Thesixtyone Turns Social Media Up to Eleven*

Characterized by TechCrunch as “a Digg for Indie music,” my new favorite site of the week/month and beyond is thesixtyone.  

Thesixtyone serves up the latest Indie bands in a format that is as simple as it is dramatic, telling visitors that “new artists make music and listeners decide what’s good.”

With well-established sites like the Hype Machine and Pandora indulging my online music needs, why am I proclaiming my love for this self-described music adventure? Well in addition to music, thesixtyone has several interesting elements in social media and design to catch my attention. 
 

·         Focus: thesixtyone only offers Indie music. It goes deeper than it goes broad with 50,000 tracks uploaded by artists and music labels. This allows them to do one thing very well. 

·         User Control: Site visitors can listen to all 50,000 tracks and create playlists. This means users can listen to what they want and bands can upload what they want…this ability to customize the user experience ensures more repeat visits. 
 

·         Addictive Sharing: The site includes social gaming elements, giving you reputation points that encourage you to listen to more songs, rate them and then share them via Facebook and Twitter. More like foursquare than Pandora in this regard, the site tracks your efforts. 

If songs you “heart” get more popular after the fact, your reputation grows. You can also unlock badges but, much like foursquare, you’re not exactly sure what activity unlocks each badge. This of course encourages more activity on the site. Visitors even get reputation points if they are listed as having referred someone to the site. So tell them prblog tipped you off…my reputation depends on it. 
 

·         Simple, Beautiful Design: Site navigation is subtle, but not so simple that you can’t figure it out. This makes it easy for site visitors to immerse themselves in thesixtyone’s full-screen images and of course listen to the music. This combination of simple design, with music and images helps connect the listener to the artists vs. simply connecting the listener to thesixtyone. 
 

·         Info Bits for an ADD Audience: As each song plays, band schedules, back story and smaller images flash on and off the screen to keep your attention.
 

The end result of thesixtyone is an engaging social media listening experience that is…wait for it…music to my ears. Check it out.

*If you knew that the headline’s reference to “turn it up to eleven” is a quote from Spinal Tap? You get reputation points from me.
** Cross-posted to my work blog, Social Study.