MattyMC – Technology + Coding + Music

In the past I have never been a big fan of streaming music online. MySpace was too disaggregated and while the Pandoras of the world used a cool technology, they didn’t give up enough control to hold your attention.

The first music site that came out that was actually useful was Last.fm. I still use it to keep a history of what I listen to but I stopped paying the three bucks a month for the radio station. It just didn’t cut it without the ability to say ‘I want to listen to this song’ not just songs like it!! Don’t worry though, the sites I am pitting against each other both let you scrobble your stuff.

Nowadays with music streaming communities like Hype Machine and thesixtyone at my disposal, streaming is a much better experience than anything  iTunes can dish out.

Out of the these two I personally gravitate towards thesixtyone. Here’s why…

Hype Machine

The Hype Machine is basically just an aggregator of hand picked music blogs. It’s a great site for keeping up with new music.

It works well for the person who wants to be given a bunch of music to listen to. You don’t have much control on what type of music you listen to except on other people/blogs post. If that is your cup of tea — drink up.

Pros

• Music is aggregated from blogs so it keep up with “what’s hot”.
• Super simple. Search by popularity, newness, or search. Play it, put it on your list, subscribe to blogs/people to find more.
• Great options for making it easy to download/buy the song. It links up to eMusic, Amazon, and iTunes to name a few.

Cons

• 90% of the songs are remixes, so unless your a remix junkie you really need to sift through the stream.
• Passive community, you basically just listen to what the blogs are pushing and pull out what you like from the stream.
• No comments / Very litting rating options / no personal touch.
• Due to copyright issues, stuff gets taken down all the time.

thesixtyone

thesixtyone on the other hand is a total democratic community. The songs posted there need to be uploaded by the artist and for the artist to be allow to upload more, we the people need to “bump” them up in popularity. As you “bump” up songs/artists you gain reputation if your judgement turns out to be popular in the community. Reputation gives you more power to revive songs to the front page and stuff like that. This alleviates the casual listener from the listening to too much junk and rewards the hard working listeners/participators for becoming involved.

Seems a bit overwhelming but you get used to the rhythm of things. In short, it is. Once you are immersed and have your hearts and favorites set up it gets much easier to work with.  It’s like working on a playlist for a long time — it’s worth the time. It’s also pretty addictive trying to bump up the music you like to the top and gain reputation doing it.

Pros

• Great filtering system — Sort by what’s hot,  newly submitted, or most popular all filterable by both genre and your specific mood within that genre.
• Addictive community — artists have a page to communicate with fans and  fans have an outlet for there music taste.
• Ability to tag your favorites to sort/listen your list when you are just listening
• After some time, you end up with a much better and easier to organize list of music to stream — which is the usually ultimate goal.

Cons

• Sometimes the community can hold you back. I hate when I don’t have any more hearts (daily votes) and I can’t even save a song to my play list. Grrrrrrrr.
• You need to play around with it a bit to really get into it
• They allow you to download music if the artist allows it but only links to Amazon to buy music (sucks for Canadians who can’t use Amazon). They have said they are working to integrate with more stores though.