App: Mflow

by Chris on 02 June 2010

mflow.com The social music store, Twitter meets Spotify?

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Pros

Flo Ridaaaaa

mflow is the new kid on the streaming music block. So what’s the deal?

In a strange way to start, the idea is to follow your friends by adding them to your profile. You then receive tracks that your pals rate which are ‘flowed’ to your profile for you to give a spin.

If you like the flowed track, the idea is to purchase which will give 20% of the profit to the recommender/mate.

Anything you ‘flow’ which is downloaded by a friend will in turn give you a slice of the pie.

There is a handy video that tells all you need to know here.

Sounds great doesn’t it?

We gave mflow a test drive over at the Webgun Towers where we were unconvinced to say the least.

Sure everything looks great, shiny buttons a plenty, glossy images all the interaction design works well but is pretty much just a re-skinned Spotify with the general layout almost identical.

Much like with the problems of Google Wave it only comes to life when you have a bunch of mates using the application… and suffers from the ‘no-one is using it so I won’t bother’ and therefore it’s hard to really see mflow at it’s full potential.

mflow feels very empty when you first arrive and they try to get around this by automatically subscribing you to there own selection of labels and celebs, such as Island records, NME, Ninja Tune & Zane Lowe, which we like.

Cons

Flo Problem

We can see how on paper in the boardroom this must have looked like a great idea, combing the social mediums of twitter/facebook with steaming music, but feel they have missed a trick in finding a niche.

As for the ‘discovering new music’ angle, again we feel it is a little hollow, the music is usually good, but it’s all the mainstream stuff you’ve heard before or ‘Indie’ which is probably now the most mainstream genre of all. If mflow play their cards right it could become a massively popular platform.

We would love to see mflow take the mantle of myspace by giving unsigned bands/musicians a platform to promote and sell truly ‘new’ music. If it’s good it will be bought as it wouldn’t be available on Spotify/iTunes/Boomkat and needs to offer something exclusive to the user.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is that each track can only be listened to, in full, ONCE!

Now even the best tracks that become a smash hit usually take more than one play to grow on the listener, that said after you can listen to any 30 SECONDS of the track… which is rubbish.

There are some great ideas at mflow, but at the moment we are struggling to see the point with Spotify and iTunes covering all bases.

Who knows in 12 months time we might look very stupid when everyone is using mflow and Stephen Fry gets £100,000 from people buying his recommendations, and once mflow finds it’s niche we are sure it will be massive success, so sign up now!

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