New welcome graphic
Matt flipped the switch on our new welcome graphic this morning, so if you normally start at your profile, make sure to stop by the homepage and check it out. Web deux at its finest.
Archive for October, 2006
The system is down…
We’re having problems with our servers again — this time the issue is power in the data center. We’ve notified them of the problem, and hopefully we’ll all be jamming again soon.
Update: We’re back online! Let’s keep our fingers crossed…
1 comment October 19th, 2006 Matt Rubens
Invite-only Beta
Jamglue is an online community for creating and sharing music and audio. In short, Jamglue is:
- A place to upload and share your music with your friends
- Slick tools for remixing music and audio from within your browser
- A library of music and audio to listen to or mix together
- A rich social network for:
- sharing your music
- discovering hot new artists
- finding cool new people who share your musical taste
For those of you already on the friends and family beta, you may have noticed that you now have 5 invites to share! You will notice them as soon as you log in. We’re really excited about taking this step, and hope that you’ll share Jamglue with people who you think would be interested.
Who should you invite? Anyone who you think would be into Jamglue. The groups we are particularly trying to engage are musicians and younger users (read: the MySpace generation), so if you know enthusiastic users in either category, please invite them to Jamglue!
At this stage, we have 3 major goals.
- Continue to get valuable feedback from our users
- Build up the Jamglue community so that it continues to become more interesting, compelling and connected.
- Build up our content library to the point where mixes practically build themselves. Right now, we’ve got a few great loops and tracks, and we’re counting on our beta users to continue this trend.
Anyway, welcome to the Jamglue beta! If you’d like an invite and don’t have one yet, ping the team and we’ll see what we can do.
2 comments October 16th, 2006 divyab
A mix in the wild
Fred Wilson just posted a mix he made on Jamglue to his blog. We can’t wait until launch, when he could’ve included a link for his readers to go remix it too! Thanks, Fred!
Update: Here’s what it would look like -
Top 40 the right way
I think everybody who came of age in the 90s has a deep distrust of top 40 radio. It was no good, and together we made “Alternative” a genre (by which I mean it quickly became as corporate and exploitative as other pop music).
As a result, I feel kind of guilty for my addiction to The Hype Machine, particularly when explaining it to people who use Pandora or other personalized recommendation engines (”So it learns what blogs you like?” “No, it just uses all the blogs.”)
So why is it that I enjoy listening to the Hype Machine’s popular feed more than any Pandora channel that I’ve ever been able to carefully fine-tune?
It’s organic
It’s barely worth mentioning with online music: the songs are chosen by the wisdom of the crowds, not a corporate tastemaker.
But this isn’t enough- the charts are full of songs I wouldn’t want to listen to.
It captures interest and attention
Much more important is the way these songs are selected; it’s not that people are just listening to the tracks, it’s that they’re discussing and commenting on them.
In today’s attention economy, the time and effort to author a post and link to an mp3 indicates a level of interest that’s valuable to me as a fellow consumer.
Obviously this is very prone to astroturfing and gaming, but for as long as it remains authentic, it’s great.
It’s very “sourceful”
If I have any kind of strong reaction to a song (enjoyment, curiosity, disbelief, etc), I can go right to the people who propelled it onto the popular page, and find out what’s up with it.
This replaces the DJ in a very pleasing way- when I want some backstory, I’ve got it easily.
It’s timely
Finally, the live performances and Internet memes that show up in the feed are a great way to know what’s going on in the musical world. If an artist dies, releases a new album, breaks up, etc, people will post about it and include new or old tracks.
Often these “breaking” popular songs and viral audio creations appear in the form of multiple remixes, and I certainly hope that someday soon Jamglue’s logs will be full of the Hype Machine spidering all the incoming links.
Enough?
Maybe I’m just making excuses for my laziness, but I honestly think the Hype Machine represents how a Top 40 can really be enjoyable these days. They’re doing a great job, and I’m grateful for the easy and great experience.
(cross posted from my personal blog)