TheSixtyOne (YC W09) Is Building a Digg For Indie Music | Hacker News Reader

TheSixtyOne (YC W09) Is Building a Digg For Indie Music

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50 pointsmarkbao22 comments

As a regular user (and big fan) of thesixtyone, I was happy to see this article because now I finally know how to embed songs!

You can email a song link or embed the entire stream on another page. (Although, it is not easy to find these options. You have to click on the tiny “comments” link to open them up). For instance, I’ve embedded “Repetition Kills” by the Black Ghosts below. It would be better if you could embed entire playlists.

Edit: After successfully embedding a song I tried sharing it over twitter, and I have a request. It would be great if clicking Post Song to twitter would automatically convert the link to a tinyurl link.

"It would be better if you could embed entire playlists."

I can't actually work out how to do playlists - do they support them?

hi guys. embed were sorta thrown together qnd a few months ago, so they're still fairly basic. we plan on redesigning them and adding embeddable playlists in the near future.

Are there regular playlists (i.e. on site not embedded) ?

yes, there's a tag-based playlist system -- just favorite a song to begin.

Oh okay I think I finally worked it after toying with things off and on over 20 minutes - a "tag radio" list has appeared when I'm in a radio section and if I click one of those tags music will play continuously. I guess by playlists I meant ones I create.

In any case I think this feature needs to be a lot clearer.

I think you're on the home page. For an example, you can see my personal tag playlist named 'mellow':

http://www.thesixtyone.com/tags/song/show/sam/mellow/

Or go to your profile and click on the tags that appear to your right.

Right thanks :-) I see now I can just go to my profile and "listen to radio" to play my favourites.

Long time artist user of TheSixtyOne.

It has seriously driven more people to my music than anything else has. Granted, I don't play the myspace 'thanks for the add' game.

http://www.thesixtyone.com/devin/

I experimented with combining the "Digg model" with indie music when I created Contrastream and although I have been too busy with another start-up to flesh out the idea, I still believe there is a lot of potential. I still find it difficult to find new indie music.

The next level may be a combination of scraped content (hypem) and social voting.

I recently met up with the founders of another startup trying to tackle this problem at http://cherrypeel.com, and they seemed excited about it as well. Hopefully there is some money to be made from it to make it sustainable.

i use thesixtyone when i'm coding, have a lot of trance and techno. feel free to listen to my radio: http://www.thesixtyone.com/jmtame

i keeps it fresh!

I've gone through most of their library of classical. Found many good new artists. My favourite find is definitely Edgen: http://www.thesixtyone.com/#/edgen/

It's "epic" music. Reminds me of starcraft terran background music. This is one of my favourite songs: http://www.thesixtyone.com/edgen/song/Kings+and+Kingdoms+-+D...

There needs to be a new name for orchestral music written recently. "Classical" feels wrong for music written in 2009.

yeah his name is justin, i used to do some flash work with him some 10 or so years ago. he's an awesome flash designer/animator, and composes great music. stuff you'd never find anywhere else.

Does this do any sort of relating how one user likes music to how another user likes music?

It seems to me that this would be a necessary element, unless you're willing to cater so thoroughly to one specific defined community that you don't care. (Is that the case?)

I don't think it uses Collaborative Filtering technology, but each user has their own radio which is basically a list of their favorite songs.

Music is a terrible choice for a voting system. The homogeny of opinion for sites like Hacker News or even Digg is way higher than any sector of music listeners, and it's this homogeny that aggregators depend upon to remain useful. To put it another way: without curators, you need to all think alike.

The only way I can see this site working is for rankings to be calculated on a per-user basis, based upon the votes accrued from the user's neighbours. This would go some way towards the mental filter I use for music recommendations from friends: do I trust this person's music taste?

"homogeny of opinion" has a lot to do with how you implement your voting system. people may call us "digg for music," but, backend-wise, we're far from digg.

I'd love to hear more about your voting system...

I just started fooling w/ it and MIA "Paper Planes" is at the top along w/ the FLOBOTS "handlebars." Are either of these guys indy? Could a Rolling Stones song make it on here? If there is no criteria by which you are too big, won't it degenerate into the top 40?

Are you assuming their intention is to keep the sixtyone.com music community closed to major pop artists? Would that be such a bad thing? How would they then handle an indie act that becomes bigger down the road? Who or how would they measure a band's "popularity"? I think it would be great to see major artists branching out and using different distribution mechanisms. Please, leave it up to me to decide what music I want to listen to, not some third party who decides if a band isn't cool enough anymore for their community or me.

The title reads "digg for indie music" so yes, I did assume that it was for indie music.

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