Senior’s site lets users control the sound


Nicolae Ivanescu, a senior majoring in business administration, might just be USC’s Mark Zuckerberg. Ivanescu is co-founder of Just Hear It, a site that could be to music what Flickr is to photo hosting.

Ivanescu’s story begins in 2007. While enjoying Thanksgiving holiday with his roommate, he discovered Pandora, an online streaming radio service. Ivanescu browsed the site and quickly became fascinated by the possibilities of the future of online music.

Photo by Dan Chen, courtesy of Hearit

He began taking notes on what he did not like about Pandora ­— the site’s advertising, for instance ­— and what he thought needed to be improved in a site that could have so much potential. As an entrepreneur, he, along with Cosmin Panait, a friend from Emory University, looked on what Pandora was not doing, what Youtube was kind of doing and what iTunes was successfully doing for a lot of money, and began creating a website that would improve the way people listened to music.

Just Hear It allows for its users to upload any songs they own onto the website. With contributors from across the internet, much like Youtube, Just Hear It is able to stockpile a wide variety of music in its online database.

The more users the site has, the bigger the selection of music they have to follow. One of the best parts of this website — other than its very minimalist, black design — is the incredible capability to personalize the listening process by allowing users to create their own playlists.

With just a couple of mouse clicks, users can create several playlists, which appear on the left side of the screen. With simple drag-and-drop actions, users are easily able to add, delete, shuffle and repeat their favorite songs.

Another innovation is Just Hear It’s capability to search for songs by lyric, as well as artist and song title. Simply typing in “Beatles” yields a listing of all the band’s songs that have been uploaded by users, but type in “where do they all come from,” and “Eleanor Rigby” pops up first on the list.

Users also have a history feature, which allows them to see what music they have heard.

The site has thousands of songs and is rapidly expanding. It already has a large following, with 700 listeners a day. Last year, the site saw an all-time high of 2 million users in a single month — without any publicity. Listeners are the key to the site, providing traffic and the songs that they all listen to.

One of Ivanescu’s mottos is “any song, legal, free,” which is an ambitious plan for his website. When asked about the legality of uploading songs, he said that if the record company does not want a particular song on the site, then they can send Just Hear It a Digital Millenium Copyright Act notice and the site  will remove it.

Unlike Napster, which bypassed the music industry market through its peer-to-peer mp3 site, Ivanescu wants to work with the music industry. In the “about” section of the website, it states that Just Hear It pays for licenses from all the major performing-rights organizations, which then pay publishers and writers in proportion to the number of plays they get, all protected under the DMCA of 1996.

Ivanescu’s plans with regard to the future of the company are to partner with all major labels. At this point, getting in touch with these companies is very difficult; record labels do not pay attention to the website if the rest of the world does not pay attention to the website.

Ivanescu said that the motivation for the site is love — namely the love of music. He wanted to make a music website that is perfected until it is just right for the listener; and he is on his way to carving a name for himself in the online music revolution.