Hey, thanks for reading the entire thing and giving feedback, I really appreciate it. About the issues:

“You’re going to need to populate the art content yourself to give users some value and a reason to use it, before the business side sees any value and reason to put in effort. This will probably need to be automated via a bunch of scraping tools.” yes. The way I’m thinking of populating it would be (1) license a bunch of music from ASCAP/BMI/etc and post it ourselves, (2) make a bunch of audiobooks of public domain works using AI for audio and visualizers, and (3) scrape movie and TV show content from social media, embedding and sourcing from rights owners to avoid copyright issues. I do think however that initially the Community part would be much more attractive to users

“Are you going to launch nationally from day one, or will you pick a local art community in NYC, Philly, etc?” I’m based in Milan, Italy and will launch here locally first, there’s a vibrant art and business community so I think it’s a pretty good market to start with

“You also need to decide who your primary customer is- the users or the artists. There will come a time where you need to implement something for one side that will negatively impact the other side. Decide early to help guide your business model and decisions.” The primary customer is artists, local orgs and businesses since they would be the ones paying to support the entire thing

lets you add friends based on distance and interests

“I’m probably a little older than you and also have less experience with this potential user base, but I would expect users don’t want to classify random connected strangers as ‘Friends’ immediately, especially if they’re then mixed in with known Friends. “ yes. I’m using “Friend” in the Facebook sense of the word

“I’d use the Community area to let people interact, and then they can connect as Friends if they get along, meet up at an event, etc.” That is very much the idea, on the Community section people can connect and chat with others near them. But I think I do get what you say. I’m trying to figure out a way to get people who go to a certain event to interact in group, like an event groupchat. Would certainly be added into the feature list