The 61 Music

2024-12-14

From <https://vmst.io/@maphew/113654951604987771>

April 26, 2023

The best music discovery website to ever exist, without doubt, was called "thesixtyone".

My god. I've never seen anything else like it. Perfectly crafted to surface good content and reward good content discovery. Effortless, intuitive, addictive, and just... fun.

One product change killed thesixtyone overnight. The new frontend was beautiful, well-crafted, and completely dead inside. The sense of connectedness/fun was gone in a heartbeat. It was just another Pandora clone. The community revolted, and within a month we were gone.

From <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGsmNNrDQKLJvpjlTXRNdpfvHJL>

I was a very active member before they changed to the current design (old.thesixtyone.com to see the old one), and while I don't go there anymore, I was part of the community.

A big part of how they got artists to join was by enabling interaction between the artists and the users. Users could browse the site and talk on artist pages about songs while listening to a different song. By enabling this instant feedback, artists were drawn to the site. I believe that was the biggest factor.

Other factors may have included the ease of uploading new music, the ease of listening to music, on the user side, and even just the general feel of the site. By that I mean the way the site welcomed new users directly into the fray, as if they had been member's all along.

I can't speak for the new site, since I left after they disabled the community features which I liked so much along with scores of other users, but this is how I feel the old site worked.

From <https://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-thesixtyone>

Gamification:  implemented a game-like system that allowed users to earn points for discovering new artists, listening to songs, and sharing music. The more points a user earned, the higher their rank on the site, which in turn gave them more influence in shaping the site's music charts.

User engagement:  fostered a strong sense of community by encouraging users to leave comments, follow each other, and share music. This not only helped to promote artists but also kept users coming back to the site.

Curation:  had a team of curators who handpicked new music to feature on the site. This helped to ensure that the music on the site was of high quality and appealed to a broad audience.

Social media integration:  integrated with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, allowing users to share music with their friends and followers. This helped to increase the visibility of artists on the site.

From <https://www.quora.com/How-did-thesixtyone-com-get-artist-traction>

I've also seen it's positive effect on my own music. I've been featured many times on the home page and found that it was a great tool for artists to reach fans in a completely organic way.

From <https://www.quora.com/How-did-thesixtyone-com-get-artist-traction>

Why did we redesign?

A couple reasons (apologies for being terse, we just pushed):

• Simplicity. We had furiously bolted on features over the last 12 months as we experimented with how people explore music. Anything that didn't fit the core experience was cut.
• Artists on thesixtyone possess a wealth of high resolution photography. My sense was that this could be harnessed to create richer context when listening to a new song.
• Listening to music on the internet is too sterile in a YouTube kind of way (remember those beautiful album covers?). We hope to make listening to an album or user playlist as engaging as reading a good novel.
• I wanted to create an artist-centric experience. Our UI shouldn't overpower the artist that's currently playing. thesixtyone is about music, and, more importantly, the artists behind the music.

From <https://www.quora.com/Why-did-thesixtyone-redesign-their-site>