

TheSixtyOne (YC W09) Is Building a Digg For Indie Music - markbao
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/09/thesixtyone-is-building-a-digg-for-indie-music/

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divia
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.

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

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

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JMiao
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.

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

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

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nopassrecover
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.

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hsiung
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.

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

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dnaquin
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/>

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dmix
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.

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jmtame
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!

~~~
smokinn
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...](http://www.thesixtyone.com/edgen/song/Kings+and+Kingdoms+-+Dragons/27327/)

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

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jerf
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?)

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jmtame
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.

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maryrosecook
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?

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JMiao
"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.

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

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uuilly
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?

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bluefish
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.

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

