Getting the (third) party started

Electronic dance music fans often have a hard time finding and listening to new music. Akshay Dodeja saw the need for a new service and last year attended Startup Weekend Portland, a 54-hour Web business sprint.

Electronic dance music fans often have a hard time finding and listening to new music. Akshay Dodeja saw the need for a new service and last year attended Startup Weekend Portland, a 54-hour Web business sprint.

Participants start from scratch to design the best e-business in the allotted time while enjoying food, swag and memories.

Dodeja, a student at Portland State, and his team hope to reduce the hustle to find good music by making DJ sets more accessible and user friendly with their creation of Mugasha, a music streaming Web site.

Dodeja is heading up the development on the project along with Justin Thiele, who is concentrating on marketing and business, and Chris King, who handles design and front-end development.

“In May there was 40 to 50 people at the event, and we grouped up into teams to create this Web business in one weekend,” Thiele said.

Mugasha is an online service that provides a selection of third-party music podcasts in an interactive Web site that lets the user view DJ sets in a track list. 

The user can skip tracks and jump to specific songs, whereas before DJ sets came in one long track usually lasting an hour or more. This allowed the user minimal control of what they were listening to because they had to either experience an entire set all the way through or fast-forward through a set, much like listening cassette tapes.

“We are trying to make the whole genre more interactive and get the artists exposure,” Thiele said. “Electronic music isn’t as popular in the U.S. but is more popular on a global scale, [that’s why] we have so many artists on the site from around the world.”

Mainstream electronic music giants such as Armin Van Buuren, Tiesto, and Above and Beyond have weekly sets posted on Mugasha. There are 10 sets of big name artists that come out every week, and Mugasha already boasts 250 sets and more than 3,000 easily accessible tracks.

Mugasha has partnered with iTunes and amazon.com so users can easily buy single tracks or whole sets from featured artists.

“We are partnering up with Bands in Town, a Web tool that shows related events around the area of Portland,” Akshay Dodeja said. “We are working on integrating a ticketing system for upcoming concerts, too.”

“Mugasha is still in the beta testing form but will hopefully be in full operation in the near future,” Thiele said.  “We are still working with the artists about copyright laws.”

The team uses social networking Web sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter to get the word out about their start-up. You can sign up for Mugasha online at www.mugasha.com/signup/psu.