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Next Big Thing, a HN-like site for music content

34 points| mxpxpx | 13 years ago |liisten.com

47 comments

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[+] GotAnyMegadeth|13 years ago|reply
This site looks great, signed up. However:

> Next Big Thing is not a place for ... anything else flat out offensive.

One of my favourite bands at the moment is "Rotting Christ" that name alone is very offensive to some people. Does that mean I can't post stuff about them? Where is the line? Can I post anything Black metal related? What about Gore Grind?

I think music has a much wider view of what is acceptable than tech. For example a lot of music/art is made with the sole purpose of being offensive. This is going to be hard to moderate.

[+] booruguru|13 years ago|reply
I agree. Labelling music is one thing, but outright censorship will ensure your project never takes off. However, after looking at your site, I don't get it. I thought the music would be embedded in the page itself. Also, you have music and news/editorial links on the same page. What's more there's no tagging/categorization so I have no way of filtering music to my tastes.

The site looks slick and you deserve kudos for the effort. But I think you should seriously consider the value proposition of "The Next Big Thing."

EDIT: I just went back to you site and discovered that you do in fact separate music and news/editorial links.

[+] mikecane|13 years ago|reply
> Next Big Thing is not a place for ... anything else flat out offensive.

Said Putin about Pussy Riot.

[+] breadnwater|13 years ago|reply
If you have no objection to a band, song or album cover that degrades your mother or someone else you love and revere, then hey, maybe it should all be fair game.

Do you understand where I'm getting at? That's how Christians feel with names like that.

P.S. I don't think for a second that the name of someone you love should be degraded. Nor should someone I love either. That's my point.

[+] Cowen|13 years ago|reply
I'm not saying this was done on purpose, but I find this name and concept eerily similar to the music analytics startup Next Big Sound.
[+] jonathanjaeger|13 years ago|reply
Agreed, the name is way too similar. The concept I think is different -- Next Big Sound provides a paid analytics service for labels, artists, and other music-oriented companies. Their consumer-facing product and partnership with Billboard and others does has a similar concept though. I find Next Big Thing to be similar to We Are Hunted and The Hype Machine as others pointed out, but the site's not loading for me so it's hard to judge.
[+] uncoder0|13 years ago|reply
What is the value add over hypem or r/music?
[+] cm-t|13 years ago|reply
ah, though exactly same as you !
[+] RyanMcGreal|13 years ago|reply
Looks good so far - I've already discovered some great sounding bands.

Just a few suggestions:

* When you vote, the arrow should disappear. Instead, it just pops a notification saying you can't vote again - but there's no easy way to determine which songs you've voted on.

* It would be great to see a page of links you've upvoted so you can refer back to songs you liked.

Edit to add...

* A way to exclude domains you can't use (e.g. Spotify, which is unavailable in some countries).

* There's no need for the site to auto-scroll to the top of the page and display a Thank You message every time you vote.

[+] jaredmoody|13 years ago|reply
Thanks for the feedback Ryan, appreciate it!
[+] hermaj|13 years ago|reply
Being middle aged and not particularly into music I'm surprised to find I'm already aware of most of the 'next big things' on the front page. I don't think this is a good sign.
[+] mxpxpx|13 years ago|reply
Site got mentioned a few places and is currently down from traffic.

In the post I do mention that you can do the same thing with reddit or following a ton of music related twitter accounts, but the voting and input from different people. We're not doing anything new, but I do think the presentation and appeal is there for nbt.

If you are interested, bookmark the link, it should be up again shortly.

[+] pseut|13 years ago|reply
A nice touch might be if voting reordered the site's RSS feed as well as the webpage. If you have a way to generate a podcast from submitted music, that could be a great combination. I have a lot of trouble following HN through an rss reader because the filter is so much worse, but there's no reason the .xml file should be in any different order than the html file. And podcasts have even worse navigation options than other rss feeds.

This would probably not work with PuSH. But two separate feeds, one for PuSH and one that gives a voting-ordered snapshot when it's fetched, might let you target both the very-frequent and the casual users.

(haven't been able to check out the site yet, so this point might be extra ignorant)

[+] thekillingtree|13 years ago|reply
I'll be sure to keep checking this out. It could end up being pretty good.

A bit off topic: I'd love to see something like this but for motion graphics. I had planned to try to build it but that's clearly not my skillset, ha.

[+] DanBC|13 years ago|reply
This looks good, and I'm excited by the idea of finding music new to me.

NBT itself seems to have died under the traffic, so I have some (perhaps stupid) questions:

1) How do you deal with voting rings and other gaming?

2) How do you deal with 'bubbles' - Some services keep me pretty tightly locked in to a certain bubble, when what I want is some leakage to explore and find new content.

[+] brador|13 years ago|reply
Is there an open source version of HN anywhere?
[+] pseut|13 years ago|reply
To add to the other replies: reddit's open source as well[0] and reasonably straightforward to set up (at least using their Ubuntu installer). Not your question, I know, but thought I'd add for completeness.

[0] https://github.com/reddit/reddit

[+] lewisflude|13 years ago|reply
I like this idea, but I can't see it's use. :(
[+] Le_SDT|13 years ago|reply
Thank you for this :) It is sometimes hard to connect with new people and stand out. Created my account and posted my stuff as Psy Conversion !

EDIT : I liked the sign up experience, that was really quick, kudos for that !

[+] cm-t|13 years ago|reply
Next Big Thing, a HN-like site for music content (/r/music)
[+] mlerner|13 years ago|reply
This seems similar to The Hype Machine. A site that gauges taste in music really needs lots of people using it for the "popularity" of a song to be useful.
[+] guiomie|13 years ago|reply
I agree. Good luck to any website making me switch away from hypem.
[+] edwardunknown|13 years ago|reply
The problem with this is most people have bad taste in music.
[+] Semaphor|13 years ago|reply
From your POV ;)

What I see as a problem is that it's probably going to become (if it gets really big) a copy of mainstream charts or (if a a genre group becomes the majority) only have music for that genre and related genres.

I wish them the best of luck but I personally don't see a future.

[+] largesse|13 years ago|reply
It's not coming up. Load problems I suppose.