TheSixtyOne - Music Exploration Done Correctly

I’ve long searched for a service that helps you discover new artists. There have been a few attempts at this in the past. Last.fm was my favorite for a while and they do a pretty good job.

Recently I came across TheSixtyOne, a Digg like rating system for songs.

Initially I liked the idea, but calling it a “Digg-like” site actually cheapens the experience. TheSixtyOne goes so much further in to music exploration I immediately signed up.

I hardly ever sign up for a site immediately. If you want my e-mail address you’re going to have to work for it or really wow me.

Instantly I fell in love with TheSixtyOne. It uses a little Flash, a little AJAX but uses them in appropriate ways. It manages to continue playing songs through page loads, a great feature.

It also allows you to build a queue of songs to play, effectively making TheSixtyOne a media player.

I’ve already found a few new artists I really like, on Last.fm I’d find one or two per session max.

I even went to purchase a song through Amazon but abandoned ship after realizing Amazon makes you download their software, yuck.

The last concept I find interesting is the idea of points. You can bump songs or artists but it costs points. You get points for logging in, and I assume other routine tasks like writing comments.

This means you only bump artists you really really like because you only have a certain number of points.

I’m still sorting through the site, there seems to be a lot here–but so far I love the idea and the implementation.