Free Your Music: Why I Built F Powrd Audio
I'm a musician and a beatmaker. Most of what I make starts as a beat or a track that I send to rappers and singers to write on. We trade versions back and forth, and when it works, cool stuff emerges.
For years, though, one problem kept getting in the way. It wasn't a creative problem. It was a practical one: where does my music actually live, and how do I get it to the band?
Hearing your work outside the studio
Every producer knows a track sounds different once it leaves the studio. Headphones and monitors only tell you so much. The real test is playing it in the car, on earbuds, or on whatever speaker is nearby. That's where you find out the low end is too heavy or the vocal is sitting too low.
The hard part was getting my own files onto my phone. These were my options:
AirDrop. The files land in the Files app, with no playlists and no queue.
Emailing tracks to myself and singers. It works, but it's slow and messy. The tracks are stuck in everyones email and new versions always get lost in the shuffle.
Dropbox or Google Drive. One file at a time, in a preview player that wasn't built for music.
Uploading privately to a streaming platform. Compressed audio, ads, and unreleased work sitting on someone else's platform. For rough drafts or just beats this isn't worth the time to upload or create arrtwork.
Syncing over a cable. Slow, and it feels about ten years out of date.
None of these felt like a real music library. I was working around tools that weren't designed for what I needed.
Streaming apps are built for listeners, not creators
Spotify and Apple Music are great for listening to other people's music. They aren't built for the people making it or collecting it. If your (old) cool enough to remember, Apple actually had a fun, yet very slow way of curating your personal collections. You could rip a CD from the older macbooks and pcs CDRom drives. That was actually a lot of fun for me cuz i love music and was so psyched to have ALL of my Miles Davis CDs in my computer that I could listen to anytime. But that all changed when Apple music went to a streaming model.
My catalog is hundreds of beats: instrumentals, rough mixes, alternate versions, and the version I sent to one artist versus another. A lot of it is unreleased, and some of it always will be. That work shouldn't sit on a public platform before it's ready. It should live in my own library, organized the way I want, and be available wherever I am.
I couldn't find a tool that did that, so I built one.
What F Powrd Audio does
With F Powrd Audio, my workflow looks like this:
Finish a track and export it as an MP3 or WAV.
Open F Powrd Audio in my browser and drag the file in.
Pick up my phone. The track is already there.
No cables, no emailing myself, no digging through folders. I add tracks on my laptop, and they're on my phone right away, ready for the car, my headphones, or wherever I'm listening.
It's a simple idea, but it wasn't possible for me before.
How it changed the way I work
Reviewing mixes is faster. I add a new beat at night, and the next morning I hear it in the car on my way out. I note what needs fixing and take care of it when I'm back at my desk.
Sessions go smoother. When an artist asks what else I have, I don't have to dig for a laptop or scroll through old texts. My whole catalog is on my phone, organized into playlists, and I can pull up the right track in seconds.
My music is mine. My library isn't surrounded by ads, and no algorithm decides what plays next. It's my music, organized my way.
Built for people who make music
I've spent my career designing products, and I built this one for my own workflow first. It includes:
Drag-and-drop uploads from your computer, right in the browser
Instant access on your phone, with no manual syncing
No ads, on any plan
Library tools: search, metadata editing, album art, and playlists you can reorder
Lossless playback on paid plans, so your WAVs sound the way you mixed them
Playlist sharing, so you can send tracks to an artist or build a shared playlist with collaborators
If you're a beatmaker, producer, DJ, songwriter, or a band with a hard drive full of demos, F Powrd Audio is for you.
Get started
F Powrd Audio is free to start. If your library grows or you want to bring collaborators in, paid plans start at $5 a month, with more storage, lossless audio, and sharing capabilities.
Visit fpowrd.app, add your first track, and listen to it wherever you are.
— Joe
Follow F Powrd Audio on Instagram at @fpowrdaudio. If you try it, I'd love to hear what you think.
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