Foundry Company: Coverstruck

He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

With this new batch of Foundry miscreants halfway through their cohort, F2 tends to be more tech-oriented than the F1 guys that preceded them. Which means that they are smarter and spend their time mulling their baggy eyes through lines of code at weird times during the night - eating $5 pizza and "liberated" Rockstar Cola that mysteriously showed up on Foundry's footsteps last July.

CoverStruck, an audio/video startup founded by Foundry F2 member, Garrett Smith is like Youtube for the musically talented to showcase their artesian recreations of popular songs and support each other. I was surprised to note that Garrett has somehow locked down performance licenses from the three biggest music rights management companies so that users can upload their "interpretations" without fearing The Man.

While I can definitely see the benefit to "yet-to-be-discovered" musicians and their desire to not be sued, I found the user experience for non-musical norms like myself to be very intuitive. The front page has a rolling feed of videos that are on the site, it's addictive (kinda like Facebook's newsfeed) and I found myself returning to it to see what else was going to pop up.

What also cool is the way that the site is designed to encourage exploration. While the video is playing you can see who else has covered the song, who has covered other songs by the same mainstream artist and how many covers the particular musician has covered.

To give an example, I found a piano cover of "Use Somebody" by Kings of Leon and while I was watching the video, I noticed a tab that showed there were three other covers of that particular song. So once the first video finished, I checked out who else had done the song and then moved on to other Kings of Leon covers.

Surprisingly, I spent much more time than I planned to on the site and I think that speaks to the way Garrett is thinking about the user experience on both sides of the spectrum: the musicians and the music lovers.

CoverStruck is now saved in my favorites and I plan to use as I do work on my laptop - sort of like a Pandora for song covers (it's that good).

I recommend that you check them out and encourage your musician friends to be soothed by their ability to legally express themselves online.