Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

At ISMIR, I asked Anthony Volodkin, founder of the Hype Machine what music sites he was excited about. He pointed me to thesixtyone. I've been playing with thesixtyone for about a week now and Anthony is right, thesixtyone is really interesting.

The sixtyone is part music discovery site, part social music site, and part online game. On thesixtyone, you listen to music (almost all of it by artists you've never heard of). If you find something you like you can 'bump it' - (it's just like digging) - songs or artists that get bumped a lot hit the home page, where they get lots of visibility and lots of plays (just like Digg). Not only is getting to the front page highly rewarding for the artist, it also can be highly rewarding for you if you were an early 'bumper' of the track. That's because everything that you do on the site can earn you points. Visit the site every day, you get points. Listen to music from 'the rack' (the new bin), you get points, bump a song that then gets bumped by lots of others, you earn lots of points. Be the first person to bump a song that ultimately makes it to the front page - you get a boatload of points. As you earn points, you go up levels, just like D&D - and the higher your level, the more weight your opinion carries - higher level users can bump songs multiple times. You also get points for 'achievements' like 'disk jockey' if you attract lots of others to your 'radio station'.

I've really just scratched the surface - there is lots to do at thesixtyone - you can spend time looking for undiscovered gems, you can listen to the music that is been bumped the most, you can explore the 'favorites' of other users, you can build playlists, you can create your radio station, you can comment on tracks (the comments get turned into little popups that sometimes appear when people listen to the song) - it really does feel a bit like a D&D game - it is fun to notified via a little popup that you've just received some points or achieved some goal. And while you are doing this, you are listening to music, of all sorts of genres. The music is mostly good to excellent (with some clunkers too). And there are some big name artists - I've listened to NiN, Bjork, Jonathan Coulton and Daft Punk on thesixtyone.

thesixtyone developers have done a great job of making the site highly interactive. It is very highly polished, and is simply fun to use. The music player is integrated perfectly into the site, so no matter what you do, the music keeps on playing.

thesixtyone is a fantastic place for new artists to get their music into the ears of listeners since listeners are rewarded for finding and bumping the newest music. My friend, Sten, uploaded some tracks for his band "Hungry Fathers" and within minutes their songs had been listened to by half-a-dozen listeners. That just doesn't happen on Myspace.

It has been a long while since I've been excited by a new music site. Most 'new' music sites are just variations on the Last.fm theme - ("Let's build a social community around music!") and there just isn't any need to do that anymore, Last.fm does it so well. But thesixtyone is really doing something different - they are making it easy, fun and rewarding to explore and discover new music.

The observant browser will notice that my link to thesixtyone includes me as a referrer - yes, I'll get thesixtyone points if you follow that link and register