Innovations in cinema and music occur only with creativity, passion and drive! In the early 90s, recall how AR Rahman’s songs in Mani Ratnam’s iconic Tamil film ‘Roja’ revolutionised the way music was treated in southern cinema. Not only did the trend grow to be a significant hit with youngsters and across college campuses, it brought in a feeling of ‘youth’ by way of the medium of fresh voices and exceptional instrumental music combinations.
Be it in any format or geography, music evolves and resonates with the altering instances. This sums up precisely what occurred when a group of musicians and artists got collectively and connected more than a shared interest in music.
“Rohit, Ishaan (also co-founders) and I met back when we were pursuing our undergrad from BITS Pilani and largely connected over a shared interest in music. The team behind humit comes from a varied background with expertise in product development, data science and design, having worked with leading fintech and ecommerce firms such as PayU, Ola and Tesco,” Prithvi Shankar, CEO and co-founder of humit, tells TheSpuzz Online.
This marks the turning point when they realized that music has a robust social element connected with it, ranging from how men and women fight more than aux cables through road trips, metalheads favor to sport band tees to wanting to queue the next track at a social gathering. streaming services are made for private listening.
“We felt the need for a social music discovery platform for ourselves. Initially, we started out building humit for us and a few friends but since we launched on Play Store towards the end of 2020, the feedback has been really encouraging and we are seeing early signs of repeat engagement on the platform ever since,” Prithvi explains.
What about the name humit?
hum (verb) + it = humit (action)
Tell us what is humit all about?
humit is a social media platform for bite-sized music sharing and discovery. The concept revolves about letting Spotify (at present), Apple Music & YouTube Music listeners share 30s audio snippets of strong moments from their preferred songs, which we refer to as “hums”. These hums can be sampled by followers in an endless feed showcasing fresh and new music.
Music delivered byte-sized – can you articulate this vision?
In this age of waning consideration spans, brief-kind content has taken center stage. Twitter popularized micro-blogging followed by apps like Vine/Tik Tok that produced video logging social. Audio as a format is exploding across music/podcasts with more than 50,000 hours of content getting uploaded on Spotify every single day. However, social audio is at present a whitespace and that is exactly where we saw the chance. In reality, a current study undertaken by Spotify shows that 1 out of 3 songs gets skipped inside the very first 30s. That’s how we decided to narrow down on the 30s brief-kind audio + UGC (user-generated content) format.
What do you imply with the emphasis on ‘Share convincingly’ and how does it translate into impactful behavior for your customers?
Music sharing on mobile is broken — sharing a URL by way of Facebook/ Messenger/ Instagram Stories/ WhatsApp signifies cutting by way of the clutter, jumping in between apps, and there’s usually no feedback on whether or not a person listened to/ liked the song or not.
On the other hand, algorithmic reccos have a tendency to go no additional than saying “here’s another song that sounds extremely similar to the one you just listened to”.
That’s exactly where we really feel the potential to curate the most effective moments from your preferred tracks would ease the method of sharing and discovery. And in the method, top to the discovery of underrated/ underrepresented artists.
What external aspects have supported the development of humit?
Our current soft launch on Product Hunt had trended #1 and got us featured on their newsletters, Twitter, and so forth, courtesy of all the assistance and generosity we received.
Further, we are also now working with leading colleges in India and some of the country’s finest musicians to organize a nationwide virtual music talent hunt known as ‘heal the world’ with a total pool of Rs. 7 lakhs supported by OnePlus India. More on this is accessible on our internet site.
Scaling up – what’s your significant program and concentrate locations?
Although we have been creating a international solution given that Day 1, offered that we are serving an international audience of streaming service customers, our present concentrate is on the Indian industry.
Since our perfect customers would be millennials and Gen Z, we are focusing on college communities, to start with by way of a variety of on the internet activations and by partnering with offline events.
Down the line, we would also be working closely with musicians & artists to provide them avenues to monetize their talent.
The concept is to develop a neighborhood of music fans and artists, enabling meaningful interactions.
In 2021, you would see us actively engaging in collaborations with music festivals, artists, and collegiate events across the nation.