Why Adding Music Recommendations Is Great For You!
Leave a CommentI just love not only adding articles to Where To Start With but also adding my opinion. Why? Because it gives me the opportunity to get myself re-acquainted with the bands that I love but may no longer be in my everyday music rotation – either due to the fact I’ve listened to them so much or because I’m constantly seeking out new music.
A case in point is the article I have just written for where to start with the Pixies. I know the Pixies songs intimately, own all their albums, all their B-side, live and compilation albums (in fact I first became acquainted with the Pixies via their compilation album "Death to the Pixies"). Although knowing all their tracks intimately I couldn’t tell you which album each track belonged to as, probably like you, my music has all been digital for years – the last time I took a Pixies CD out of its case was to rip them to MP3’s.
However the simple act of writing my opinion to share with others who may not have had the luxury of finding the Pixies yet meant I got to review my collection of Pixies music to decide which album I would recommend as essential etc. It meant that I have listened to more Pixies tracks in one go than I have for a long time, in fact they continue to play while I’m writing this post. To find out what I decided upon as my recommendations for the Pixies then read the article, you can add your own opinion there too if you agree or disagree with me.
So adding articles and opinions to Where To Start With not only helps others and gives you the warm feeling of knowing that you’re doing a little good by helping someone find their way with one of your favourite bands but it helps you re-connect with your favourite bands.
So why not add an opinion or article today over at Where To Start With.
Goodbye private beta. Hello new features!
We’ve decided to remove the private beta status of Where to Start With, now you and all your friends can enjoy the music recommendation site without needing a beta account.
But we’re not stopping there, as part of the release we added what we think is a killer new feature – the ability to quickly (and I mean super quick) add new articles. This stemmed from the main problem we found users having during our private beta test – they wanted to add their opinion on an artist, but not necessarily want to (or have the time right then and there) to write the initial article. This addition solves that problem, but rather than try and explain it to you in writing I made a quick screen cast demonstrating the new feature.
Another oft-asked for feature we’ve added is the ability to add missing releases to articles, we also have some more features in the pipeline which should be appearing within the next few days.
So whether you’ve had a play around with Where to Start With before or not I hope this new feature improves your experience on Where to Start With.
It’s working for us
We found when we started this project that it kept taking us in directions we never expected it to. Originally planned as a place of reference for music, kind of like a better designed (for our purposes) Wikipedia, we have found it is opening us to a whole load of music we wanted, but didn’t know existed.
I think it was said in an earlier post that the website was started from an agreement to find new bands for us to try out. Well, here at the Where to Start With headquarters, we have found that by following the RSS feed, we have already been discovering fantastic music.
The latest is Texas instrumental rockers “Explosions in the Sky”. Kind of like a less intense 65 Days of Static (if that helps) but don’t listen to me, head over to the article to have a look (and listen). Go and get lost for a few hours in their brilliantly intricate weaving guitar melodies.
If you like that recommendation when why not return the favour and add your own article?
Introducing Where To Start With
Welcome to the blog for wheretostartwith.com, this blog will be used to document our progress and developments. However I’m getting ahead of myself here as you’re most likely wondering what Where to Start With actually is, well the elevator pitch for it goes a little like this:
Where to Start With is designed to help you when you’re trying out new bands and artists by providing community-powered recommendations written by die hard fans.
If that new band you want to try has 10 CD’s out, then Where to Start With will give you… well, where to start with them!
That all sounds well and good you may think, but how does it actually work? Well each band or artist will have an article about them which gives a short history/description of the band and each of their main releases (e.g. Albums & E.P.’s) with a little description. Any user can add these articles and each article is in the wiki-style, e.g. anyone can edit the descriptions to add new information and fix mistakes etc.
The real core of the site comes into play when people start adding their opinions on artists, once again anyone can do this, but it is better for people who are currently fans of the artist to add their opinion. Each opinion includes a rating, a recommendation (more on those later) and a personal comment on each of the albums for the artist. We then take these opinions and produce an article that gives you recommendations on where to start with the artist, what to try after that and even sometimes what to avoid.
Why would I want to use Where to Start With?
Well, whereas other sites, software and services may give you reviews, the most popular or most listened to albums those may not necessarily be the best releases to start off with a new artist.
For instance I personally hardly ever listen to Nirvana’s “Nevermind” album any more (as I know all of Nirvana’s albums inside and out, every cough and guitar string noise included), however “Nevermind” obviously would be the album I would recommend anyone new to Nirvana should start out with.
But going further than that after you have tried the “essential” release Where to Start With helps you with which release to follow the essential release with, a wildcard album and even sometimes what to avoid – which can be just as difficult to determine from the other methods.
About the recommendations.
Each Where to Start With article can have the following recommendations for each release to help guide you:
- Essential
- This should be the first release to try.
- Follow with
- The next release to try after the essential release.
- Also recommended
- Another good release to try.
- Wildcard
- A release that may not be “the norm” for the artist, could be interesting.
- Avoid
- Yes, some users will also tell you what to avoid.
The votes of each person on each release are tallied up to ensure that each article has one of each of the above recommendations (where applicable) and the more opinions that are added the better the recommendations become. Also just in case there is a close call between releases you can also see the breakdown of the votes for each release.
Okay, sounds great, how do I get started?
Well we’re currently in private beta, but are accepting applications to the beta and adding new users on a daily basis. The reason we’re currently in private beta is to ensure that the platform is solid and discover any issues, we’re not sure how long this will take but we obviously want to be out of beta as soon as possible, so keep an eye on the blog for updates.
We’re not resting, though.
Just because we’ve been working hard to ensure that we’re at a stable enough point to get it to this beta stage doesn’t mean we’re now going to sit back and just fix any issues that crop up, no we have a long list of features that we just haven’t had chance to include yet but we’re sure people will love, such as:
- Making it easier to get started with an artist, e.g. once you’ve found someone and a release you want to try we want to make it as easy as possible for you to get started trying them.
- Adding more of a community feel to the site. For example we would like to be able to see what artists our friends are writing about/giving opinions on and we’d also like to recommend artists to friends directly, and more.
- Plus much, much more.
We started out this project in response to the fact we were getting older and no longer discovering new music in the ways we used to. We just didn’t seem to be exposed to new music all the time like we were in the past. Between us we made a pact to find two new bands a month for us to recommend to each other.
Someone recommended Porcupine Tree… their back catalogue is, well, diverse. This website would have been a godsend and nothing like it was available so we decided to develop it.
We have already found ourselves already listening to, and being exposed to, loads of new music just through the private beta. We hope
that other music lovers will find that wheretostartwith.com broadens their musical horizons, like it has for us, and get involved by
writing more articles to give something back.
We hope you’re interested and sign up for the beta or get a bit more information over at the site, and don’t forget to keep an eye on this blog or subscribe to the feed.
