A big day for the Bliss project - we have a new sister app!

Astiga is a Music streaming service… but for your own music. With Astiga, you connect to your music library stored in cloud storage services - for example, Dropbox, Google Drive, and more. Then, you can play back your music from Astiga’s web app or its mobile apps. You can also cast music to devices in your home network.

Co-incidentally, I reviewed Astiga back in February for my cloud music player roundup. Then, in early June, this popped up in my Twitter feed:

Have you ever wanted to know what it is like running a website like Astiga? Well, you can, as Astiga is for sale. More information can be found here: https://t.co/6lJ3XVCHb8

— Astiga (@astigamusic) June 10, 2021

I was intrigued by the possibility of acquiring Astiga and the possibilities it may bring.

Why we’ve acquired Astiga, and what this means for bliss

The TL;DR is - nothing changes for bliss users. But we do think that Astiga may be useful for many of you, so we intend to make it as easy as possible to adopt it for existing bliss customers.

bliss concentrates on locally stored music collections, organising them to make them beautiful. It’s not a music player. Astiga, meanwhile, is almost the inverse: it works on music libraries stored in the cloud, and is primarily a playback tool. It’s ideal for accessing your music collection when you are outside of your home network.

This, I think, makes the two products very complementary in the short term. Astiga offers bliss users a way of accessing their music outside of their home. bliss offers Astiga users a way of organising their music prior to upload.

What are the plans?

Well… there’s a lot to do. Gulp!

Aside from general work on Astiga; marketing, bug fixing and the like, there are a slew of possible developments we could undertake.

Over time, it would be good to allow both products to fully complement the other - offering bliss “in the cloud”, so to speak, so an uploaded music collection to Astiga can be automatically organised and made to look beautiful.

And work continues on bliss, of course.

By the way, if anyone out there is interested in helping… paid help, of course… get in touch. Of particular interest are: PHP developers, Java/Scala developers and writers.

Your feedback is essential

As I write this post, I’m also writing an introductory post for the Astiga forums. In that post I point out that feedback from existing customers is going to be essential. I will be inviting anyone with an opinion to get in touch.

I want to extend the same invite to bliss customers. As I wrote above, I see the two products as complementary, and some users of bliss will find Astiga useful. I might be wrong in that! But whatever your thoughts, even if this is “nope, not interested, and here’s why…“ I’d love to hear what you’re thinking. It helps me guide the products.

Remember: I’m a believer in charging for products, and charging for the core functionality of those products. That means, for bliss, charging for what it fixes. For Astiga, it’s charging for the access to playback your library. What I don’t believe in (so much) are indirect revenue models - advertising and the like. That’s not to say they don’t work, but they’re models for larger, higher scale ventures.