview.

Join us for a virtual demo and discussion on Tuesday, August 12 at 7pm ET / 4pm PT. RSVP here: https://lu.ma/t28ioztb

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What we’ve built (so far)

Harmonic is a music marketplace centered on recommendations and conversation around music. At its core, Harmonic is simple:

• Artists upload music.
• Curators buy and recommend music.
• When someone buys based on a recommendation, the curator earns 10% of the sale.‍

That’s the foundation. We’re layering some exciting features on top of that (like the ability to curate your own digital record store!). There’s a lot more to build, but before we get too feature-heavy, we want to hear directly from artists, curators, and music fans.

A seat at the table

One of Harmonic’s founding principles is that artists must have a seat at the table. That’s why we brought on artist advisor Rae Isla before we even had a working demo. Rae has helped shape Harmonic’s early stages, and now we’re ready to expand that collaboration.

As we add new features (like physical media and merch), we’ll be openly asking artists and curators for input. Harmonic will only succeed if artists believe it’s a fair, supportive platform. We’re committed to keeping it that way.

Bootstrapping

Harmonic is 100% self-funded and privately owned. There’s no corporate parent, no VC backing, and no outside pressure steering our decisions. That means our limited product development bandwidth goes toward what artists and curators actually want, not what investors think they want.

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The Roadmap

The Harmonic beta period will roll out in three stages: a private artist beta, a private curator beta, and an extended public beta. 

If you’re interested in taking part in any of these stages, make sure you sign up for our waitlist!

Stage 1: Private Artist Beta (Happening Now!)

Our focus for Stage 1 is to onboard a small cohort of artists and work with them to build out their releases and make those releases available to their most passionate fans. By focusing on individual artists, we can make sure the platform works for these core users before leaning into discovery.

Artists that join during the private artist beta will: 

✅ Test uploading music and customizing their store
✅ List music that doesn’t fit streaming platforms (live bootlegs, demos, alternate versions)
✅ Get their music recommended by their biggest fans
✅ Share feedback and feature ideas
✅ Build out the library of music available on Harmonic

As mentioned, we’ve kept the initial feature set simple. This means it will be easy to test and polish the core functionality. It also means that we expect every artist will have ideas for additional features, and we can act on those ideas relatively quickly.

By participating in this beta, artists will be able to hear firsthand from their biggest fans about why they love the artists' music. When a fan views an artist’s release, they have the option to recommend the release and write about why they love it. We specifically call these recommendations because we don’t need negative reviews (there are plenty of other places to do that on the internet). We want fans that love the music to share why they love it, right on the release page. These recommendations will eventually become the core method of discovering music on the platform.

Because those recommendations are being posted on a platform where other people can actually purchase music, they’re not only validating for the artist, they’re a monetarily valuable contribution that can directly impact sales.

During this stage, we suggest that artists focus on uploading existing releases that fans already love — and will be that much more likely to recommend — as well as rare/unreleased/limited-availability recordings that the hardcore faithful will be excited to own. Here’s your opportunity to see maximum value from demos, alternate takes, live recordings, “lost” albums, or to sell tracks you only want made available for a specific window of time. If it strengthens the bond between artist and audience, Harmonic is a natural home for it.

Without music, there is no music marketplace. Therefore, we need artists to join in order to have a diverse library of music for curators to purchase and recommend. As Harmonic co-founder George Howard likes to say. “Once the friction is gone, so too is the opportunity.” The artists that join early will have an outsized impact on the direction of Harmonic and will hopefully make some easy sales as we begin the curator stage of the private beta.

Stage 2: Private Curator Beta

Once we feel we have a sufficiently growing library of music available and see that our core features are working as designed, we’ll unlock our next group of features:

✅ More customizable stores for artists AND curators, allowing store owners to group releases under custom categories.

✅Publishing tools for artists and curators to write longer-form articles and newsletters about their music or deeper thoughts about music, and for the ability for other users to subscribe.

✅Additional store item types! Physical products as well as other digital formats (video files, PDFs, photos) will be made available.

In addition to the above, more artists on Harmonic means there’s more to discover! Music fans (aka curators) can now browse through the available music on the platform and read recommendations from other curators.

Unlike passive streaming platforms, Harmonic is built for active listening. Early curators will help us shape how music discovery truly works here and become the first tastemakers on the platform.

Stage 3: Extended Public Beta

We can’t keep Harmonic under wraps forever! With a library of independent music and curators excited to share that music, we’ll open up Harmonic to everyone as a public beta. 

We’re calling this “extended” because we want to give ourselves and the community ample time to tweak and revise until everyone is excited about the platform. During this phase, expect quick updates and feature rollouts based on community feedback. This means it will be a more dynamic situation than what one might expect from a final, polished product.

How will we know when this stage is complete? When we see a flywheel of curators discovering and recommending music, artists making sales, and new users coming in organically, we’ll know we’ve found the sweet spot. At this point, we’ll polish things up with a fresh coat of paint, and plan for an official launch with everyone that has taken part along the way.

Join us!

If you’ve read this far, you’re exactly who we want in the Harmonic community!

👉 Click here to sign up for the waitlist. 

Artists will get an email about onboarding quickly. Curators won’t have to wait long. Plus, we’ll be hosting virtual events along the way so that early adopters can meet, talk about music, and help shape Harmonic’s future together. It’s going to be a blast.