wax&wires

TheSixtyOne – Game Theory Meets Music Discovery

Check out thesixtyone.com. It derives its name from the famous “blues highway” Route 61 that runs between New Orleans up to Duluth, Minnesota. Mostly renowned for it’s mentioning in 1965′s Highway 61 Revisited, the song by Bob Dylan, the famed highway was also known to artists like Muddy Waters, BB King, Ike Turner, and Elvis himself.

Pull those roots to the now, and you have thesixtyone.com.

thesixtyone makes music culture more democratic: artists upload their work for review, but, rather than allow a stuffy suit in a boardroom to decide what’s good, thousands of listeners do. The best music automagically bubbles up on our homepage where you can listen to the most popular songs for any genre. It’s a quick way to find new music for your iPod powered by pure excitement as opposed to some contrived marketing budget.

Think you’ve got a good ear? Aside from customizing your experience, creating an account allows you to earn reputation, level up your influence, and collect badges for discovering and recommending good music that others may enjoy. On thesixtyone, tastemaking becomes fun, competitive, and trackable.

We’re on a quest to help people fall in love with something new while giving deserving artists an efficient channel for finding their audiences. To learn more about how thesixtyone works, please see our FAQ.

Don’t get this mixed up with Pandora, where you select songs you like to find recommendations generated by their staff. TheSixtyOne is a different animal. While it does stream music for free, that’s about where the similarities end.

TheSixtyOne allows artists to submit their own content, and have it voted up to the homepage by users of the site. There’s an incentive for users to vote too, as listeners get credits for discovering music and voting it up before it becomes trendy to. Users also get credits for various “achievements,” like reaching a particular play count, being the first person to favorite a song, or getting others to listen to your playlist. You can check out the leaderboard to see which users are the hottest trend spotters.

All of that creates a system in which the homepage reflects a current sampling as to what music is on the rise.

The interface is clean and easy to use, the sound quality is very good, and there are more than enough users to make it a fun site to use.

I could write a bunch more, or you could just check it out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 12:49 pm. It is filed under wires and tagged with discovery, pandora, promotion, radio, streaming, up and coming, websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.