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A few people mentioned that this has some Last.fm vibes. While that's true, here's my thoughts on how they differ and what prompted me to create Digs:

Last.fm mostly answers the question: "What I've been listening to mostly, this month?" whereas Digs.fm aims to answer the question: "Which album I discovered (i.e. listened for the first time) AND liked last month?".

This essentially comes down to the fact that Last.fm tracks "listens" of an album/track/artist, no matter if its the first time you're listening to it or the 1000th, where in Digs.fm _you_ (manually) track the _first listen of a release_.

Likewise, Digs aims to answer: "which album did my friend discovered and liked?" or "what album does my friend wants to listen to?". The premise is that, the fact that a certain person (which I know) found this interesting, is a good signal that I might be interested to that as well.

So, I'd say that, while they do share similarities, they're different tools that aim to tackle different needs. I myself was using Last.fm around 2008, then forgot about it until last year. I activated it, but I haven't looked at it ever since. I'd say it's a good tool to look at the yearly reports once or twice a year, but to me that was about it.

In contrast, I use Digs daily (I'm biased :P) to see what my friends discovered, add new albums to listen to my lists or pick something to listen from my "Want to Listen". Also, I love discussing about something that I listened or someone else listened (this is done by commenting on activity items).

Ultimately, I wanted a way to track and organize music discoveries (not listens), and make it so that I can easily share them with friends, and perhaps spark a discussion around those.

In fact, a few people asked for an integration with Last.fm, in which you could import the albums/artists from Last.fm in Digs, and add then manually add those that you want to a list.

I’m one of the ones that asked for a comparison. Thank you. I’m not sure I’ll appreciate the difference until I give it a try though. I know that when I look at my history in Last, I could clearly see what I discovered and what I obsessed over for a period of time. But let’s say your tool isn’t different in any fundamental way. So F’n what? :) Not the most tasteful examples, but where would Burger King or Wendy’s be if they had demurred to the big M?

Back in 2009/2011 last.fm was much better. It had working radio (you could stream from it directly, for a small fee) and their discovery stuff was great. Not sure what happened at last.fm but they just completely screwed up. They dropped streaming, disabled or broke a bunch of other functionality and reverted their API to the stone age.

If I recall, it was around then that they were bought out by... CBS? (Say no more)

Acquisition was 2007, radio shut down in 2014. CBS was hands-off for a long time but you know how this story goes.

Selfish, but possibly not alone in the following request…

I was a passionate, early user of last.fm. On its face, your service is similar in its goals. How does it differ? How do you think it’s better?

A good question to ask myself: why did I stop using last.fm? My quick response is life (becoming a father, the pandemic and a lack of live music) and possibly something to do with migrating from an ipod to Spotify. Also, I still use my account a bit to see historically what I’ve been listening to and what the ear’s of some friends have discovered. That is, I’m still scrobbling!

See my comment at the top level for a comparison to Last.fm. Let me know if that clarifies things. (I use last.fm too!)

Link to top-level comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32552617 .

I like the concept. I'm missing the social side of music since moving away, physically and musically, from my school and university friends. It would be great to find music friends across the internet.

Some thoughts:

- Since most music can be accessed instantly as part of a subscription, the "want to listen" list may lack purpose for most users. If I want to listen to something, I'll listen to it at that time or very soon afterwards. So it'll be in my "listened" list already, and maybe my "digged" list too. Goodreads has a "want to read", but that makes sense for many people, since most people still pay for individual books and often buy physical copies. Books also take a lot longer to consume. Some sit on my shelf for months, partly finished. So there is that backlog of books to get through that doesn't exist to a significant degree for albums. Maybe it doesn't matter though - the list may still serve a purpose for those who want to use it.

- It would be nice to see all listeners to a particular artist or genre/tag. That would make it easier to befriend like-minded listeners. I imagine the success of this website will partly hinge on the edge density of the social network, so the more avenues you provide users to find friends, the better.

Good luck!

> It would be nice to see all listeners to a particular artist or genre/tag. That would make it easier to befriend like-minded listeners. I imagine the success of this website will partly hinge on the edge density of the social network, so the more avenues you provide users to find friends, the better.

Great suggestion. Truth is, I was focused so much on the core stuff (indexing releases, implementing the bookmarking system, user profiles etc.) that the friend discovery aspect is almost non-existent. What you suggested seems like a great start though.

I'd make a feature request for goodreads-style public lists. Anyone can start a list with a certain theme, anyone can add books to it out upvote them within the list. It's great for manually curated discovery.

Yep, this will be done definitely in the short to medium-term.

I am a programmer and an active DJ myself and as such a type of person I do a lot of music organizations into different playlists. For example, each month on Soundcloud I keep one playlist of "Mixes to listen" (usually private) and one playlist of "Favorite mixes for month X". I've been doing this for a few years already. You can find these at https://soundcloud.com/ulterior

I can see how this kind of a service can be useful, especially in recommendations, if you are able to answer what music did the digger like from his diggs. Because, as we musicheads well know, not everything we dug out is gold.

I myself wanted to mark mixes as listen later, among regular album releases. So that's why Mixcloud URLs are supported in the search box, and it will fetch the actual mix.

For example: https://digs.fm/releases/57246010-Monkey-Shoulder-DJ-JAZZY-J...

Yeah, I understand your idea and I thought that it's similar, it's like a pipeline.

Seems cool. This project gives me some last.fm vibes. Do people still use last.fm? I used to be a big user of Last.fm back in the day, but just slowly lost my interest to make sure my Last.fm "scrobbler" was always running. Havent thought about that site in years.

I tried signing up with Spotify, but after accepting the authorization on Spotify's side, I was redirected back to digs.fm but not signed in. Now when I click "Continue with Spotify", the page just refreshes without logging me in because I've already accepted the Spotify authorization.

> I tried signing up with Spotify, but after accepting the authorization on Spotify's side, I was redirected back to digs.fm but not signed in.

Ugh, a friend also reported this to me but I couldn't reproduce it. Mind letting me know what browser you're using? If you don't want to disclose, feel free to email me at [redacted].

Thanks for reporting this.

P.S. I'll post a comment regarding comparing to Last.fm soon :)

Just using up-to-date Chrome. I see the network request where I get redirected to "https://digs.fm/users/auth/spotify/callback" with a code and state. It returns a `Set-Cookie`, but I see my next request to the digs.fm homepage has another `Set-Cookie`. Unsure if you are just re-generating session IDs on every request or if the session data from the callback is being overwritten when I hit the homepage again.

Might it be something to do with how your account is registered with Spotify? Mine was signed up for with Facebook (ugh) and I'm seeing that bug.

I have the same issue. Firefox, Windows 10; also Firefox, macOS.

I don't see myself in the New Users list on the main page. Perhaps it's completing the authorization on Spotify's end, but not creating the user account on the Digs end?

Sorry for that, I found the root cause, unfortunately it'll be a bit before that's fixed, I guess (depends on action on behalf of Spotify).

> Do people still use last.fm?

Absolutely! https://www.last.fm/dashboard shows shows about 500 scrobbles (track listens) per second, in the "All Time Scrobbles" section of the page.

(Disclaimer: I work at last.fm.)

Cool dashboard page. Thanks for sharing.

Question from a 10+year last.fm user: how does last.fm stay afloat? I have to assume that the vast majority of users are like me and mostly in it just to have a scrobbling server endpoint. It's been years since last.fm had the radio/streaming components for advertising revenue, and I have no idea what percentage of your userbase pays for the Pro subscription.

Does anyone remember 'the sixty one', I used to use that all the time to discover music, was really cool - sadly, I left with the rest after the redesign plus overall the music discoverability market was already shifting away from it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesixtyone

Not the same at all but I use this site to find artists that are "close" to an artist I already listen to a lot. I like it a lot.

https://www.music-map.com/porcupine+tree

Not sure how well this works for what you have in mind, but it may help. I'm not a fan of the "just play stuff related to the artist I'm listening to" to find new things, rather I would prefer to get a list of artists and explore those on my own.

Oh damn, I had forgotten about the sixty one. Spent so much time on it! Thanks for the nostalgia.

I'll give this a go. I was an active Last.fm user for years and still miss that kind of interaction; a DeviantArt but for music listeners...

If you were able to have as many releases as rateyourmusic.com and provide a public API then I'd be very interested. But due to the userbases of sites like rym and discogs who have contributed a lot to the information and number of releases on those sites, it's hard to see how new contenders in this particular space can compete

A public API will be implemented long-term. Releases are all fed from MusicBrainz database (2.6M releases atm), so I'd say that chances that you'll find what you're looking for are high.

And if not, then you can add a release by providing a Spotify/Discogs/Bandcamp/Mixcloud URL in the search box, and it will fetch the proper metadata.

I like the idea a lot -- I'm someone who listens to a lot of music, constantly gets music recommended by friends, and recommends music to friends. I also design/PM software.

I just signed up and am very confused on what I can do. I see a feed of albums from strangers, but there's no way to listen to it. If I want to add music, I have to copy and paste links shown at the top of my screen (they're not even hyperlinked).

If I'm discovering music: - I want a quick/easy way to listen to what's in front of me - I want a quick/easy way to get recs from friends

If I'm sharing music: - I want a quick way to share music

I feel like these are your core experiences and I'm having trouble finding my path through any of them. I see there's a browser extension and a bunch of community features, but the first user experience (at least on web) for any of those core paths above isn't there.

Can you deliver on one of those paths in a really easy way? Looks like you've already got tie ins with discogs. Can you start with just a spotify web player? I think the preview of a song can be made available publicly, which would at least get a delightful enough first experience for listeners (listen to what you see if it looks interesting -- not sure many would "save" without that or at least some solid meta data)

I want what I think this product is supposed (based on your description) to be to exist, so I hope this feedback is helpful.

Edit: Signed out and noticed you have "continue with spotify" on the logged out / sign in page https://digs.fm/users/sign_in -- that wasn't available on your home page https://digs.fm/. I would've signed up with spotify if available and maybe that would've exposed clearer UX?

To be fair, Goodreads also doesn't let you read the book right there on the site. And while I agree it would be convenient for music, I'm so desperate for a good discovery mechanism that I'll gladly accept this (currently I use ListenToThis and then look the names up on Youtube if they seem interesting)

Thanks for the suggestions. It's true that the UX definitely lacks in many parts, and in many others it's unclear what one should do after they sign up for the first time.

Let me try to clarify a few things. First and foremost, Digs is supposed to be a bookmarking tool (you add and organize albums to lists). Then, it's a social network.

It's not created with the mindset of it being a music streaming service. That said, for convenience and pragmatism, a web player is included if the release was added via a Spotify, Mixcloud or Bandcamp link, or if the corresponding MusicBrainz release had a Discogs URL associated with it. Ideally, every release on the page should include a web player - this is something I'm trying to figure out how to do automatically, without enormous amount of human moderation. (I understand this is all technicalities, I just wanted to explain how it works currently.)

> I see a feed of albums from strangers.

The "Community updates" feed is the default if you have no friends added yet. If this is too noisy (and after this post it will be, for almost all people I assume), then you can switch to "Friends' updates" by clicking on the dropdown arrow. The choice will be persisted and you won't see that noise again.

> If I'm sharing music: - I want a quick way to share music

The current way to share music, is passively, i.e. by having friends (your friends will see your activity in their home feed). The active way to share is to click on the "Recommend" option, from the action dropdown button in a release page (e.g. https://digs.fm/releases/2782921-DJ-Shadow-What-Does-Your-So...).

> Edit: Signed out and noticed you have "continue with spotify" on the logged out / sign in page https://digs.fm/users/sign_in -- that wasn't available on your home page https://digs.fm/. I would've signed up with spotify if available and maybe that would've exposed clearer UX?

The Spotify SSO is currently broken, so I've disabled it until I fix it. Apparently I forgot to hide it from the sign_in page as well - thanks for bringing this up!

As a longtime Last.fm user (I have scrobbles from 2007 on), I’ll have to give this a go.

On another note: I was ecstatic to discover recently an iOS app whose main purpose is similar to this: Albums (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/albums-album-focused-player/id...). It has incredibly tight integration with Last.fm and is perfect for people like me who prefer music in whole-album form.

That looks very interesting and close to the spirit of Digs. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll definitely check this out and perhaps borrow interesting ideas!

Thanks for sharing. I signed up and will try it out. I've been using a combination of LastFM recommendations, Top lists from rateyourmusic, and just random findings on the internet for my music discovery.

I've been looking since 2015 and have never found anything that comes close to rdio [ RIP :( ] in terms of music recommendation / discovery.

I like this idea a lot - I run https://asti.ga/ which is a streaming service for your own music library.

A lot of our customers value the importance of curation, and it seems curation is an important part of Digs. Maybe the two could be integrated somehow? We already integrate with Last.fm.

How is this different from Rate Your Music or Album Of The Year?

It looks a lot like RYM

Have you checked out https://listenbrainz.org ? It features a lot of similar functionality.

You can pin your recording jam, recommend tracks to users, view statistics in your listens, create and listen to playlists. We are actively working on adding various type of recommendations for users and also intend to add more music discovery features in future.

(- a ListenBrainz Dev)

I believe digs.fm is partly powered by MusicBrainz already, hurray :D

That's true! All release groups from MusicBrainz are fed into the Digs database.

I'm a member on ListenBrainz (I also hang out in #metabrainz). It's an awesome project, thanks for your work.

I think that the my other comment comparing Digs to Last.fm (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32552617), applies pretty much for a comparison with ListenBrainz as well.

While they have some overlap (i.e recommend tracking users, statistics), they do differ in the fact that the one defines "listen" as "listen (new or repeated) of a track/album/artist", while the other defines "listen" as "first-time listen of a release".

Also, the other main focus of Digs is providing a way to organize your "Want to Listen" list (with tags, notes and more on the way), as a means to stay on top of all the music you found interesting at some point. The problem I had, specifically, was that I had "Queues" of things I like to hear in the future (albums, mixes, etc.) in 3 or 4 different sites: YouTube, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Discogs, Spotify. So I wanted to have a single way to organize all these (that's why Digs knows how to parse URLs from these services) and share them with friends.

All in all, I love ListenBrainz and I believe there is room for both sites in this world, since they tackle slightly different needs.

Nice! Have signed up and will play. What would work for me especially is some kind of API, so we could integrate it into, say, music players...

Yep, that's on my radar definitely, probably in the long-term plans. It's a great idea.

just signed up!

the new user experience leaves a lot of user gap (i signed up with username/password). ideally you'd give me a way to pull in my spotify/youtube history and generate recommendations off of that.

right now my recommended/recommending tabs are empty. huge cold start problem.

i'll leave now but just telling you why new users might churn.

> Add a Bandcamp album by entering https://2000black.bandcamp.com/album/lord-dego-2

Never ever did I expect to see Dego mentioned on HN. Kaidi and him are dons.

Oh I love Dego & Kaidi :)

Music (discovery) on the Web, i.e off-device, and not integrated seems DOA to me for various reasons.

I like Hype Machine a lot. I listen to a lot of new music - music by artists with no prior success. I am part of a small audience of music listeners. But consider if you want to make value in music, elevating the new artist is a goal.

Good job but a heads up: this has been done a gazillion times... loads shutdown after a short run. Worthwhile researching others for reference at least

Any suggestions to research are more than welcome!

Sign up with Spotify not working on my end though.

Same, I just keep getting redirected to the homepage after login

I'm sorry for that. There's an outstanding bug on the Spotify implementation. It'll be a while before it's back to working again (pending action from Spotify).

There's a Chinese site called Douban which is like this but for film + books + music + game + ... all on one site

I'm trying to login with Spotify but kept redirected to the home page.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32554640

Thanks, will try with email.

I cant find my favourite music. Can we add new entries?

Not yet, but it's something that could be implemented long-term. So, if I understand correctly, are you talking about an album/EP/single release? Can you please provide some examples of what you searched for and didn't found?

Note that you can paste URLs straight from Discogs/Spotify/MusicBrainz/Bandcamp in the search box, and it will take you to the release page in Digs.

I thought the past tense for dig was dug? :)

I've been using this yesterday and today and love it! Others in this thread have mentioned similar services but I hadn't heard of most of them so I'm excited to try digs for awhile. I'm an avid last.fm user but am pretty much using it for data on my current listening. The social aspect has pretty much died on there, and is off to a great start on digs. Their recommendations are ok, but I like the idea of recommendations from friends rather than algorithms. I may not be your typical user (do not use streaming services, buy music on Bandcamp or buy physical CDs and rip them) but do fall into what I perceive to be your general target audience: I tend to be a full album listener and am always looking for new music. One thing I have used it for so far is adding albums I have already purchased on bandcamp but haven't had a chance to listen to yet to "Want to Listen", as well as albums that are brand new to me that I see on other's feeds.

- One little quirk I noticed is that adding albums from bandcamp doesn't seem to work if the artist is using a custom domain. I tried it with the browser extension and by copy-pasting the URL. Maybe you can change the way a bandcamp site is detected? Does the code only look at the URL to determine if it's bandcamp, or does it load the page and try to parse it?

Example:

https://music.einavjackson.com/album/--2

- Another issue I ran into is the search; it seems like you need to type the album name exactly and with correct spacing and punctuation, not just partially.

Examples:

I tried to look up "tUnE-yArDs w h o k i l l". It wasn't case-sensitive, but I ended up having to type all those spaces in the album name.

Hot Chip has a new album called "Freakout/Release". I tried to type "hot chip freakout" and it couldn't find it, but once I added "/release" it came up.

- I'm torn on this one, because I really liked being able to make an account without providing an email address, but social notifications might be more useful if I didn't have to go to the site to see them. Definitely should be opt-in, but I think the option to receive email notifications or notifications through the browser extension would be perfect.

- This is just a personal nice-to-have feature and I know it can be somewhat contentious (if you are looking towards future monetization licensing might be a headache), but I would love more open source code. I found the browser extension on Github but it would be fun to see all of it, and I would definitely contribute to development given the chance.

Anyway, thanks for the cool site, I've had a lot of fun with it so far and can't wait to get a few more friends and start getting really good recommendations.

Hey, thanks for the amazingly kind words. That's very encouraging to hear!

> One little quirk I noticed is that adding albums from bandcamp doesn't seem to work if the artist is using a custom domain. I tried it with the browser extension and by copy-pasting the URL. Maybe you can change the way a bandcamp site is detected? Does the code only look at the URL to determine if it's bandcamp, or does it load the page and try to parse it?

I didn't know custom domains were a thing with Bandcamp. I've added a ticket to tackle this somehow (seems like they all CNAME to dom.bandcamp.com, so that could be useful).

> Another issue I ran into is the search; it seems like you need to type the album name exactly and with correct spacing and punctuation, not just partially.

Searching is something that could be improved a lot. Thanks for that specific example, it really helps. This'll be prioritized soon.

> I'm torn on this one, because I really liked being able to make an account without providing an email address, but social notifications might be more useful if I didn't have to go to the site to see them. Definitely should be opt-in, but I think the option to receive email notifications

Yeah there's already a ticket for that. I totally agree with making it opt-in. I myself despise notification noise I didn't explicitly asked for :) This will be definitely done short-term.

> This is just a personal nice-to-have feature and I know it can be somewhat contentious (if you are looking towards future monetization licensing might be a headache), but I would love more open source code.

This is something I occasionally considered a few times myself. To be frank, the code is far from a point that I'd be comfortable releasing at this point. I haven't considered monetization yet (not even remotely), but I would like leave that option open.

Perhaps I could start small, and release some code I've written to wrap the MusicBrainz database and make it available as a Rails model.

This definitely needs more consideration - not something that's likely to be done soon, since there are other things I'd like to focus on (like those you suggested, polishing and bug fixes).

---

Thanks a lot for the amazing feedback!

> One little quirk I noticed is that adding albums from bandcamp doesn't seem to work if the artist is using a custom domain.

Just a heads up, this is now fixed.

Awesome, thank you! Any plans to allow you to put a little note about why you want to listen to an album/where you heard about it/etc? Also maybe if you click "want to listen" from someone else's post, show that somewhere? I'm starting to get a pretty long queue to listen to, it would be nice to see a little info to help me decide what to try next.

That's what the "Notes" text field in My Lists (make sure you switch to the table view) is for. Have you seen it?

Also, you can add tags to your items, as a means to organize them however you see fit.

Ohhh, I see it in list view. :) I haven't switched out of table view since I started using the site. Also I've been almost exclusively using the mobile site, you do have to scroll in list view to see the notes. I'll try out the tags. Can you see others' notes/tags? I don't see them, but maybe I'm missing that too. I think it would be cool to bring the social aspect in there too. I left a comment on my own "Want to Listen" post yesterday for the purpose I'm thinking about.

It definitely would be cool to see if people click "want to listen" from someone else, I've already seen albums move from profile to profile. You could even track how each album spreads, and show a "virality" chart...how "contagious" it is, and then how many people actually listen or dig the album eventually.

Still having a lot of fun with this, thanks again!

> I haven't switched out of table view since I started using the site. Also I've been almost exclusively using the mobile site, you do have to scroll in list view to see the notes.

Yeah the list view is not suitable for mobiles since it's a table. I'll have to come up with another way to display the tags and notes in the thumb view. I've put a ticket to tackle it, because apparently more people are using this on mobile every day.

> Can you see others' notes/tags? I don't see them, but maybe I'm missing that too.

So notes are private, but for tags I have a ticket to add a setting to choose if it's going to be public or private. Right now they're private. I think I'll prioritize this.

> It definitely would be cool to see if people click "want to listen" from someone else, I've already seen albums move from profile to profile. You could even track how each album spreads, and show a "virality" chart...how "contagious" it is, and then how many people actually listen or dig the album eventually.

That's a neat idea, it never occurred to me, thanks! Added it to the backlog.

---

As a minor suggestion, if a comment talks about a release in general (like a review), then it might be more suitable for it to be added on the release page (as opposed in a "Listened" or "Digged" activity item). If you scroll down on a release page, you'll see a "Community discussion" section, and if you add a comment there, it will appear in your activity feed.

Sorry, one more tiny thing. I listened to an album from the "Want to Listen" list, I just marked it Listened but the update says "digged". I don't think it actually added it to Digged, just something I noticed. I'm gonna start using that Canny link for these, sorry this probably isn't very convenient for you.

Hey thanks for the report, this should be fixed by now.

Show HN: Digs.fm – For passionate music explorers (like Goodreads but for music)