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)

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

The site promises to help users find good music quickly. Artists upload indie music and others vote on it Digg-fashion to push the good stuff to the top of the site. It is at least somewhat similar to iJigg, which also lets users vote, Digg-like, on music.

ContraStream will leverage the user-generated voting data to create let users search/browse popular music. Each artist and album also gets its own dedicated page on the site.

In an effort to “keep the music indie,” users are encouraged to flag music that is “too mainstream.”

See more at Scopetech.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

FineTune

Finetune is a relatively new application written in Flash. It’s my favorite out of the bunch and I covered it on my ZDNet blog. What makes Finetune stand out is that in addition to the standard “artist radio”, it allows users to build playlists of specific songs. The minimum playlist is 45 songs and you can have up to three songs per artist. With custom playlists, you can make sure you’re only listening to songs you want. Finetune also gets points because in addition to the web version, it runs on the Wii and there is an Apollo-based desktop client.

Pandora

Pandora is the granddaddy of the bunch and it’s one of the Web 2.0 applications that Mike can’t live without. It is built using OpenLaszlo and provides the cleanest experience out of all the applications on the list. Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to generate a stream of songs that you’ll like based on how you rate previous tracks. You create stations around artists, songs or albums and you can provide feedback (thumbs up or thumbs down) on the songs Pandora chooses. Tech Crunch’s coverage of Pandora is here.

Last.Fm

last.fm is another Web 2.0 veteran and is more socially-slanted than the others. Tagging is a big part of the last.fm experience and you can tag any song that comes along in addition to being able to listen to “user tag radio” which is based on tracks that users have tagged with a specific genera. last.fm has a separate desktop application that “scrobbles” the songs you listen to and generates a music profile that you can share with friends. See Tech Crunch’s coverage of last.fm here.

MOG

MOG is all about a music community. It’s very blog-centric and revolves around user pages, or “Mogs”. You build your Mog around songs you’re listening too and artists you like. That builds something like a profile for you that users can browse to and comment on. It also uses this profile to suggest other people or music that you might like. Tech Crunch’s coverage of MOG is here.

RadioBlogClub

radio.blog.club is another music service that builds playlists based on an artist or song you specify. I’ve heard the least about it, but the interface is good. When you browse to the site and type in an artist or song, it builds a playlist of 10 songs for you. In my experience the recommendation system for radio.blog.club wasn’t the best, but they do allow you to embed their player on your blog. This seems to be the least robust of the applications but still worth a mention.

MyStrands

MyStrands started off as MusicStrands and is a downloaded desktop application that works with your current music players to build recommendations based on what you’re listening to. In many ways it’s similar to last.fm’s “Scrobbling” but MyStrands ties in with your mobile device and seems to provide a more social recommendation system. By tying in with music on mobile phones, MyStrands is a bit ahead of the others and it helps tie all of your music collections together. Tech Crunch’s coverage of MyStrands is here.

iLike

iLike is an iTunes plug-in that makes your music library more social. It tracks what you’re listening too and recommends songs and people with similar tastes. It hooks in nicely with the iTunes interface and recommends music as you’re playing songs. I listen to some pretty obscure stuff and the recommendations were good. They also have a widget for MySpace that is formatted to sit nicely in the “Music” section of the profile. Tech Crunch’s coverage of iLike is here.

iJigg

iJigg is a digg-esque music discovery service that I had a lot of fun playing with. Users vote on individual songs and the most popular rise to the top of the front page. You can’t do any “related artists” with iJigg, but you can browse by genre so that you can target your music discovery. The iJigg player can also be embedded on other sites so you can share it with friends. As this service gets more popular, I think it will be a great way for bands to get discovered. Tech Crunch’s coverage if iJigg is here.

Ryan Stewart is an expert in Rich Internet Applications. Ryan writes his personal blog here and also writes a RIA blog for ZDNet called The Universal Desktop.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Think Digg for music, plus lots of Flash functionality. Songs are presented on the home page and can be “jigged” by members. Songs can also be embedded into web pages (I’ve done so with one of the popular songs below), commented on, etc. Songs are tagged for easy browsing, and there are most popular and recently posted areas as well.

As a music discovery service, it’s compelling. And the Digg way of having massive numbers of people vote on stuff to make the cream rise is a good way to sort stuff. Others are giving glowing reviews.

Another problem with iJigg is that they don’t provide any way to get your hands on the music. No downloads, and no links to buy the music. You can listen to it all day on the Flash player, and embed it on other sites, but you aren’t getting this on your iPod.

All this may limit adoption, and any friction could be fatal when ultimately these new indie-music startups are competing with MySpace Music, which has 7 million band profiles. In December 2006, MySpace music had 16.2 million unique visitors and 475 million page views. It will be hard to pull eyeballs away from MySpace.

And at the end of the day, I still like the Amie Street (our coverage here) model best for indie music. People can download songs without DRM. Songs start out free, and as more downloads occur the price starts to edge up. If a song gets above $0.50, its really popular. Anyone trying to game the system will be paying money to do so, which cuts down on fraud significantly. In my opinion, it’s a much purer voting system than the one iJigg has launched. And you can put the music on your iPod. I wouldn’t be surprised to see eMusic, the popular DRM-free music download site, adopt an Amie Street music model down the road. And perhaps others will too.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.