Show HN: Kizina – Self-Executing, Interactive Music Album Technology
Nfixx here.<p>Interesting commentary; some heated, but most informative nevertheless. Yes, like @caseymarquis, I hadn&#x27;t heard of Demoscene despite being someone who kind of hoards all kinds of music (yes, I&#x27;ve even collected some algo-generated music as many folks do refer to that more modern trend here). But, in my part of the world - I&#x27;m doing these projects from East Africa, there&#x27;s a lot that could use some innovation.<p>I definitely know there are more optimal means for my music to reach fans - and I&#x27;m being vigilant here (see how much channels I&#x27;ve tried thus far). This is my first serious music project in all of my life thus far, and being a techy, I always felt there should be a means to do something else besides suffering at the hands of tradition - I&#x27;ve not yet been successful with getting someone to manage or help sell my music. So I&#x27;ve decided to do whatever with it, as I see what ideas work, what doesn&#x27;t.<p>Contrary to what one person said, I don&#x27;t love locking my users&#x2F;fans in. I just like to advocate for diversity - and looking at how many options a new musician has to use for distribution, I felt like, why not use all that I can readily use at the moment - especially sites&#x2F;platforms that are more self-service, and have something new to bring to music distribution:<p>Genius: I love it, because, a potential fan gets to listen to your music while studying the lyrics and possibly seeing how others have interpreted what you have to say. This sort of method of consuming music, in my opinion, is the &quot;higher end&quot;. It is more important than most other methods, especially for genres such as Hip Hop that I do, where so much effort goes into writing not just nice-sounding, but educative, often poetic lyrics, and this can best be appreciated when someone listens as they read the lyrics as well.<p>-- so in a way, despite being an official editor on Genius myself, I used their sleek idea to do something else my folks in this part of the world might love : my typical local fan here in East Africa might not have the resources to savor my music album via Genius&#x2F;Soundcloud all the time, and yet, the idea of giving them something more than just typical audio&#x2F;video, seemed to me like a nice thing - if packaged as an app, not only do they get to listen to the music, but there&#x27;s more exciting things they can do with the album even while offline: read lyrics, take notes, browse longer album bio&#x2F;stories (which can all be part of the package, and which, due to the dynamic nature of the app-medium, allow for more creative ways of presenting many things than a standard album on disc)<p>SoundCloud - the possibility of my fans highlighting specific parts of songs that they liked the most, and possibly leaving context-aware comments for why. I see Soundcloud giving to the lyricist in me, the equivalent of Genius&#x27;s per-line annotation power, but instead, the focus being on the lyrics and soundscape, as they are combined, at a given moment during the song. DVDs and most other means of distributing music don&#x27;t readily given the artiste this sort of power.
-- and, who says some future version of this KIZINA tech might not allow &quot;album-app&quot; authors to bake-in perhaps soundcloud-api-powered discussions for the tracks or offer something similar that uses the internal streams, but posts to the remote soundcloud (or does a sync of those comments, and renders them in sync to the user playing the song in the album?) There&#x27;s lots of room for innovation and experiment here, and I think this does all of us more good in the long run, than not. I for one, love to tinker with things that seem to be important to what I&#x27;m doing with my life, and music is one of them.<p>So, what might be the real benefits of KIZINA?
- fans can choose to download the self-contained album app once they really want to be that engaged with your music (think of a fan that wants to unplug from the internet, but yet go on that hike with your lyrics, music, album gallery, stories, etc. They can spend more time engaged with experiencing your music, than what the typical audio-only or video-only methods of consuming music would offer). And this doesn&#x27;t only have to work for music albums only. 
- I&#x27;ve already hinted at the possibility of many educational projects that might use this sort of thing: story-books, magazines that bundle both music and visual&#x2F;text, etc.
- The lure of this all, being the creative power the content author has, when determining what other auxiliary things to include besides their main product (in the case of music, the main product being audio). This is an app, so you might even bundle a game that lets the user play as they listen to your music! No existing music packaging tech might easily give you that sort of power IMO.<p>So, TL;DR: This is not as fringe&#x2F;cutting-edge as I first thought, but it is nevertheless meant to address some concerns about music (and generally, content) publishing that I don&#x27;t see other platforms offering me yet. And it also sort of opens up innovation, as making albums software, means we can do an infinity of things with each new music release... Think about that. So, perhaps KIZINA is still relevant to introduce to the public, as many, like me, didn&#x27;t know of other similar options.<p>I will definitely even consider selling my music directly on the street (it&#x27;s one of the more popular methods of indie distribution in Kampala - some bunch of chaps basically duplicate the records, and vend them on the verandas of shops and in kiosks of all sorts).