A killer app for music websites
I spend a little time browsing for new music on sites like Jamendo and Amie Street. I’d spend a lot more time if it weren’t such a painful process. Basically there is an informational problem: These sites feature music by a lot of unknown (to me) amateur artists, so I have no idea which are good or bad, and which I like or dislike. By random browsing, I’ve found a few songs that I like, but a lot that sound crap, or at least aren’t to my taste. This process is painful because the information I’m provided with by the websites (the artist’s name, a picture, the genre, etc) is more or less useless for informing me about what the music sounds like. To actually hear the music, I have to click a play button, wait for a player to load, buffer something, etc. Then after all this waiting, 99% of the time I don’t like the music anyway.
If this process could be more efficient, I’d spend a lot more time browsing for music on these sites. The probability of finding something that I like is low, and the quality of a lot of amateur content is low too, so the cost of browsing needs to be low. The music may be free, but finding it is not, and at the moment, searching is too expensive in terms of time.
So here’s my suggestion for the ‘killer app’ for these sites:
Make a sample of the music play instantly when I hover the mouse pointer over the artist’s name or picture.
It doesn’t matter if the sound quality is low, I just need to get an idea of what the music sounds like, and I want to hear it fast. That way, I can quickly screen out the crap. Then I’m more than happy to click and wait for downloads of the stuff that I actually like. Surely it can’t be so hard to do?
3 Comments
Hi Aaron,
We talked about this at the office and we’ll be testing out the idea of instant previews for an upcoming version of amiestreet.com. We also plan to include play buttons next to each song, album, and artist (all our playable items). In a top-ten list for your favorite genre, you could simply click through or hover over each item for a preview without needing to enter into an artist or album-specific page.
If we do add a faster way to preview, would you see any value in being able to filter out the music you hear but don’t like? You would need to take the time to X-out individual songs or artists as you go.
Another thing we have planned that should make it less expensive to browse through undiscovered music is an on-page music player, rather than just the pop-out version we have now at Amie Street. The on-page would be a lightweight way to serve up new music very quickly.
Artists and albums offer a choice for which song to play on preview. Imagine clicking a play button next to one album in a list of the top ten in your genre, or hovering over an undiscovered artist — what do you want to hear? The most popular song from that album or artist? Snippets from several songs? A song that’s buzzing at the moment?
Thanks for the feedback!
Jonah: It’d be really great if you can implement instant previews.
I’m not sure if it’s necessary to have a way to filter out things that I don’t like (but you might want to provide that option so you can get some data from users about what they don’t like).
More important would be a quick way to ‘filter in’ the things that I do like. Maybe a single button that I can click after hearing the preview that puts the music into a ‘basket’ or something, for me to check out later. It’d be cool if you can do that with AJAX or something so I don’t have to wait for the page to reload.
In terms of which song to play for the preview, I reckon just let the artist choose which one they want to play.
As punch button widget technology is already here, I’d guess your suggested innovation is achievable.
You might be interested in Lucas Gonze’s (pioneer of the XSPF at webjay.org, now working for yahoo)weblog at gonze.com, where discussion of accessibility issues like this as well as music economics frequently occur.
As masses of interesting product are released on hundreds of netlabels, on jamendo, on simuze, and elsewhere, I believe that the crying need is not for artists so much as for people who write about artists and serve the role of tastemakers. The next wave, as I see it, will be the wave of those who help sort out what works from what works less well. The efforts at this thus far, like phlow.de, black sweater white cat, and blocsonic, have been very good. Yet if I were to pick the consumer music website “most likely to succeed”, it would be an authoritative
google-ad-supported guide to Creative Commons music.