The idea behind the site is to turn scouting for new independent music into a game. From their website:

thesixtyone makes music discovery a fun, adventurous experience with persistent reputation and rewards — it’s like a massively-multiplayer game for music junkies who are always on the prowl for new sounds…

Musicians upload their music for listening, but rather than allowing the Simon Cowells of the world decide which songs go on the homepage, the listeners do. If you like a song you’ve found on thesixtyone, just click the “bump” button to increase its bump count. Doing so will cost you points, but if songs you bump get bumped by others, you can earn more points! Collecting points increases your level and reflects your skill in picking top songs in your favorite genre!

By listening to songs through the lens of the collective community on thesixtyone, you’ll always find good new music. We’re committed to giving every bit of music on the web the opportunity to find its audience.

mebeli

It can be quite an addictive experience as one logs in regularly to be the first to bump (”firstbump”) a great new song or just to check your score against others in the community.

I’m sure that this model of new music discovery will eventually replace the traditional music industry “gate keepers” in their role of taste makers. Just listen to “front page” songs that have gotten significant bumpage and although you probably won’t recognize more than a couple mainstream acts, you’ll find that songs that get that kind of attention are without exception, Quality music. That’s the power of the collective. We can weed out our own trash, Mr. A&R man.

In honor of this exciting discovery I’m posting my first thesixtyone.com song as the trackoday:

Love During Wartime by The Main Drag (warning: myspace link) is a track that I think is tragically underbumped, so don’t be afraid to click on it and set up an account. It’s free and you can help this track gain some dearly deserved momentum. Oh, and if you do set up an account, don’t forget to list me (gumptionthomas) as a referrer.

So, was the hype for Radiohead’s new album worth it? The music, I mean. Did the content of this industry-breakthrough album live up to its historical importance? After nearly constant listening since Wednesday morning, my opinion is that it is a solid release that continues to unfold listen after listen, but it is far from Radiohead’s best work. That being said, there are a couple of fantastic tracks, one of which I’ve chosen for the trackoday:

Bodysnatchers by Radiohead from In Rainbows

Purchase In Rainbows Directly From Radiohead

Now for the funny bit. The album download came without album art of any kind. A bit of a bummer, but I understand that they intend to use cover art as an additional carrot to purchase the CD/LP combo box set for about $80. I don’t currently have that kind of disposable cash laying around since my dog, Babbage, has had more income than me since I quit my corporate job in March (“When starting a new venture, be prepared for a long period of putting in before you can begin taking anything out.”). Instead, I improvised and made my own cover art from a screen grab of the In Rainbows website. However, while reading Global Nerdy this morning, I saw much more inspired fan-art:

(via Global Nerdy)

This development is very exciting to me personally. As many of you know, I’ve been working for the last few months on a project called djedna, which is a music distribution, e-commerce, and marketing engine/framework for independent artists and labels (as well as the home user who may want to access their personal music collection from any browser in the world). One of the payment options I had been planning on implementing was “donations,” where the artist could set a minimum price (usually, just enough to cover the credit card transaction fee) and allow the fan to decide how much to pay. Well, Radiohead has provided justification for that feature!

I will be releasing djedna as open-source (meaning anyone can download it and use it for free — thus the informal tag line of “Software For The Rock Star’s Geek Friend”) when it gets a little further along. Currently, the code base is a little messy and I’d be embarrassed to show it to the world, but it’s getting closer by the day. If you’d like to see my own installation (minus all of the cool features, like e-commerce, since it contains my own purchased CD collection rather than original music), check out DJ Edna @ Gumption. For those that are curious, I wrote it in Python using the un-freaking-believably-cool-and-fun web-framework, Django.

I’d like to determine if the same business model can work for open-source software. Yes, this model, known in the software biz as Shareware, has been around for a while now, with inconsistent results. But I figure if I’m “selling” this software to musicians and labels that are using this same business model, they may more inclined to pay something for it, even if they don’t have to.

I believe that the main reason this “pay what you feel it’s worth” model has been slow to take off is that historically (i.e. pre-internet) there have been very few (if any) products where the distribution costs approach zero, making this payment model possible without “giving away the farm.” We, as consumers, just aren’t that familiar with the option to pay. However, I also believe that we’re adaptable (especially the generations growing up with the internet) and before long we won’t associate “set your own price” with “free.” That is, we’ll all soon learn how to quickly judge what these products are worth to us, without the “one size fits all” price set by the producer. We’ll use all kinds of information to come up with the “value” (Robert Pirsig might call this the Quality with a capital Q) of a product, and most of that information will be the kind we rarely think about today when buying, say, a jar of peanut butter:

• “Do I want to support the people/company that is producing this product?”
• “Do I want to see more of this kind of product?”
• “How does the Quality of this product compare to the Quality and price of other similar products I’ve already purchased?”
• “How much can I afford for this product right now? If not very much, will I pay more in the future if I have more?”
• “Do I want to pay a little extra to make up for those that can’t pay very much?”

Once we start learning to judge the value of a product ourselves, rather than just relying on the price the producer has come up with based only on their own concerns, I believe that this “pay what you think it’s worth” model will become more successful and popular. After all, the Quality and value of a product depends not only on the producer’s opinion, but on each individual consumer’s opinion, which is conditional on their own personal circumstances. The digital revolution has finally made this previously “impossible to implement” business model feasible.

And just remember, it was a rock band from England that brought this consumerist realization to the masses. Rock and roll revolution indeed!

Imagine my giddiness as I listened to Mouthful Of Bees (my apologies for the myspace link — that’s all they seem to have *sigh*) and heard influences from many of my favorite bands. There was a little Ween, a little Archers Of Loaf, a whole lot of Superchunk, and even a Spoon-ish riff here and there. Finding out that they were a local band (like TnT) only made the find sweeter.

I’m now officially in the middle of an overdose month of MoB and I’m enjoying every minute of it.

Amazon | iTunes | eMusic

Under The Glacier by Mouthful Of Bees from The End

I had a heck of a time picking only one track for my self-imposed rule of “TrackODay” (as opposed to, perhaps, “AlbumODay”). There are no tracks on the album that sound like filler, and better yet, they don’t sound all the same. So, don’t take my choice as a “quintessential” Mouthful Of Bees song because I have no idea what that might sound like. Listen to the album yourself and see if you can spot other influences that I’ve missed and post them as a comment below. I’d be more than interested in checking out any band that sounds like they influenced MoB.

Consider this my trance coming-out post.

Amazon | iTunes | eMusic

Cowgirl by Underworld from Dubnobasswithmyheadman

I’m not sure why, but my penchant for electronic music doesn’t extend beyond the sub-genre of trance. I’ve tried listening to Dance, Drum ‘n’ Bass/Jungle, House, Trip-hop, and even Broken Beat, but for various reasons, I always end up back with the pulsing groove of trance.

Even stranger, I’ve never been to a rave.

Slightly.

Yes, I know that Modest Mouse is now everyone’s favorite indie-rock band, but where were you all when they were grinding out their earlier, shall we say, more experimental material? ‘Cos you know, their old stuff is so much better.

Just kidding. I didn’t really discover MM until some time after Everywhere And His Nasty Parlour Tricks in 2001 and have slowly filled out their earlier catalog. I wouldn’t say their older stuff is better, but I would say that it was, expectedly, less polished. Yet it still retains at least the germ of the sound they’ve solidified over their last two band-defining releases.

Amazon | iTunes

Missed The Boat by Modest Mouse from We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank

Another reason I chose this particular track is that there are a ton of free videos online for this song. All part of a contest where fans made their own videos and the best won some cool crap. But you know who really won? The band. All of the videos are obviously crafted by people who love the song and the band and probably do so even more after spending time being creative at a distance with them (the band provided video of themselves playing in front of blue screen). The result, a few really good MTV-quality videos and a lot more videos that prove something I’ve always suspected, that it’s easy to direct music videos. With a good soundtrack, almost any imagery is watchable for 5 minutes (as long as the edit cuts happen on the beat).

I was introduced to them in 1995 by an acquaintance (his name escapes me now) who had picked up a floppy disk that the band was handing out at a concert. Since he didn’t own a computer, he left the disk at my house. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I popped it into my Power Macintosh 7100 and double-clicked the little multi-media application (I think it was made with Adobe Director). I was blown away by what I heard and saw. Turns out that the Poster Children are DIY computer geeks and had done all the programming, graphics, and design themselves.

I’ve been following the band closely ever since, including a mind-blowing show at The 7th Street Entry where they opened for Archers Of Loaf.

Best… show… ever.

Amazon

Junior Citizen by Poster Children from Junior Citizen

If you prefer that your artists have a DIY streak rather than relying on a big-evil label, check out the Poster Children. They’ve been doing it themselves from the get go.

Round 13 Records

The John Oates Mustache Ride by Droids Attack from Fatal/Error

I love the title of this song (and the album for that matter). It brought me back to my early teens, watching Hall and Oates on The Tonight Show. Of course, I would have been completely clueless to the implied meaning of the song title in those days.

Interesting bit of Droids Attack trivia. The band’s first release (All Your Chicks Are Belong To Us) was recorded by none other than Rick Valentin of The Poster Children, one of my all time favorite bands. Who knows, if I play my cards right, maybe I can leverage this reduction in degrees of separation into a “chance” meeting with Rick and Rose. A boy can dream, right?

Round 13 Records

Guys Named Geoff by The Ugly Fat Kids from Earth: The Most Dangerous Planet In The World

Like most of the Round 13 bands (maybe all, but I haven’t listened to the whole catalog yet), The Ugly Fat Kids fall into the far-too-broad category of punk. But also like their other label mates, their music is infused with Quality that only comes from believing in and loving what you’re doing. They also put on a remarkably, ahem, energetic live show, so you know they understand the punk (or is it post-punk?) ethos.

The concept was simple…put a collective of bands together that play music they believe in and were willing to help promote Round 13 Records.

In honor of Tonnage, the founders of Round 13, they get the first trackoday of the new week.

Round 13

Luddite by Tonnage from The Panzram Session

I don’t have a lot of this hard-driving, hook-crunch rock in my collection, but you know what? There’s Quality in Tonnage’s music. I’ve been listening to the EP all day and it’s definitely been good for my gumption. Grrrrrr… I’m gonna kick me some bug butt!