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General Category => Entertainment and Media => Topic started by: Bisse on April 18, 2008, 07:11:10 pm

Title: Earn XP for listening to music
Post by: Bisse on April 18, 2008, 07:11:10 pm

So I found a pretty cool site and thought i'd share it with you guys. It's called thesixtyone (http://www.thesixtyone.com/#/home/), just made it out of alpha stage, and "aims to make listening to new music a fun, adventurous experience".  If you've ever used Pandora, Musicovery, Last.fm or similiar you get the idea already - it's got a huge collection of music and all of it is free to listen to. Things like these are great for finding good music, and end up being like listening to the radio, with the difference that you can be the DJ, and the songs aren't shit.
 
This particular site is kind of like a music RPG. You get points for listening to music. You can also 'bump' songs to the top of the main page list, which costs point, but if people listen to what you bump, you get poitns for that as well. You can try to earn points and levels, or you can just not care about all that and just enjoy the music instead. So in essence, it encourages you to find new stuff and showcase new stuff to others. My profile's here (http://www.thesixtyone.com/profile/#/Bisse/), although it's pretty empty right now since I just found the site. You bet i'll fill it up with awesome shit though. Also, there's a community upgrade coming pretty soon which will let you form groups and whatever, so we can form a GW clubhouse and you guys can fill it up with all your weird postmodern music or finn metal or whatever!

So yeah, give it a whirl and show it to everyone you know. Also, when you create an account, the referrer nickname will be "Bisse" or I will fucking end you.

Authors own words (Click to reveal)

Drebin posted about this a few months ago, but I wanted to personally share my hobby/experiment with you all since it finally graduated from its alpha phase today. It's called thesixtyone and aims to make listening to new music a fun, adventurous experience. Some of my friends have amusingly called it a music scout RPG.

Having worked in the game industry since I was in highschool, I've simply become bored of making more games where the goal is to shoot more aliens or save more princesses. I started wondering if games could be harnessed to entertain people AND solve real-world problems.

Everyone knows the music business is in the shitter -- the RIAA's trying to mold the web into a police state, and finding new music (that isn't being paid for by the labels supporting the RIAA) still feels like a job. I don't know anyone who successfully browses Myspace and finds new stuff they love unless they're specifically looking for it.

So I realized that my calling was to see if I could develop an accessible game that would help people find new music and reward reputation to those that play the "scouting game." This new sense of meaning was perfectly timed as I found myself droning through an expensive college, so I dropped out determined to make this thing happen. I left home with my laptop and 3 changes of clothes to live on a living room floor, roam libraries for wifi, and survive off a diet from Walgreens (um, yeah). It was a scary/sobering experience, but I'm kinda glad I went through it because, when you hit rock bottom, you really start to get your priorities straight (and priorities are different for everyone).

So what do you guys like about it and what can be improved?

Feedback is extremely critical as the site is constantly evolving, so more feedback means a better experience. Hopefully this site can help musicians find their audiences on their own and give people a cool way to find new music that's driven by their peers, not some marketing budget.

Sorry about the advertising; while I hate ads as much as anyone, streaming music is really expensive, so the ads basically help me from going bankrupt.

edit: here's my page --> www.thesixtyone.com/james

my collection --> www.thesixtyone.com/james/collection/

Title: Earn XP for listening to music
Post by: Artis Leon Ivey Jr on April 18, 2008, 07:13:03 pm

I heard of this a few weeks ago on SA. something about MUSIC: THE RPG rubs me the wrong way but if it works and gets people to listen to better music, more power to it.

Title: Earn XP for listening to music
Post by: Eltee on April 18, 2008, 09:30:04 pm

This site rules.

Some pretty nice tunes on it.

Title: Earn XP for listening to music
Post by: local_dunce on April 18, 2008, 10:04:51 pm

What the fuck! I clicked "Listen to the Radio" straight after registering and it played a song by an artist who I pretty much really like and is seriously obscure. How did it know to do that? Just got a song by "Spoony Bard," It is terrible.

EDIT: Actually this is really not very good. I enjoyed Pandora because it played music that I enjoyed and wanted to hear. I could thumb up and thumb down and it would offer more suggestions from there. Here I am just getting a lot of stuff I don't like very much.

Title: Earn XP for listening to music
Post by: Mama Luigi on April 18, 2008, 10:23:11 pm

Quote from: scubacoaster on April 18, 2008, 10:04:51 pm

What the fuck! I clicked "Listen to the Radio" straight after registering and it played a song by an artist who I pretty much really like and is seriously obscure. How did it know to do that? Just got a song by "Spoony Bard," It is terrible.

Lucky. The first song I got was some shitty country song.  :fogethuh:

Title: Earn XP for listening to music
Post by: local_dunce on April 18, 2008, 10:26:26 pm

It just went round in an entire circle of tracks that repeats itself and I didn't enjoy a single one of them :(

Title: Earn XP for listening to music
Post by: Craze /!\ on April 19, 2008, 12:19:13 am

This sounds neat. I'm a fan of Pandora and need something to listen to right now, so~!

---
Okay, I really don't like the lowercase scheme but whatever. The pop-ups are kind of cute but I don't really get the interface at all. A radio should be like... Pandora.

Neat idea, and Bisse got some points from my signing up, but I'll stick to Pandora.

Title: Earn XP for listening to music
Post by: Grunthor on April 19, 2008, 12:49:56 am

I'm sending this to the music forum.  I think it would fit better there.

Title: Earn XP for listening to music
Post by: Mama Luigi on April 19, 2008, 01:20:07 am

Pandora wins in simplicity, but in all honesty Last.fm has the absolute best when it comes to interface and ease-of-use. Pandora is just... overly simple.