

My Startup: app turns music discovery into an online game - feedback? - JMiao

www.thesixtyone.com<p>what?
thesixtyone, a web game that makes listening to new music a fun, adventurous experience.  It's like a music scout role-playing game.<p>how?
Listeners are allocated virtual currency that they can spend promoting songs and are rewarded when their picks perform well.  Top songs reach the homepage and are sorted into a radio playlist where listeners are a click away from discovering new sounds.<p>status
We're 3 months into our public beta, and, aside from balancing several "gameplay" mechanics, we've since introduced a couple of new features, including a more sophisticated genre system, show listings, artist photo reels, play history, and embeddable listener badges that syndicate your personal radio station across the web.<p>about
thesixtyone is myself and Sam Hsiung.  I used to be a game developer (EA/Atari/Activision), but declined an offer to work on Xbox Live (my dream job when I was in school) and dropped out of college so I could make thesixtyone happen.  Sam is a YC alum, having previously created the venerable YouOS (YC Fall '05, I believe).  We made thesixtyone because music on the web to date has felt either super-gimmicky or like a ridiculous, restriction-driven police state.  Music is entertainment, and entertainment is all about fun...and "fun" just happens to be what makes us tick.<p>For those curious, thesixtyone was written in Python (Django), although our very first prototype was thrown together with Rails.  We're named after Highway 61, a US interstate that starts in a little town in Minnesota and ends at the heart of American music culture, New Orleans.  A significant portion of music culture emanates from this particular place: it's where Bob Dylan came of age, B.B. King first toured, and Elvis was born.<p>One more thing: we're interested in recruiting a talented developer as teammate #3; we'll be at Startup School, so feel free to say hello!
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ranebo
First of all, excellent job ( As a long time reader of HN this is the first
time I've felt compelled to comment). I just spent more time on your site than
probably any I have found through HN.

\+ Love the Growlesque notifications and trivia. Love the continuous play
music.

\- I subconsciously thought the black header on the home page was a banner ad
thus completely ignored it. Only later did I realise it actually described
what the site was about, even then I didnt want to read it because the colours
were too contrasted.

Im no designer but I have to agree with the comments about the font and the
indecision about rounded or square corners. This could all be a product of the
page being too busy though.

Overall though I'm very impressed. Good luck.

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colinplamondon
The idea sounds interesting when you write about it, but when I load the page
my first impression is that it looks like every other music streaming site on
the planet- it looks like a more crowded version of HypeMachine. If I hadn't
read about it here I would have closed the link without poking around at all.

After clicking the first link I'm impressed- the song starts playing
immediately, and I love the little pseudo-lightbox pop-under.

Very slick.

The bumping rollover is very well-done, the ability to download is perfect,
but the flow to registration is even better.

I clicked a random song, wanted to download it, and was interested in
registering- it then pushes me to register. Right on. The growl-style
notifications are awesome.

I'm writing this as I explore the site, and, I have to say- the first
impression sucked, but this is really well-done. I'm impressed. It's ajaxy and
interactive without being slow and non-responsive. Also, while logged in, the
little trivia notification in the bottom right corner is a great touch.

The player in the top right is cool, but poking around, the layout feels too
complex, and I wish there was a better dashboard. Just a page where it has a
large Now Playing, Cover Art, Next/Previous/Volume Controls, and then three
columns with recommendations, the popular list, and some kind of popular/new
submission hybrid list. It would also be great if there were bump/add/download
links in the top right hand player.

I think the site is absolutely phenomenal, I love the bumping, the music
that's playing (it's actually good!), and the interface touches. However, I
feel that the focus on the game aspect drags down the site- I just want to
load it up and have a stream of kickass music playing that I can bump when
it's good (and it usually is!).

Basically, I want this site to replace iTunes for me, because it's better than
iTunes... one it has a more passive listening focused page that I can flip to
when a great song comes up and bump/favorite/download when one plays. I think
this is going to be a real break-through service if you focus on the 'new
music that doesn't suck' angle over the 'music scavenger hunt' angle. I know
that the two go hand in hand, with the good music being drawn out by the
people digging for music by playing the game, but I think that there will be a
lot more people who just want to listen to the result of the game (good music)
without taking part in the game.

Personally, I'm down to bump good songs and add them to favorites list, but I
don't have time to go find good music by looking up new bands. It might be
worth focusing the initial blank slate experience on passive listening.

When I go to the frontpage, it's not immediately clear how to just listen to
the the list of songs straight through. I hit play on an individual song, but
there's no feedback if the entire playlist will play. I want to fire and
forget until a great song I want to remember comes on- when a great song
played, that's when I hit download, and that's when it pushed me to register,
which I did. But then it put me to a page focused on music scavenging instead
of listening, which is why I registered.

Your pitch is for the game aspect, and the site's copy is about the game
aspect... but, as a listener, what impresses me is the music quality. It'd be
great to have more differentiation between listeners and scavengers.

Bit of a braindump post, but I love the site and will keep on using it- first
impression is shitty but the second I clicked on a song link I was blown away.

Good stuff, and good luck!

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euccastro
Overall nice site. It hooks you as soon as you press a play button. Alas, you
may lose many users in the critical seconds before that happens. The newcomer
experience is too busy: too many "mottos" that allude to the purpose of the
site with more cuteness than explanatory power. You could learn a bit in this
respect from reddit: they only have one motto, and as a newcomer, you are
welcome by a short text that stands out visually (but more elegantly than your
three color salute) on a yellow background. It reads:

"reddit is a source for what's new and popular online. vote on links that you
like or dislike and help decide what's popular, or submit your own!"

You see, short and to the point, but made to explain rather than to make an
impact. You could add a "more..." link at the end of that if your site
requires it.

The site could lose a bit of visual noise. For example, each song entry
consists of four sub-rectangles. It's not clear what this division gives you.
I'd make it just one rectangle and group similar items with whitespace in the
same background color (that is, gray instead of white).

I don't get why some actions (download, +add) are treated so differently
visually. Given the focus of the site, I can understand that you want to
highlight Play and Bump, but that's it.

Believe it or not, I missed the player at the top right corner until I read
about it in this thread. I'd make it stand out more, and use good old play,
pause, previous, next buttons.

Your number of points is displayed in the player area. It looks like somehow
it's the currently playing song who has "90 points".

OK, enough nitpicks for today. As I said, great work overall!

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rantfoil
Great implementation, well thought out with the music playing from page to
page. Impressive.

Design-wise you should get pick up or contract a visual designer/creative
director to really get you to the next level.

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thorax
You win my wicked cool site of the week award. There is no such award, but
nice work on the site!

This is eerily close to a project we've been working on. But you deserve mad
props for doing it so well.

My biggest gripe are your fonts so that says a lot. (When I Firebug it to
verdana it looks rather nice.) It is a bit too complicated, but every little
bit I explore seems rewarding.

Random plug/advice, you might consider using one of our little tools,
featurelist.org, to get user feature voting and/or a feedback widget.

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h34t
I'm listening in from northern Thailand and it seems great so far. I like how
responsive the UI feels, and the way the player stays out of the way and lets
me browse all over the site.

* Can I bump a song by clicking somewhere in the mini-player that sits in the top of the screen? that part confused me a bit.

* It'd be nice to have standard pause/next buttons in the mini-player. I'm not used to having to click a text link "next" to advance songs, and it's such a small text link it's hard to click without thinking.

* Sometimes it seems weird to have all the notifications come up in the bottom-left. It's a sort of cool concept, but when I click "What's this?" I think I'd rather see placement more akin to a tooltip (right by the mouse-pointer) instead of having to look down at the corner of my window.

* I first thought that "+add" would add a song to my playlist. Actually I'm not sure how the whole playlist thing works here (how I can know exactly what's coming next and how to modify that list?).

* Under "my music" I don't seem to be able to do anything with the songs/artists except drag them. I can't click to view their page, or listen to the song, etc. __Oh, figured it out now - but still not sure why 2 steps are necessary here. Why not have the song in the table expand in-place? (and include a play button even before it's expanded?)

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cmos
I love it. It's the first music site I've been to that has grabbed me. I
actually signed up for it, which is rare.

My only feedback is that the colors could be more subdued. Or more glaring.
Actually, the colors of the headers seem a bit out of place.

But that's pretty detailed. :)

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tel
Another detail oriented bit for you guys:

There's a problem with your headers. The rounded corner sprite is a png and I
believe, without doing too much testing, that difference in color profile
rendering is causing it not to match the generated color of your columns.

Solution: use gif.

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JMiao
Yeah, this is an issue in Safari. We didn't use gif because we wanted to keep
the "custom background" option open.

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renault
Glad you explained the name -- wouldn't have got the whole highway sign
favicon otherwise. Now that I think about it, that's a pretty awesome name.
Especially when considering the crappy selection available and the usually
unimaginative ones being used by most startups.

~~~
JMiao
Ha, thanks for the complement. It's really hard not to fret about the name
when you're so in love with what you're doing and what it could do for others.
The original name was "Project Alix," "Alix" being the first name of the girl
who owned the notebook that I scribbled the early wireframes of thesixtyone on
while I was supposed to be studying for an exam.

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truebosko
I've been using thesixtyone.com on and off for awhile, it's a nice site. Only
thing I would say is the site seems kind of busy at times and it's hard to
pick something. Usually though I just go to it, press play .. and let it go (I
don't rate or anything)

~~~
JMiao
that's perfectly reasonable. we realize that the interactive portion of the
site appeals to different people on varying levels, and that's a big reason
why most of the site is accessible without having to signup (and the homepage
autoplays).

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hooande
My initial reactions:

\- I would be cool if I could play with the site more without registering.

\- I like the UI and the interface. A lot of people have been talking bad
about the design, but I don't mind it. I think it's unique.

\- If someone asked me to describe this site, I would say "it's like
iminlikewithyou, but for music".

Overall, I think this is an amazing website. Great job, guys.

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truebosko
Oh, one major issue I've noticed with thesixtyone is that it lags firefox (2,
or Beta 5) when I am listening. Not all the time, just has random jolts of
slowness. Not sure why, I've run Firebug on the site and it doesn't seem to be
any AJAX queries, looks like it's the "Ever-loading" JS and Flash files

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DaniFong
Have you checked out Amie Street? They have a similar model. You can pick
early tracks when they're unheard of and free. Then as they get more downloads
they gather points and then you get points, like you have one share in the
song. You can then spend these on buying different songs.

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luserspaz
I'm using Flashblock, and I wish your site was a little friendler to it,
instead of telling me I need to install Flash. Whitelisting your site directly
works, but that's a lot more effort than I normally want to go through.

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noodle
an interesting idea, but i don't see how its less, in your own words, "super-
gimmicky" than the rest of the music options on the web.

what do you feel will be the force driving traffic to your site?

~~~
JMiao
most music options ignore the fact that listening to new music is usually
tedious and uninviting.

it feels like work, and people simply move on, especially when you consider
that most already know what they want.

so the big problem for emerging artists is how you get those first plays from
people who aren't your friends or family. our approach may seem lighthearted
and overly-friendly for such a serious problem, but that's what we're finding
works best when introducing new music to new audiences.

interesting fact: avg. listener spends more than 15 hours/week listening to
new music on thesixtyone.

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opportunity
Hi JMiao, The site is loading too slow for me to try it. I will check back
later in an hour or so. I tried both firefox and flock to check
thesixtyone.com.

~~~
JMiao
Hmm, that's odd. It's working ok on my end. Please write back if you're still
running into any issues.

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culley
So far so good. Nice Concept and implementation. Check out RadioFreeTexas.org
for a direct competitor with other interesting point based ideas.

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bobp
Good job on the site!

I like how the song keeps playing when you click around, but when you hit the
back button the song gets cut off :(

~~~
JMiao
Yeah, that depends on your browser. Firefox works great.

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acgourley
This looks solid. Users++

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LPTS
Nice beta. Nice functionality. I could see using this while I work at my desk.
I will bookmark it.

I always find the most value in detailed critical feedback. In that spirit:

There is a lot of subtle visual dissonance on your website. It looks like you
put some effort into the design, but it fails because of small details. It's a
shame to have a promising functionality masked with so much ugly.

The blue yellow and pink text is ugly. It draws the eye away from your app.
It's hard for me to switch between reading text of different colors. When I
look at those bright colors, your app and the light green text just fades into
the background. I think the green and orange are nice cool colors. Stick with
cool colors like that. Subtle is better.

Do you want round corners or square corners? I think you should round them all
to soften the page. You are locked into squares for the album covers, but all
square is too aggressive, so you should make the rounding more subtle. You
have giant rounding that is dissonant with os x and album cavers and half the
site. Use tiny little rounding so it blends with the OS X apps and the square
corners on the album cover. Again, subtle. I shouldn't notice corners, here I
do.

Your growl clone belongs top right of window, not bottom right.

It shouldn't beep and say stupid things. We are listening to music and beeps
suck if you are listening. They are not 'fun' just superfluous. Assume your
audience is more intelligent then the mtv crowd. Real listening requires
focused attention and the beeps are insulting to the music of the artists you
host. It's not consistent with the goal of allowing people to discover awesome
songs, because a lot of awesome songs require careful listening. Listening to
a great song with those interruptions is like looking at a van gogh with kids
stickers on it. Let your artists control 100% of the audio experience from
your site. Slightly shaking the growl would be an acceptable alternative.

Incidentally, I heard many really kick ass songs.

My impression of the site is positive. The engine is good, it's functionality
is good, it's design was overall good, but details were weak despite honest
effort, and it's music is good. Hire a geek with a minimalist aesthetic to fix
your designs small details.

I'm looking forward to an iPhone app of this.

Aside from this starting a business stuff, I'm a musician, and I would love
for a site like this to replace MySpace as the default for musicians.

