movementsixtyone.com

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!

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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

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