> Next Big Thing is not a place for ... anything else flat out offensive.
One of my favourite bands at the moment is "Rotting Christ" that name alone is very offensive to some people. Does that mean I can't post stuff about them? Where is the line? Can I post anything Black metal related? What about Gore Grind?
I think music has a much wider view of what is acceptable than tech. For example a lot of music/art is made with the sole purpose of being offensive. This is going to be hard to moderate.
I agree. Labelling music is one thing, but outright censorship will ensure your project never takes off. However, after looking at your site, I don't get it. I thought the music would be embedded in the page itself. Also, you have music and news/editorial links on the same page. What's more there's no tagging/categorization so I have no way of filtering music to my tastes.
The site looks slick and you deserve kudos for the effort. But I think you should seriously consider the value proposition of "The Next Big Thing."
EDIT: I just went back to you site and discovered that you do in fact separate music and news/editorial links.
If you have no objection to a band, song or album cover that degrades your mother or someone else you love and revere, then hey, maybe it should all be fair game.
Do you understand where I'm getting at? That's how Christians feel with names like that.
P.S. I don't think for a second that the name of someone you love should be degraded. Nor should someone I love either. That's my point.
So, you want the "next big thing," but not the next sex pistols? I agree that you should encourage civil and thoughtful discussion on the site (can't check it out now because of HN load, I assume) but I'm sure you know lots of new important music is controversial. And it's easy to forget that some massively influential and accepted bands started out controversial. Controversial usually means "offensive to many" so you might want to reassess your decision here.
And to address the quote specifically:
>If you have no objection to a band, song or album cover that degrades your mother or someone else you love and revere, then hey, maybe it should all be fair game.
I wouldn't want users to degrade me or my family. But I've got no problem with a band calling itself "kill the families of all the atheists" (wouldn't go out of my way to listen to them, but that's a separate issue -- I'm an atheist, btw, so I'll choose that example) and if they're good their music should be on any good music site.
Depending on where you want to go with the project, it might be better to design the site to discourage participation by people who take band names and lyrics personally. Those people often don't have a lot to contribute to music discussions anyway...
edit: typos. Also I realize now that this is addressed as though I'm replying to the author of the original service, but I'm probably not. Sorry for any confusion that causes.
I don't care if you or anyone else is offended by thoughts. Lots of people offend me and I don't begrudge their right to do so. I believe 90% of music is unlistenable. Another 9 percent ranges from mediocre to acceptable. Most of the remaining 1% was produced years, if not decades, ago.
I honestly don't understand how vocalizing one's desire to urinate on his "beoytch" constitutes music. But I'm not going to dictate to people "what is" and "is not" art. I mean, people screamed bloody murder about Elvis and the Beatles back in the day. And it wasn't too long ago rock & rock was a profane evil poisoning young minds.
Twitter, Facebook, etc... can get by just fine with nothing but farmville marketing spam and lolcat videos. However, art and censorship don't mix. That's why the puritans at Apple label "explicit" music rather than ban it outright.
I am not quite sure that I do understand. Firstly I don't have any problem with art mocking my mother or anyone else. Secondly I think mocking my mother is more personal than mocking my religion so your argument doesn't quite work. Thirdly people of many religions listen to black metal, and are aware that often it is a parody of itself.
Agreed, the name is way too similar. The concept I think is different -- Next Big Sound provides a paid analytics service for labels, artists, and other music-oriented companies. Their consumer-facing product and partnership with Billboard and others does has a similar concept though. I find Next Big Thing to be similar to We Are Hunted and The Hype Machine as others pointed out, but the site's not loading for me so it's hard to judge.
doesn’t appear to be much at the moment, but i could see value in this as being less chaotic than r/music and more active than many of the genre-specific subreddits (though less focused).
and while that would be nice, i feel this (and pretty much every similar site) misses a very real problem around music discovery.. in that, for very active consumers, there’s no efficient way to track and monitor releases of specific interest to them. sites like this, r/music, and hypem are fine for surfacing what the majority finds cool, but they in no-way replace the need to monitor and frequently check-in with numerous source blogs and other sites to cover all that an individual is interested in (a very inefficient and time-consuming task)..
even more focused sites (and subreddits, if active), can never reach the level of personalization required to make them a reliable single-source for music discovery. don't get me wrong i frequent many and do find some great gems i'd otherwise have missed, but they're far from comprehensive..
and i don’t mean to discount anything here. it is a very difficult problem to solve given how disparate people’s tastes in music are, and even more so considering how widely distribution methods vary. i really feel anyone who can solve this problem would do quite well..
Looks good so far - I've already discovered some great sounding bands.
Just a few suggestions:
* When you vote, the arrow should disappear. Instead, it just pops a notification saying you can't vote again - but there's no easy way to determine which songs you've voted on.
* It would be great to see a page of links you've upvoted so you can refer back to songs you liked.
Edit to add...
* A way to exclude domains you can't use (e.g. Spotify, which is unavailable in some countries).
* There's no need for the site to auto-scroll to the top of the page and display a Thank You message every time you vote.
Being middle aged and not particularly into music I'm surprised to find I'm already aware of most of the 'next big things' on the front page. I don't think this is a good sign.
Site got mentioned a few places and is currently down from traffic.
In the post I do mention that you can do the same thing with reddit or following a ton of music related twitter accounts, but the voting and input from different people. We're not doing anything new, but I do think the presentation and appeal is there for nbt.
If you are interested, bookmark the link, it should be up again shortly.
A nice touch might be if voting reordered the site's RSS feed as well as the webpage. If you have a way to generate a podcast from submitted music, that could be a great combination. I have a lot of trouble following HN through an rss reader because the filter is so much worse, but there's no reason the .xml file should be in any different order than the html file. And podcasts have even worse navigation options than other rss feeds.
This would probably not work with PuSH. But two separate feeds, one for PuSH and one that gives a voting-ordered snapshot when it's fetched, might let you target both the very-frequent and the casual users.
(haven't been able to check out the site yet, so this point might be extra ignorant)
To add to the other replies: reddit's open source as well[0] and reasonably straightforward to set up (at least using their Ubuntu installer). Not your question, I know, but thought I'd add for completeness.
This looks good, and I'm excited by the idea of finding music new to me.
NBT itself seems to have died under the traffic, so I have some (perhaps stupid) questions:
1) How do you deal with voting rings and other gaming?
2) How do you deal with 'bubbles' - Some services keep me pretty tightly locked in to a certain bubble, when what I want is some leakage to explore and find new content.
This seems similar to The Hype Machine. A site that gauges taste in music really needs lots of people using it for the "popularity" of a song to be useful.
What I see as a problem is that it's probably going to become (if it gets really big) a copy of mainstream charts or (if a a genre group becomes the majority) only have music for that genre and related genres.
I wish them the best of luck but I personally don't see a future.
> Next Big Thing is not a place for ... anything else flat out offensive.
One of my favourite bands at the moment is "Rotting Christ" that name alone is very offensive to some people. Does that mean I can't post stuff about them? Where is the line? Can I post anything Black metal related? What about Gore Grind?
I think music has a much wider view of what is acceptable than tech. For example a lot of music/art is made with the sole purpose of being offensive. This is going to be hard to moderate.