movementsixtyone.com

What has fallen between the cracks lately? Attack of the Show reviews thesixtyone.com; Paisley looks back on T61 protests; former T61 artists tour Canada!

On February 24, G4tv.com’s “Attack of the Show” reviewed thesixtyone.com on their Web site. The video review tried to touch all the bases of the site in a couple of minutes, stressing both the game aspect and the discovery aspect. Nothing was said about the interface or design, and nothing was particularly rated. The video certainly had the feel of being more of a slick demo tailored for the masses rather than a review of the positives and negatives of the site.

Little was said about the community aspect of the site. Of course if the AotS folks weren’t aware of the community features in the previous iteration, it’s not terribly surprising. Rather, the slight geek/gaming aspect is what likely drew them into a video “demo” of the site. There is no way of knowing if T61 had any influence (verbally or monetarily) in the segment, and it would be slanderous to say that the T61 team did without facts. Still, one does wonder…

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Blogger kilexia from paisleysound.com looked back on the changes of T61 and how it affected its users this past Saturday. Kilexia included comments from six others former T61 users who talked about the old T61 and the new.

User ThomasAD3 tried to get used to the new version but couldn’t. Thomas AD3 told Kilexia: “Navigation was so frustrating as to be nearly impossible. All traces of the game had vanished, save a meaningless ‘rep’ number. Radios were gone. ‘Walls’ had disappeared, so communicating with friends was no longer possible.”

Later, Kilexia went on to talk about the loss of the wall posts, saying: “At first I missed having people leave messages on my wall, and the ability to leave artists a quick note telling them how awesome their sound is,” said Kilexia on his blog. “But when those methods of communicating on thesixtyone were eliminated, I got into Twitter, where I can talk to bands and find out about new releases faster than ever.”

Of course, Uvumi is mentioned as well, and many former T61 users seem to have adapted to the site. A few listeners and musicians still lament that Uvumi doesn’t quite fill their needs, and MovementSixtyOne can’t really blame them. T61 had a unique style that drew in thousands of people, and the site proved to be something different to each person. Of course it’s to be expected that no real substitute can be found.

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Mark Edwards of EEPROM has written MovementSixtyOne to both lament the new T61 design and mention how the old design made it easier for artist and listener cooperation. Mark specifically mentioned the “coolest” T61-related music tour ever. Apparently the Bankai vs Canada music tour was launched in Victoria, BC in Canada on February 19 and continues through March.

According the Web site, a conversation of like-minded artists from T61 led to an agreement to tour together in Canada. With donations from a mix of fans and and solid profit-sharing plan, musicians from Australia and Canada got together and started their tour across Canada. The tour consists of Bankai, Bearbot, Beautiful Unicorn, EEPROM and Support Artillery.

“I’m pretty sure it was the coolest t61 related thing to happen in real life — artists and listeners coming together and partying and playing shows, in spite of the ‘death’ of the old sixtyone,” Mark told M61.

“[I]t just goes to prove how WELL the old site worked, bringing people together and having a great time,” he added.

A more detailed interview about the tour is tentatively set to be posted on this blog later. Stay tuned.

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Tidbit: Alexa’s statistics for thesixtyone.com seem to show similar traffic rank and pageviews to October and November of 2009, but the “Time on Site” indicator still seems to show that people aren’t staying as long. This can be seen best by looking at the “Trailing 6 months” option of the graph. Pageviews seem to have been steadily increasing since February.

Also, apologies for the delay in posting. My health hasn’t been the best lately. That combined with a ton of other factors, and updates have been few.

general news artists, attack of the show, Bankai, Bearbot, Beautiful Unicorn, EEPROM, listeners, m61, movementsixtyone, paisleysound.com, statistics, Support Artillery, t61, thesixtyone, uvumi

movementsixtyone.com was allowed to interview Uvumi’s founder Marshall Stokes, who provided very interesting and thorough responses.

M61 has been wanting to learn a little about Uvumi’s Marshall Stokes ever since former thesixtyone.com members began flooding Uvumi in late January. Stokes and his crack team of people have been hard at work, coping with the influx of traffic, but he found time out of his busy schedule to answer five questions  posed to him.

The questions were chosen to get a better idea of the past, present, and future of Uvumi and what influenced its creation. Stokes graciously took the time to write very thorough responses, and M61 thanks him. And with that, the “interview.”

1.) What role has music played in the course of your life?

When I was about 11 years old I got hooked on heavy metal and spent a lot of time listening to Iron Maiden, Megadeth, and Metallica. As a teenager I fell in love with classic rock and bluegrass music, and spent countless hours listening to Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty, Van Morrison, Pink Floyd, CCR, and other classics. When I was 13, I starting playing guitar in my spare time and learned my favorite Petty and Zeppelin songs by downloading tabletures from the budding internet. A couple years later, my closest friend in high school exposed me to underground hip hop, and I became infatuated with the beats and brilliance of Kool Keith, The Pharcyde, and of course the groundbreaking Beastie Boys, to name a few. When I got to college I suddenly had access to insane amounts of music I had never heard, via high-speed networks, and I explored a lot of electronic music, which I found to be great for studying.

Listening to music was life-changing, and was a critically important component of my youth, but what really gave me a solid appreciation for musicians and music in general was playing guitar and my experiences recording my own songs. I experimented with home recording as often as I could for about eight years, and when I finally realized the kind of skill and talent it takes to produce a quality recording, I developed a very deep appreciation for the amount of work and artistic ability that goes into great songs and great recordings.

(There are four more questions behind the cut. What are you waiting for?)
Four more questions behind the cut!

movementsixtyone artists, fans, industry, listeners, Marshall Stokes, movementsixtyone, music, musicians, MySpace, thesixtyone, uvumi, uvumi.com

What fell between the cracks this week? TheSixtyOne.com insults its users; T61 refugees post their final thoughts; another look at T61 site statistics

On February 1, T61 co-owner James Miao essentially insulted and mocked its user base with a short blog post hardly worthy of the time of the users. The post attempted to dispel the belief that the duo had been influenced in any way by money from venture capitalists, despite a ReadWriteWeb news bite that seemed to suggest otherwise. Additionally, the post avoided making any professional commentary about the site changes by using crude humor in no way associated with the site’s situation.

“So, in this non-capitalized burst of unbridled arrogance, TheSixtyOne basically let the world know, along with their most loyal users, that they simply don’t give a damn,” said Erez Zuckerman in a DownloadSquad.com article on Thursday.

“Regardless of the design change, this is not how you manage a community; this is not how you treat your most loyal users,” added Zuckerman. “These guys can take a lesson or two from Seth Godin. Nice going.”

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It’s been well over two weeks since the redesign at TheSixtyOne.com, and the refugees have done their best to move past the mess. It’s unknown how many listeners and artists actually fled T61 after the fallout of the design change. However, it’s obvious that a significant number fled to Uvumi.com where Marshall Stokes, Michele Stokes, Olivier Couston, Lloyd Winter and Justin Mack have welcomed refugees with open arms.

Though most have put T61 behind them, a few users took the time to post final comments on the T61 debacle. User docMT posted an in-depth analysis of the T61 redesign fallout. Doc said: “While the site owners are naturally free to experiment however they wish with their site, their comments seem to reflect a delusional sense of omnipotence where they think that they can arbitrarily change well established music mappings and discovery mechanisms and ignore the social intelligence … contained in the various social groups bound together by their shared music tastes.”

User MusicMissionary also gave his closing remarks on the T61 situation on his blog this week. In it, he gives lessons learned by the community, but likely not by T61 owners Sam and James. The most compelling lessons were arguably that both the listeners and artists are people. “They aren’t factories that make a product, but living breathing people,” he said of artists.

This lesson resonates well with the post that M61 made about looking at Sam and James’ actions from the point of view of the disinhibition effect. It appears that they truly have forgotten that people were affected by their actions or lack thereof.

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Let’s take another look at the site numbers for T61. Thanks go out to Paul for alerting M61 to another statistics site called Quantcast.com.

This is a look at the amount of daily visitors to the site over a one-month period, ending February 4. Note that visitors to the site have fallen closer to January 11 levels, before the redesign went into effect. While the January 21 traffic peak wasn’t surprising, some may be surprised that it’s back down to pre-redesign levels.

This is a look at page views per person. As M61 said in a previous post, we can’t be sure if the drastic drop in page views is directly associated with the fact that the redesign ripped out most of the many pages we previously used. Regardless, this shows that page views per person is down but relatively steady. This number will be interesting to keep an eye on as the months progress. It’s interesting to note that this graph roughly corresponds to an Alexa graph posted by docMT. That graph measures time on site (in minutes), and it seems to match up well with the above graph. That said, perhaps when combined, this is evidence that people aren’t staying on T61 as long as they used to.

general news, thesixtyone artists, downloadsquad.com, james miao, listeners, m61, Marshall Stokes, movementsixtyone, statistics, t61, thesixtyone, uvumi, uvumi.com

What fell between the cracks this week? thesixtyone.com fails to post a real update while movementsixtyone.com posts many; protest songs cause a stir on t61; Tech Crunch comments get hacked including post about t61

It has been nearly ten days since the site-wide design changes to thesixtyone.com (t61), and yet there is still no significant update or letter to the community about the changes. Those that have been holding out on the hope that owners James and Sam would share their reasoning behind the redesign have mostly given up. The only signs of feedback to the community appeared on their blog on Monday, January 25, proclaiming the addition of a “saved songs” category for users.

Meanwhile, movementsixtyone.com tries to keep you updated about what the folks at t61 aren’t keeping you in the loop about.

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A flurry of t61 protest songs made the home page this week. On Wednesday afternoon, Dr. Mic And The Brain Ninjas’ “Bring Back The Old Sixtyone” and Hollis Smith’s “Bring Back The Old T61” hit the T61 “home page.” (With the new design, it doesn’t seem like there is a home page as there was with the old design.) The achievement was without doubt thanks to the legions of T61 protesters that pushed them up the charts.

And arguably in even more glorious fashion, Lynskey’s “F— THE NEW DESIGN” posted to the front of T61 on Friday afternoon. The song, a continuous loop of dissonant noise, posted with a pixelated image and details about how much the new design sucked, title of the song in bold letters.

At least one Internet user thought that thesixtyone.com had been hacked when confronted with the track upon opening the site in his Web browser.

“In what appears to be an immature backlash from a disgruntled user, someone hacked thesixtyone,” said user rjett on the site Hacker News. “Although I agree thesixtyone’s new design has adversely affected its usability, this was probably not the way to protest that fact.”

Poopsmith’s “I’m As Mad As Hell That You Killed TheSixtyOne” also posted to the front page on Friday evening. Additionally, two more protest songs have appeared on the site since. (See the library for details.)

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Technology site Tech Crunch originally reported on thesixtyone.com and the redesign on January 23. The article has since spread throughout the Internet. Many passionate users commented on the article, giving their opinions on why the redesign did and didn’t work.

All told, there were well over 230 comments posted. Then, on January 25/26, they disappeared.

Theories were rampant that Tech Crunch had purposely removed the messages on the article, but it was quickly revealed that the site had been hacked. The issue apparently affected a broad range of information housed on their servers.

On Wednesday afternoon, Tech Crunch spokesperson Robin Wauters addressed the missing comments in the comments section of the article.

“Sorry, I’ve just now noticed all the comments here about the many comments we allegedly removed,” said Wauters. “The truth is that we were hacked twice in the past couple of days, and that as a result most of the comments are not appearing on posts published before the hack occurred.”

“We have a team working on plugging the security holes and making sure the issues aren’t exploited more, and they said they will also be reposting all comments on all posts that used to appear just fine before.”

You can find a screen capture of the comment and responses here.

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Tidbit: There’s a job posting on RentACoder.com for a music site “in the spirit of lala.com and thesixtyone.com.” In case anyone here needs a job and wants to make a competitor to T61.

Job posting for T61 clone on RentACoder

general news artists, Hacker News, library, m61, movementsixtyone, protest songs, RentACoder, Robin Wauters, t61, Tech Crunch, thesixtyone

Owner of Cherrypeel.com contacts M61; New users settling in at Uvumi.com; TheSixtyOne.com filters out user comments on Facebook page

Bo Claypool of Cherrypeel.com has opened contact with M61, looking for feedback on how Cherrypeel and sites like it can encourage “the return of music to an art form, rather than an industry.”

Cherrypeel.com was originally the brainchild of two college students in Toronto. Claypool bought the site last year.

“I have a passion for music and the Internet, and Cherrypeel is, in many ways, beyond just a hobby; it’s a way to help Austin musicians really showcase their music,” Claypool told the Austin Business Journal in September 2009.

Responding to Claypool’s inquiry, M61 said that maintaining a communal aspect to music was key.

“The community that detached from T61 did so primarily because the community aspect was ripped out of the format,” M61 said to Claypool. “From that large group of people, many listeners loved communicating with the artist and vice versa. When that was taken away, a lot of the ‘heart’ of the site was lost. At a close second was the lack of respect and communication that James and Sam showed to the community. By not communicating any changes and not including documentation on how to use the new design, they alienated their customer base further.”

“The community aspect of music will likely be key to capturing music as an art form,” M61 added.

An interview with Bo has been requested to get his take on Cherrypeel.com and what independent music means to him and his site. Stay tuned.

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As the first wave of thesixtyone.com refugees settles into Uvumi.com, new artists and listeners continue to show up there. Meanwhile, Marshall Stokes continues to respond to community requests and minor site load issues. In a comment on this site’s third blog post, Stokes reached out to a user from India that complained that he was “blocked” from accessing the site. It’s unknown if the issue has been resolved, but as the user indicated that he had to use a proxy to access the site, it’s possible the user’s ISP may be partially responsible.

Meanwhile, users are encouraged to give a little leeway to Stokes while he and his team addresses issues. As forum user PaulNZ explained: “The team at Uvumi have shown themselves to be open and responsive to ideas (but lets not swamp them too much right now, I imagine they are busy enough dealing with the sudden growth!)”

M61 is reaching out to Stokes for an interview about the site’s design and inspiration behind it. More news to come.

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In a move that alienated thesixtyone.com users (past and present) even further, owners James and Sam have filtered user comments out of the main stream of their T61 Facebook page and have defaulted all comments on user posts in the user stream to a hidden status. Additionally, they disabled the ability to make wall posts, even in the user stream.

The last accepted user comment was at 5:56 p.m. on January 26. Since then, users have been posting comments in that post listed as “Charlie Pattinson – How do I… CALM THE F— DOWN?!”.

“Wow… just wow. Instead of fixing problems, they’re attempting to stop us talking about it?” commented user Joel Rich.

“[H]ow is censoring your (rapidly decreasing in number) fans going to help your already crappy rep right now?!” asked user Tammy Tamkin.

It’s unknown whether T61 will ever open up commenting again on their fan page. However, it’s clear that the owners are attempting to perform some sort of damage control in the wake of their highly unpopular changes and avoidance tactics. Others have noted in the past that James and Sam have been unresponsive to most communication attempts and have ignored users in the past.

“It’s bad enough when you ignore your users — it’s even worse when you can’t take responsibility for it,” said forum user xyresic.

general news Bo Claypool, cherrypeel, cherrypeel.com, Facebook, m61, Marshall Stokes, movementsixtyone, music, t61, thesixtyone, uvumi, uvumi.com

 T61 refugees flocking to uvumi.com; Remembering the December 2008 T61 revolt; Site traffic in flux at thesixtyone.com

On January 20, 2010, the owners of thesixtyone.com changed their design without warning. A user revolt unsued, and many artists and listeners fled. At first, little was known about where the T61 refugees would go. People began scattering to the winds, looking for social sites to reconnect with friends and searching out alternatives to T61.

Five days later, a clearer picture is emerging about where many of the community are going. After much mulling over the alternatives to T61, it seems a small majority of people are migrating to Uvumi.com. While initial news is that CherryPeel.com and StereoFame.com have elements that resemble T61, many are finding something of interest at Uvumi. Additionally, Uvumi’s founder, Marshall Stokes, indicated in a comment on ReadWriteWeb’s T61 coverage that he was willing to reach out to the community.

Stokes’ acceptance of the community and Uvumi’s relatively clear design seems to have won some hearts already. I created an account minutes ago on the site, and I hope to find time to play with it more over the coming week. Keep an eye out for a review of Uvumi.com sooner than later.

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Meanwhile, back at the ranch… While searching for new material to add to the site library, I’ve ran across evidence of what many long-time T61 fans have referenced as the December 2008 Revolt on thesixtyone.com. Having joined the site shortly after the event, I wasn’t aware of the conflict. But now I have two pages that talk in detail about that first redesign.

TDavid over at makeyougohmm.com said on December 17, 2008: “They have momentum, buzz, and then decide to change things for the worse. Why?”

And on the day before, arcadia of maxbumps.com said of the changes: “How many music sites are on the internet? More than any of us can name, I am sure. How many game sites? How many social networks? But, for the real kicker, how many sites combine all three in a package that’s as addictive as it is impressive? For the fun, for the music, and for the people—for a moment, TheSixtyOne looked like the future of the music industry, in the same way Digg and Reddit are often looked upon as the future of news.”

While many of the same things are being said of the January 20, 2010 update, many users are noting that this time, the changes are much more drastic and damaging. Will people inevitably stick around and/or rejoin thesixtyone.com? I’m sure some will, but I’ve heard plenty of voices that are saying “No!” Which leads me to…

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I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but I wanted to mention the traffic statistics of thesixtyone.com. One available tool for looking at traffic information is alexa.com, and you can find information about T61 traffic here: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/thesixtyone.com#trafficstats

This is a one-month view of pageviews on thesixtyone.com. Notice the spike around the time of the site change and the slight dip back down on the curve. This shouldn’t be surprising to see. (Note the percentage increase to the right.) But now let’s look at something more intriguing—time spent on the site.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, you’ll notice that the time spent on the site has been going down for well over a month, and a real dip was noticeable not on the announcement date but around January 12. As I said in the forum, I don’t know if there’s any evidence to match this dip with the January 12 earthquake in Haiti, but it’s worth noting. Since the site redesign, there has been a tiny shift up in time spent, but notice the decreasing values to the right. Interpret this however you want, but dare I say that more people are/were visiting the site, but they weren’t staying very long when they did?

That’s all for now. More information here as I get it.

Yours,

lostraven / Shawn

general news artists, listeners, m61, movementsixtyone, t61, thesixtyone, uvumi, uvumi.com

After a marathon session of coding, Photoshopping, and researching, our site movementsixtyone.com is up and running. Is it beer:30 yet?

The whole idea for this started on Thursday night. I went to bed feeling somewhat sick to the stomach about the redesign of thesixtyone.com. I woke up the next morning feeling more anngry after reading additional information about what had happened.

I happened on Chapel’s wiki of ideas for a new T61 clone when something snapped. I felt frustrated that I couldn’t code in Python, Ruby on Rails, or any other programming language. I only know a little bit about a lot of things. But I’ve had enough experience with Web design and writing to be able to pull a project like this off. And thus, from my anger and frustration, this site was born.

The HTML and CSS isn’t clean, but it works in both IE and Opera. I had one favorable report from a Chrome user as well, so I’m assuming that it mostly looks as it should. And I think it looks reasonable for having hurriedly spent a couple of days on it.

I’ve already witnessed a few connections being made on the forum, and that makes me happy. Like I said in the last post, if this site happens to only bring together one fan with one artist, then I’d still be happy. And I am.

Keep up the good fight. If you see an artist from T61 say that they’re setting up shop at a different site, casually ask them if they had posted their artist information here. The more connections we can make here, the better. And don’t forget to e-mail your news, links, songs, and projects for the new library.

See you on the forums.

Yours,

lostraven / Shawn

movementsixtyone artists, forum, library, listeners, m61, movementsixtyone, t61, thesixtyone

Welcome all T61 refugees! The ship may be sinking (or is that stinking?) but we have plenty of space for you here.

On January 20, 2010, the owners of the site thesixtyone.com (T61), without any notice or support, implemented a new design that left long-time users stumped, frustrated, and angry. The removal of elements like the radio, public “walls” for users and artists, and common-sense navigation tools have caused many users to boycott the site. This has had the effect of scattering users across the internet to protest, get answers, or find solace.

While I may not have been the most active member of thesixtyone.com, I loved it very, very much. When I found out what was happening, I took the time to soak in what the site changes meant to the userbase. As it currently stands, the lack of social elements has fundamentally shifted how listeners and artists discover and interact with each other. Even if the T61 team eventually reimplements many of the features that were yanked, I can personally say that I lost all of my respect for them. I would be hard pressed to return, even if they simply dropped the whole redesign and stuck with old.thesixtyone.com. (This is nearly 100 percent unlikely.)

Anyway, I wanted to build a site that acts like a hub, bringing together all the information that’s out there and reuniting artists with listeners. (And vice versa) I don’t know how popular this will be. I may only get a couple of people interact here. But even if I can reunite one artist with one fan, I will feel like I at least did something.

As I type this, I have to stop and ponder if we’re being too melodramatic about all this. However, I have quickly come to the conclusion that we are not. A love of music, whether as a discoverer or a creator, brought thousands of people together. Music is something that should be shared. It enriches all of our lives. When a key form of that enrichment is greatly disturbed, we all are equally disturbed.

Anyway, I can’t make this first post too long. I still have a lot of work to do, coding up some HTML for the main site. But this blog and our new forum will hopefully do a lot of the footwork of uniting music lovers while we get the rest of the site going.

Please pass this site address to everyone who is a refugee of thesixtyone.com. And I hope that enough people utilize this to eventually refer to it as “M61.”

Yours,

lostraven / Shawn

movementsixtyone artists, listeners, m61, movementsixtyone, music, refugees, t61, thesixtyone