The concept of building a Digg for music has been tried before (see Contrastream or iJigg), but a music streaming site called thesixtyone is the closest I’ve seen so far to getting the formula right. It features only about 50,000 tracks self-uploaded by indie artists and music labels, but visitors can listen to the full stream of each track and vote their favorites up the rankings by hitting the “heart” button. The results are highly listenable playlists by genre, tag, or just what’s hot right now.
The key to making the site work, however, is not simply the Digg-like voting system. By now, that is becoming a pretty common feature (even the Hype Machine uses hearts) and is fairly easy to manipulate. The voting on thesixtyone is combined with some concepts learned from video games. Listeners cannot just indiscriminately heart up any song they want. They are given a limited number of heart points on a daily basis. More points can be earned for identifying good music early or recruiting friends to the service. Songs can only be given positive heart points, however. They can’t be demoted for being really bad. But the fact that the number of points are limited means in theory that only the most deserving songs will get enough to make it to the home page or the top of any given category.
Members also earn reputation points, and can level up as their reputation grows. The higher level a member achieves, the more hearts he or she can distribute. Reputation points are earned by hearting a song early before it becomes popular. Members also receive a portion of the reputation points earned by their friends. This rewards people with good taste in both music and friends. So when you sign up, say that erickschonfeld sent you.
Besides the game play elements, every song can be commented on or shared, and you can see who else liked the song. There are listening and leaderboards, showing the members with the highest reputations and their playlists of hearted songs. Artists can be subscribed to so that you can be alerted when they upload new songs to the site. As you are listening to a song, it keeps playing no matter where else you jump to on the site.
The site also makes it easy share music elsewhere on the Web by posting individual songs to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or the Global Grind. 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.
Thesixtyone is a Y Combinator startup that launched a year ago. It is now attracting about 100,000 unique visitors per month and 10 million pageviews, say the founders. That suggests a high level of engagement. The average session is 40 minutes, and registered users typically spend 2 hours a day on the site (although much of that is no doubt is simply listening to it with a browser tab open while doing other things). Still, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham says the service is “ramen profitable” from ads and Amazon affiliate links.
(Photo by Michael Karshis)
Easily one of the coolest music sites out there thesixtyone…gets better with age too.
thesixtyone is easily near the top, but you can’t really top http://www.vastfm.com. They let you stream full versions of every song by any artist.
Thank god this site is getting some love on TC. Thesixtyone is a great music site that has turned me on to countless new artists.
I know, the site absolutely rocks. I use it all the time to pick up girls. I have me laptop and am like girl I got to show you this site. You want to see it…it works…thesixtyone…so good it gets you laid…
these sites are popping up everywhere.. wearehunted.com
Great site!! I’ve used it before and it’s great to have on in the background. Wonder if and how it makes money beyond affiliates and ads?
Thanks for reviewing this, never knew about the website until now and it’s awesome! Just one thing though is accessibility support, of which there doesn’t seem to be any =) Turn off JavaScript and the website renders useless and all functionality stops working! Not that I care, I don’t make a habit of turning JavaScript off, but still come-on! It can’t be too hard to do some detection and instead of the css static player at the top and pushing to divs, use an iframe so the music keeps playing during navigation! Just saying, that aside though–love the website.
Awesome, I just rediscovered Lady Danville on this site (great indie band I hadn’t heard in a while).
hi sarah, thanks for the love. we didn’t go the iframe route because we wanted to build a seamless navigation system that also persisted url link structure. browse the site and copy/paste the link to see what i mean.
How does the (existing) features of this site compare to Last.FM? Seems to me Last.FM already has much of the backend piping in place to simply turn on a feature like this whenever they feel like like, trumping this site in seconds.
This site is great. I’d love to see the math behind it, since there’s some great graph connectivity stuff they seem to be leveraging.
With an average session of 40 minutes, that’s about 10 songs per. For four minute songs, and I think 9 hearts to start, a casual user can heart about anything they want.
So it’s interesting that it’s the heavy-listening tastemakers they demand the most selectivity from.
love thesixtyone, great to see them on techcrunch. this is the new model of music right here–people are willing to pay independent artists, without a middle man, and they are discovering fresh, original music. this is a perfect example of build something people want.
Pay? how pay?
There’s no money involved – except for the website owners . . .
What’s up with that?
the best digg fore music is http://www.fairtilizer.com, hands down!
Looking good to me. Hopefully I can find some more folk music to buy.
The Sixty One looks good but the artists can’t even linkout to their own sites WTF. It does look good though.
Okay, I’m in love since I left my last comment (which was like 15 minutes ago). Already found some music I’ve really enjoyed and this’ll definitely add some variety to my general listening habits.
I am very skeptical of online music startups as I think online music is just a bad business to be in, but their voting system is actually a good innovation. The problem with traditional voting based collaborative filtering systems is that the supply of votes is virtually unlimited, as such it becomes a very bad signalling mechanism which is aggravated when theses votes are aggregated.
A better solution of course is to introduce tradeoffs so that someone cannot just vote for everything but actually has to trade off votes in an “market” with scarcity. Adding a conjoint aspect to the voting mechansim will not solve everything and the result may still be susceptible to some of the trap’s of Arrow’s impossibility theorem, but it is still better than just “brute” infinite voting.
From India
Anjali Sen
“I am very skeptical of online music startups as I think… ”
Please Lord, please, spare us from this retarded spammer….
Mike, can you please zap this fool’s IP address?
Please!
I think the person’s whose IP address needs to be zapped is you. The spammer is YOU. You are adding nothing to the topic of this post. You probably do not even know what conjoint analysis is and what Kenneth Arrow’s paper has to say about aggregative voting mechanisms … and why this may apply here. I am sure even after you read the Wikipedia/Google search on these you still would not understand.
If you have something to post that is relevant to the topic, or you disagree with any of my points, I am sure readers would be glad to have you join in the discussion.
Last time I heard, there was something called freedom of speech. But you are adding nothing to it except showcasing your ignorance.
Jeez ..
Carter,
I prefer to have SBASB than you and your buddies, who have been posting junk throughout the day.
You morons are making a fool out of yourself.
Jenny or whatever name you will use next,
When did Techcrunch made you the judge?
And if you have an MBA and computer science “degrees” , you will not be here spamming Techcrunch.
Seriously. you need to grow up. If you don’t like comments on Techcrunch articles, you are free to skip through them or go somewhere else.
Carter=Josh=Jenny
Stop taking up space on this comments with your stupid spam that have nothing to do with the topic. If you think just by posting under different aliases you are fooling anybody, you are really more insipid than I thought:
Just click on this: http://www.inte...how-private.php
I hope Mike and Co bans you all and deletes all of your irrelevant posts that have nothing to do with the topic and pollute Techcrunch to the detriment of the rest of us who would like to have an intelligent conversation about technology and startups.
Is it also possible that
MikeD == Anjali Sen ?
Just a though
Ironic, she blocked anonymous comments =)
https://www.blo...368712939939213
Curious_Reader,
Hahaha, funny thought. If I am not mistaken, Anjali Sen started Techcrunching early in the year. I have been around for quite a while before that, not that I care much about what you think.
Just sick and tired of people trying to destroy the quality of the post on TC. One of the reason why Techcrunch is better than other tech blogs, is the quality of the post coupled with intelligent comments. We are not doing the startups and companies featured on the TC any good, if we are busy bickering about which comment is stupid and which is not. That is just very high school and show disrespect to TC and the startups featured.
If you don’t like someone’s comment, move on. Stop being a baby.
I’d like the “From India” spammer removed too.
@Carter, @LOL at the Spam Lady, @Jenny, @Josh,
Why nitpicking her each and every post!? If you don’t like somebody’s comments, just skip them. Or voice your disagreement by posting something relevant to topic. Not by abusing the person.
Grow up guys, get a life.
It’s pretty easy downloading the songs… they don’t even try to put protection on it.
Interesting… will be definitely investigating this site in the future… thanks for the heads-up!
really really cool site
they even know when you’re blocking ads
http://i44.tiny...com/10zochk.jpg
For every EMI or Warner lawsuit that we keep hearing about, there are well thought, progressive online music services such as TheSixtyOne. I’ve been following these guys for some time and it’s good to see them get the credit they deserve.
As much as I love The Hype Machine, it is generally dominated by the same circle of blogs who only post on what each other are covering. This can def. make it difficult for indie artists to get “hyped”
interesting
Incredibly awesome music site
Thesixtyone doesn’t have any good music. Coincidentally, Digg doesn’t have any good links.
Man, that’s a huge generalization. I’ve already found quite a few songs I’ve enjoyed..and come on: it’s free!
People feel so entitled to things they only just found out existed (and don’t even cost anything).
I’ve found ZERO songs I’ve enjoyed, after using it for two weeks. Regularly. All of them are basic folksy indie rock. Generic.
You can’t say that any of it is good and maintain any respect from thinking people.
Hippy:
You’ve found Zero songs because there is a lot of content. There is a lot of indie rock and there is a lot of folk. I for one like indie rock, I also like folk. Then again I also am heavily into electronica, electroclash, and hip hop. And it’s there.
I’m not really into R&B, metal, thrash, techno or noise. But it is also there.
Now, if you’re one of those a-holes that think that everything sounds the same and for every new artist or song you point to their influences and write them off because someone did it before or did something similar…Guess what? You’re a tool. This just happens to be what music is because it draws from other sources. This is the same for writing. This is the same for art. You will never find something that is completely unique. Unless, maybe, you invent your own one-of-a-kind instrument and sing in a new language. (I believe Sigur Ros made their own language…but you could make your very own language called Hippylosernese).
I’m not exactly saying that all music is good either or that we should respect all artists and their music because I wish I could tell certain artist’s to never make music again.
But you can’t slam t61unless you’re slamming all music.
“You can’t say that any of it is good and maintain any respect from thinking people.”
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Please continue to believe that you are smarter than everyone else or that you are part of some kind of intellectual elite. No, I really truly believe you have an IQ hovering near or above genius. And that you are the greatest philosopher of our time.
Enjoy your sad miserable life (and your worthless second tier school degree).
Lol.. the quality of the music on T61 is incredible. Do us all a favor and don’t bother to go to the site ever again.
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along.
One of the more impressive music discovery sites – and with a slick UX, no less – that I have come across in a long time.
great site! thanks for sharing!
I’ve been a long-time user of t61, it’s a great site. I’ve discovered some pretty amazing new bands on it. Highly recommend if you’re into indie/electronic music.
Best Digg for music stories? http://HeavyAsHell.com because you not only can win stuff but it isn’t about wimpy 3 piece suit rock.
Am I the only geek that thinks Radiohead and their clones are boring and lack passion? Rock shouldn’t be so safe and sterilized!
I have tried somthing similar with my site’s(http://bandwars.org) new section but since my traffic is low its a dead end. Hope it will catch up in the future
cool website… thanks for share…
I like this. I have been using a variety of different services on the web to find new music and I will definitely try out another. Thanks.
I like to try new things. Will give it a try.
It appears they are using the last.fm API for events, bio and image data without providing the required attribution. http://www.last.fm/api/tos
A bit of a liability.
Thesixtyone seems like an awesome site for up-and-coming artists. This site could get artists to promote their music to a larger audience and have their listeners review their music. I like the “hearts” feature the best. It’s definitely better than the thumbs up/thumbs down feature. I also like how you could only give positive reviews rather than positive and negative. Artists with a passion for music don’t want to know that their music sucks-they only want positive ratings.
this site seriously controls my life. yay!
I love all the Creative Commons free music at this site, but my favorite is still http://www.soundclick.com
That’s where I put all my musical “gems”.
soundclick.com/jerrybradley
I f*ckin love T61, if I could bump it, I would max bump (”Holy Sh*t”) it and then in a few months revive it… you old school T61ers know what I mean.
failed X2