Thesixtyone: Music discovery game connects indies and fans
Thesixtyone is a "music discovery game" created by two USC students who quit their jobs to build a site that helps musicians and audiences discover each other. Fans use Digg-style thumbs-up to rate the music that's uploaded, but the game is that each rating costs you points, and you get more points if you rate up a song that lots of other people rate up too.
LinkMusicians upload their music for listening, but rather than allowing the Simon Cowells of the world decide which songs go on the homepage, the listeners do. How, you say? If you like a song you've found on thesixtyone, just click the "bump" button to increase its bump count. Doing so will cost you points, but if songs you bump get bumped by others, you can earn more points! Collecting points increases your level and reflects your skill in picking top songs in your favorite genre!
By listening to songs through the lens of the collective community on thesixtyone, you'll always find good new music. We're committed to giving every bit of music on the web the opportunity to find its audience.
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Isn't that system heavily pushing for mainstream ratings? If you actively seek unknown music and rate it, you are going to lose points if others do not discover it. There seems to be little incentive to rate new music this way.
Hmm, seems to me like a laboratory experiment in rewarded groupthink. I mean, after all, in such a system you are punished for liking what others do not. Heck, you're punished for just liking something new (that others haven't listened to yet). Even if that punishment/reward is quite insubstantial.
I would say what it needs is a good profiling mechanism, so that you can state what tastes you have, and apply similar segmentation to the scoring system. That way you would find out what people like you are enjoying and increasing the chance of finding musing that appeals to you.
Btw, a mechanism for determining a mainstream taste isn't necessarily a bad thing. Something should replace the big MAFIAA giants once they all crumble.
@ GQUANN and UNKA WILLBUR:
Actually, if you use the site, you'll realize that bumping early costs more points, but also means more reward should the song gain traction later on. You're not actually being punished, unless you'd consider buying Google stock at its $99/share IPO as some sort of punishment.
The "pop-up video" bubbles that appear when you play music have to be one of the coolest uses of Ajax I've seen on the web so far. I keep clicking around the site just to see all the great Ajaxy design elements.
jmiao:
So, in essence, their game's architecture is a "Prisoner's Dilemma" with no fixed rules/rewards. I think an examination of the "common sense" strategies employed by people playing such game would reveal that most people will act conservatively. Risky behavior in such a game (waging much to gain much) is rarely a chosen strategy.
What such results predict is illustrated handily by the top vote-getters on the site. The majority of the top ten are major-label backed artists who have already gained significant attention via the publicity channels of these corporations. The safe choices. Safe because they are already pre-approved by social (read: corporate media) consensus.
It seems to me that these safe "consensus" choices will only get more attractive to users as the user base grows.
I did a short tour around the site and found out that the system is not as primitive as I first feared. For example, there is an incentive to listen to new, possibly not-yet-popular music in the form of a reward for using the 'random' jukebox. Of course the question is: Are these tweaks signs of sophistication, or just attempts to fix a system that fundamentally doesn't work?
On one hand, the site stands and falls with the assumption that each song/track has an objective place on a one-dimensional good/bad axis. (It isn't about helping you find music you like; instead it determines what the herd likes.) On the other hand, its mechanism is completely unsuitable for gathering objective assessments — unless you think trite mainstream pop is the pinnacle of good taste.
Oh, I see, so the objective is to play a game and attempt to get a high score. This is an inviation to users to game the system, instead of giving honest, spontaneous ratings. But, oh well, it's a practical way of convincing players that the points they're collecting are a genuine reward.Apart from the reinforcement of groupthink, I think such a system is also in danger of becoming biased. Imagine that during the next two months, an unusually high number of heavy metal fans signs up. (This is unlikely, but it's not at all implausible that something of the sort happens; remember how Brazilians took over half of Orkut?) Their ratings will tend to clump together, which earns them disproportionally many points, making them more influential. Philbert (#3) suggests a fix for this, but the segmentation method is far inferior to systems like last.fm or Pandora, where classifications evolve organically to suit individual users.
Philbert's other point is very insightful, though: A somewhat objective method of gauging mainstream taste is not without merit, considering that charts based on, say, airplay are influenced by music industry lobbyists. I think thesixtyone is a worthwhile experiment, it should be interesting to see how it develops.
We need a hipster version where you only get points for bumping things that nobody else likes.
Apart from the reinforcement of groupthink, I think such a system is also in danger of becoming biased. Imagine that during the next two months, an unusually high number of heavy metal fans signs up. (This is unlikely, but it's not at all implausible that something of the sort happens; remember how Brazilians took over half of Orkut?) Their ratings will tend to clump together, which earns them disproportionally many points, making them more influential.
God forbid those Plebs discover our beautiful, nuanced oh-so-indie world, eh?
But all this is only valid in an ideal system where each user gets personalised ratings. As I said, thesixtyone appears to attempt achieving objective, absolute ratings; in such a situation, bias is doom.
Nex, I know what you meant - just a joke :)
Matt
Look, I'm all for indie music. I am adverse to "pop" radio. Yet this site seems to be supporting that same mentality. Why does popular = better? I happen to like certain artists who, through no fault of mine, aren't popular: Hazmat Modine, Toshinori Kondo, Igor Stravinsky, Bill Frisell, Messur Chups, etc. Does the fact that they are not popular make them lesser artists? Obviously not, nor do I think BoingBoing or its readers would think so. Yet I submit that supporting such concepts as thesixtyone is harmful to our cultural growth. Cory, Mark, Xeni, David make fantastic cultural, artistic recommendations, no question. But the ones that I really consider are the ones that are written from their personal, impassioned selves.
There's an essential flaw in this system. You are not being rewarded for rating music that you like, but for music that you think *other people* would like.
Some of the tweaks like the random jukebox are trying to fix this, but it's pretty clear that if all we wanted to do was to get the maximum number of points for everyone concerned, we'd all get together and agree on one artist to vote for (say, Karlheinz Stockhausen), and there'd be no great profit for anyone doing anything else.
Their only hope is that people aren't smart enough to realize that and will in fact mark up "whey like" rather than "what they think others will like". But people are pretty good at gaming systems like that.
That's why this system is not *at all* similar to the Prisoner's Dilemma except that they're both problems in game theory. The essential problem of the Prisoner's Dilemma is that there *isn't* a stable equilibrium solution; but in this case there is more or less a stable equilibrium, the "All For Stockhausen" strategy.
i'd like to know more about the long term consequences of independent taste in music. If I continue to select artists/songs that are outside the collective preference...i loose points...and then what? so long as i can continue to use the site and discover good music, i don't really care.
Finally got around to checking out thesixtyone, and despite the inherent flaws of a "popularity" system, I've heard lots of new, good, and diverse songs just by listening to the random "rack" player, let alone listening to what has become popular.
And despite my band's blend of pseudo-bluegrass (http://www.thesixtyone.com/bluemoonshine) being outside the bulk of the fare on thesixtyone, one of our tunes has gotten 14 bumps in little over a day and some kind words. That does not displease me.
I have only been using TheSixtyOne for a couple of days, but I have to say I have really been enjoying it. I understand everyone's concerns about groupthink and the such, but the mission of the site (or at least as it appears to me), is to allow people to discover new music.
The best example of this is the random jukebox (known as the Rack). It only plays songs below a certain threshold of Bumps (the sites equivalent of Diggs, essentially). You are rewarded a point for every song you listen to from the Rack, therefore encouraging you to listen to listen to the less popular songs.
There is of course room for gaming the system, like there is with anything, but the creators of the site have very active doing updates, both to scale up for the influx of new users who have recently joined the site and with new functionality based on suggestions in the forums.
My point being that the founders have shown a commitment to keeping their mission on track and, at least for me, that's convincing enough that it will stay new music centric at least for the time being.
By the way, I heard Blue Moonshine a couple times in the Rack and have bumped them. Keep up the good work!