TheSixtyOne Guide for Musicians

Bryan Hazard of Color Theory has written a great article to help musicians get started and have a presence on TheSixtyOne.com. It's his favorite music site (and mine), and he has great advice.

Read the article: What artists should know about thesixtyone .

Its Evonity's strategy guide! (2)

Part 1 of Evonity's strategy guide pointed out some of the biggest changes during the last months. I discussed how these changes could affect your gameplay, but if you just created your account recently, or if you are only about to do so, than you obviously don't care much for the changes. So, in this episode we discuss some ways to make yourself familiar with The Sixtyone and try to make some profit while we're at it. But first a...

Disclaimer

Developers at The Sixtyone are very active coders. They can and will change the site and the way the game is played without further notice⁴. By doing so, they might make this guide completely useless. I'll try to keep the guide updated, but until I do you use it at your own risk. Also remember that their might be better strategies, so try to develop your own eventually. As it is a fact that one only finds a good beginners tutorial after one figured out the whole shebang by oneself, this guide might as well be useless to you. In that case I sincerely apologize for not having delivered this guide on time.

Familiarize thyself

We're not talking about the user interface, you soon will find out that the web application is reasonably transparent and designed to suit the game. We're also not talking about the terminology in use. Although I realize we're still in need of a good glossary, for story telling sake we save that for another time (I actually kind of despite the tedious task of compiling glossaries). What we're talking about is the music collection, categorized in two hands full of genres. When you want to be good at predicting the success of new songs, you need to know the taste of the T61 audience.

So the first thing to do would be to listen to the songs that made it. There are three pages where you can find them: Radio ? Hot Right Now, Radio ? Top Songs and Browse ? Hits. The first two show you the current hits, the songs that get the most attention right now. Both pages pretty much show the same songs, but the compilation of Hot Right Now is song based while Top Songs' compilation is based on artist fame¹.

Revives

AttentionThe information about the Browse ⇒ Hits page in the paragraph below is not accurate anymore!.

Browse ? Hits is T61's all time Top 670 (I have no idea why there are 670 songs in the list, instead of 610, 500 or 1000). The first thing you'll notice is that all songs on page one of this section are all revived, which means that the listeners mentioned on the items paid a lot of RP's to bring a former hit to everyone's attention². As a result these songs have gained a surplus of bumps³.

Profit

Give the music on any of these pages a good listen. Don't forget to filter each page by clicking genres at the right side of the page. Just the genres that are of your own interest will do. Needless to say that we don't want you to only bump songs that match the real hits. Although it's fun to predict the future success of a song, it's also (even more) fun to actually enjoy music!

Can we get some profit by bumping songs on any of these pages? That depends on three things: your current level, how long ago a song has been posted (we come to that in the next paragraph) and if a song has been revived. Unless you've bumped a revived song before it was revived, you won't make any profit from them. You still can bump these songs to support the artist, but there's not much change for RP's. If a song was posted only some moments ago, there's a good change that you can have your share in the success, especially when you're at a low level. After all, the lower your level, the more giving the system still is. But again, you can also bump a song because you love it and only want it to become a hit.

Recently Posted

As you surely understand by now, the first place to be when you want to attend the great prediction game, is there where the posted songs first show up. Songs get their first real change on becoming a hit: at the Radio ? Recently Posted pages. Items on these pages are listed in order of posting time. The latest posts are listed first. Let's take a look at the extraction of page one as it was on March 13, 2009 at 10:15...

False Hope - Until Dawn Found by ThomasAD3	267
Color Theory - Hypothetically (Rupesh... Found by icrow	882
65daysofstatic - Drove Through Ghosts t... Revived by SarahxJane	701
James Wallace - This Song Found by squeakyfingers	243
Esquimaux - Traveling Salesman Found by Bleargh	432
We're On Fire (Chris F... remixed by Northern Room Revived by sarabara	842
John Brown's Body - Conquering Heart Dub (... Found by sleestack	317
In My Life covered by Jefferson Montoya Found by YeesterMeister	91
Cattlebeast - The Future (LIVE) Found by sam	112
Temple Scene - Holding Back The Tide Revived by mirandaj	1134
MGMT (Remix: MMMa... - The Youth (MMMatthias ... Found by aznbigbuttboy	214
Geographer - Rushing In, Rushing Out Found by dontcallmejohn	777
Headlights - Market Girl Found by clancy490	831
Skyline (Lasswell Remix) remixed by Shannon Hurley Found by egospring	352
Sia - Breathe Me Revived by jod02	3166

You can tell by the number of bumps that these are not new songs. Some of them have been around for quite a while. The In My Life cover by Jefferson Montoya for instance has been uploaded at least a year ago. Questions as, why did it take so long for the song to post and why did it post at about 90 bumps are almost impossible to answer. That is all part of T61's secret formula, but it has something to do with the number of unique bumpers, the artist's level and the genre the song is in.
As you might have noticed, four of the fifteen songs have been revived. You can give them a listen and bump them if you like, but there's not much to predict with them. On the other hand, there's always a change that a revived song gets its bumps doubled, in which case you can even earn some RP's with these.
Before songs get posted they reside at the Browse ? Most Active and Browse ? Recently Uploaded pages. We cover these pages in part three of the guide. You need these pages if you want to become a Top Rookie, as the rule of thumb for good strategy is: the sooner you bump, the more RP's you receive (if the song is loved by many others that is).

How to tell age

If you need an indication of the age of a song, the first thing to do is to find out if the song did receive any comments. If it did, just see for yourself how long ago the comment was submitted. It's not to say that comments always appear right after a song was uploaded, but it gives you some indication. Another thing you can do is use your mouse to hover over the song title. If you do that, the status bar of your browser shows the song id, which doesn't tell you the exact age, but again gives a good clue. Song id's are assigned to songs when they are uploaded by the artist. It's an incremental value that can't be assigned twice. Even if an artist decides to delete a song, the id doesn't become available again.
Since the beginning of 2009 T61's song id's are 40000 and above. The day we're extracted some data from the Recently Posted page, id's are close to 45000.
Knowing this it's easy to find out that This Song by James Wallace is the most recent uploaded song in this list and that The Future by Cattlebeast is even older than the Jefferson Montoya song. When it comes to predicting, you get your best shot at songs which didn't take long to post. Use your ears to make a final judgment on what to bump and check your stats to find out how it turned out. Btw. compare the first page of Recently Posted with the Hot right Now first page. Any song appearing on both are the hits to be.

How to tell genre

For songs on the first page of Recently Posted it's easy: just click any of the genres on the right and you know. For other songs you probably need to use the search function at T61. Search result pages are the only pages where the genre is noted below the song.

Just For You

By now it's obvious that in this episode of the strategy guide, we're focusing on the Radio pages. The next page to explore will be Radio ⇒ Just For You. It consists of three tabs: Friends, New Uploads and Subscribe. The songs listed under the Friends tab are songs bumped by listeners to whom you may have subscribed. Under the New Uploads tab you'll find new uploads from artists of which you have songs favorited before.

Friends

If you haven't subscribed to anybody yet, it's time to do so. Obviously these listeners don't have to be your friends for real. You are not obligated to interact with them and neither are they. But by subscribing to them, you can easily take advantage of them. The Subscribe tab is there to encourage you to follow other listeners. The avatars on the page are randomly picked, but you can fine tune the selection by choosing from the list of music genres.
Ideally you want to follow listeners who are both active early bumpers (people who bump songs soon after they've been uploaded) and share your taste in music. You find these through the Subscription tab or by visiting the Leader Boards. When you visit other listeners' pages, don't just hit the Subscribe button, but check them out properly. Listen to their featured songs, explore their tags and above all, have a look at their stats to check if they're still active (some people do abandon their profile).
Of course in reality you will socialize with other listeners. Maybe you have some real friends who are T61 members as well. Either way you might end up with subscriptions to people with whom you have a lot in common except your musical taste. From my experience this won't make the Friends tab useless, unless you exclusively subscribe to listeners who don't like the music you like. I have over 120 subscriptions and I always find 60% to 80% of the songs under this tab good to freakin' awesome.

Recent uploads

When you've collected the right set of subscriptions, you'll soon receive good recommendations from other listeners. Listeners who are active on the Browse ? Recently Uploaded pages serve you with songs that have been uploaded during the last 24 hours. It gives you a great opportunity to bump brand new songs, to get some early bumps yourself, without the need to browse the Browse pages yourself.
You can easily recognize new uploads by the absence of a bump score on the song item. Only after 24 hours of a song's lifetime, the bump score will be revealed. So any song without a bump score is a new song. The list of songs under the Friends tab will be refreshed about once an hour, so items in this list might have been uploaded less than an hour ago! Listen to these recommendations and bump them if you like them or when you expect them to become hits.

Out of breath Hearts?

The last Radio page to discuss (The Creative Commons page has no other use than to display the hottest songs shared under a Creative Commons license) is Radio ? The Rack, which isn't really a page, but rather a radio player that features new and not so new unposted songs. A benefit from listening to The Rack is that while you discover even more new music, you get rewarded with new hearts. So If you just spent the last of your daily dose of hearts on another great song, it's best that you listen to The Rack for a while. You do that until you're ready again to predict the success of songs or help songs to become successful.
Every day at 7am (Pacific summer time) or 8am (Pacific winter time) GMT you're account gets reset with a fresh batch of hearts. This reset will only be executed after you've visited any of the Radio pages, so don't forget to spend any hearts available before you visit any of those pages around 7am or 8am GMT.

Building up the batch

In the next episode, when we take a look at the Browse ? Most Active and Browse ? Recently Uploaded pages, we also will talk about Multi Bumps and Max Bumps. To most people spending a lot of hearts on a song is a luxury they can't afford - not with the dose of hearts they receive. But there is a way to save up some hearts.
Just listen to The rack for a while until you have more hearts in your purse than you get from the system every day. As long as you make sure you stay above this quota, you won't loose any of these hearts, not even if you visit some of the Radio pages after 7am or 8am GMT. In this way it's possible to save up enough hearts to max bump several songs a day!

Ben (Evonity) Scheffer, 2009

Acknowledgment

I want to express my gratitude to my T61 friends at Plurk. Without the conversations and discussions I had with them, I wouldn't be able to write a proper strategy guide. I especially thank them for what I call the Building Up The Batch secret, which I gratefully apply myself now.

Notes

1. If you think you can teach me a few things on this matter, please be my guest. As long as you won't ask me about the order of the songs. I know nothing about T61's secret formula (return)


2. As soon as you reach level 10, you're eligible to take part in revive bids. They are at Browse ? Revive Bids. You can place a bid on any song posted over two months ago. Every three hours the song with the highest bid will be revived. The song shows up in your stats and the reviver shows up on the profile of the artist. Revived songs get listed at 1am, 4am, 7am, 10am, 1pm, 4pm, 7pm and 10pm GMT during Pacific summer time (T61's server is located somewhere in Seattle) and at 2am, 5am, 8am, 11am, 2pm, 5pm, 8pm and 11pm during Pacific winter time(return)


3. Until a couple of weeks ago T61 was all about bumping. The developers recently changed that to hearting. Probably because I'm old and always having a hard time adjusting to changes, I prefer the use of the word 'bump'(return)


4. What did I tell you? The day I publish this guide, the developers decide they want something different with the Browse ⇒ Hits page. They also are adjusting the algorithm. Before I edit this guide, i need to get a better understanding of recent changes.(return)

Reprise

--- my place, April 11th 2009 --- This will be my last story about The Sixtyone for the time being. After a year of both happiness and frustration at T61, I realized that I don't like it anymore to be an active member of a constantly changing site. For over twelve months I witnessed the developers moving walls, opening new hallways and closing others. I assume that this is a basic part of the site and I respect that, but it's influencing my user experience in a negative way. So I feel it's time to move on.

I want to thank maxbumps.net and its founder Michele Yamazaki (batface89) for the opportunity to archive all my t61 related stories. I want to thank you for reading them and I want to thank my friends at t61 for supporting me in writing them.
I'll keep an eye on my stories, just in case someone decides to comment on them.

It's Evonity's strategy guide! (1)

Short after part 3 of my very critical series on the recent changes at The Sixtyone, the developers changed the heart of the game. In stead of bumping, listeners now can heart songs. They can also 'first heart' new music and even 'max heart' songs if they go really crazy about it. I dislike the vocabulary and thus continue to talk about bumps, first bumps and max bumps, but I have to admit that the game has been improved. To some of us anyway.

Hearts

The best thing about the hearts is, that it doesn't cost anything to bump songs. In the current system (hearts is still in beta¹ bumping costs vary from over 100 pts. for a fresh new song by a top 10 artist, to 5 pts. for any older, successful song. In the new system listeners receive a limited amount of hearts to award songs with. The exact number of hearts depends on listener level and will be refreshed every day at 0:00 am PST (8:00 am GMT). During the day, extra hearts can be earned by listening to the Rack - T61's radio that randomly plays songs from the browse pages - you'll find it under the Radio tab.

Reputation

In return for bumping a song you receive points. In the current system these are called XP points. In the new system you get reputation points. The profit you make depends on many parameters. Your level and that of the artist are two of them. Other things that leads to the product of T61's secret formula are the number of bumps you gave, which bump came from you, the number of bumpers (which is something different than the number of bumps) and probably also the level of those other bumpers.

More secrets

Since the introduction of the Hearts, the reputation formula is not T61's only secret. Both the number of bumps and the listeners who bumped are hidden for the first 24 hours of a song's life time. This new rule is most likely the final step in an attempt to diminish the influence of power users. The developers probably were under the impression that some people only bumped songs after they checked if some of the high ranked listeners bumped it first. As if a song only is good if a top player bumped it. Not knowing anything about a new song except the title, the artist, the fb-er and most importantly the music, makes browsing through the Recently Uploaded songs more exciting, but it also can take more time to find the stuff you like and/or you think is good. It definitely makes it harder to first bump a song.

To bump or not to bump

One aspect that has been improved by introducing the Hearts / Reputation system, is the dilemma of bumping songs for points or pleasure. I know it sounds strange to talk about an 'improved dilemma' but to me, having to choose between supporting music or leveling up, always has been what T61 is about.
In the Bumps / XP system, every single bump has it's price. You can bump as much songs as you want, but if your XP drops, you loose the ability to support music. In the beta system hearts cost nothing and your reputation will always improve. Even if you bump songs that only you will like. But you can only bump as many times as you're level allowes you to. This change in gameplay means that nobody needs to worry about profit anymore, making T61 more fun for listeners who hardly care for reputation.
The daily amount of hearts in your inventory² is probably just enough to bump every song you love. But there's a good change that you'll run out of hearts before you're done bumping, forcing you to both work on your reputation and think twice before you bump anything. I expect that most listeners will always be short on hearts, but not to an extend that it frustrates their enjoyment. Frustration might strike some power listeners though, who play every song and like many of them. In the end everybody will need to carefully pick the songs to bump and this is especially true for people who browse and listen the recently uploaded songs.

Warning: these songs have been recently uploaded!

One thing you shouldn't do when you don't care for reputation, is browse the Recently Uploaded pages. If you just want to hear the good stuff, stick with the Top Songs, Hot Right Now or Recently Posted pages. Songs over there are not the newest of the newest, but are the best of the best without any doubt (and still new enough to know them before your non T61 loving friends know them.
For gamers Browse > Recently Uploaded on the other hand is the place to be. The more your reputation grows, the more important it'll be to early bump songs. Why? Because your reputation is determined by the number of bumps a song gets after you've bumped it! As a new member you'll never be a top rookie when you solely stick to the Radio pages.

The Tao of The Sixtyone

If you care about your reputation than you'll most likely become subject to the Tao of the Sixtyone:

The music you love is not always the music that will make you look better

(I'll need to work on this quote a bit more)

Consider this situation: you have one heart left to bump a song and two new songs appear on the Recently Uploaded pages. One you don't like very much, but will most likely get a lot of bumps and one that blows your head off, but is in a very unpopular genre. Which one would you bump? The gamer in you wants the reputation points, but the music lover that you are, wants to unconditionally support the unpopular song . It's this dilemma that I like best about T61. You'll always need to split the daily amount of hearts over both the music you want to support and the music that's good for your status.

Next episode

Next episode in Evonity's strategy guide will be about the different song lists you can find at T61.

1. f you haven't done so already, you can enter or exit the beta hearts game by editing your Preferences


2. Listeners can earn extra hearts by listening to the rack (click Radio in the navigation bar, than choose the rack.) After the first minute of a song you will receive one or more hearts. Not with every song though.

It's the new Sixtyone! (1)

More than a month ago, The Sixtyone had it's first real makeover and although it seems that the developers are still busy getting stuff the way they want, it's time we review the biggest changes. The site used to be characterized by these three elements: music discovery, game play and social interaction. Today, the big question is: are these three features still the pillars on which T61 stands. There's enough to talk about so let's make this article a series by splitting it up into three parts. In this first part we start by looking at the game.

A year ago The Sixtyone was well on its way to become a prediction market game like the Hollywood Stock Exchange (movies), urladex (websites) or Media Predict (media, obviously). The points that every new Listener member received at the opening of an account were meant to place bets on songs. As with other gambling opportunities, the more risk a Listener took, the better the return if a song became successful. You really needed some strategy to do well and reach the leader board. You also needed to adjust this strategy with each new level, because the system was programmed to handicap higher-level Listeners. Just as if the virtual bookmaker knew that he would loose money on you if he wasn't careful.
The greatest thing about it was, that the site in fact simulated a real art expo, where all kinds of players in the music industry get together. Artists undertook all kinds of action to promote themselves and their songs, while Listeners tried to cut deals to make profit.
If it had stayed like this, The Sixtyone could have been the start of a small revolution in the (indie) music market, because it was the perfect testing ground for professional artists to find out what works and how well it works. Not only in terms of composition or musical quality, but also in terms of choosing tracks for an album and even dealing with fans and critics. T61 could replace the whole A&R department of a major record company, enabling unsigned artists to become as successful as their talent allows them to.

But unfortunately the owners of The Sixtyone seems to have chosen a different direction. For reasons not at all clear, they decided to diminish the game to a meaningless leader board for listeners and take away the ability for artists to promote their work or conveniently interact with their audience. T61's about page used to say: "It’s like a massively-multiplayer game for music junkies who are always on the prowl for new sounds". Now it says: "thesixtyone makes music culture more democratic: artists upload their work for review, but, rather than allow a stuffy suit in a boardroom to decide what's good, thousands of listeners do." Instead of using your points to bet, you all of a sudden were supposed to use them to support. While being well on it's way to becoming an absolutely unique mmombg (massive multiplayer online music bumping game), T61 decided to stick with the hardly unique dig-music-you-like concept.

Now, amongst the several achievements to reach, there's one achievement that nobody has yet reached. It's the Mosh Pit, for which a Listener must be online when at least 4999 others are as well. Let's face it: 5000 listeners is a lot, but it's marginal compared to traffic at last.fm - while T61 has the potential to be as hot as last.fm! All they need to do is take a few steps back and then start developing towards a real prediction market game. That'll be fun for music lovers and prosperous for indie artists.

It's the new Sixtyone! (2)

Over two weeks ago, when I decided to review The Sixtyone's interactive / social features, I mainly had all recent spam measures in mind. But when I started to give it some real thought, I realized that there's more to communication at T61 than meets the eye.

The developers of T61 wanted to supply all kinds of tools for interaction and social activity, but they didn't want their members to take over. After all, T61 is not a community site, but the venture of two young developers. They probably developed appliances with a certain usage in mind, but then saw people use it in ways they didn't like. The most memorable listener to do so was the one called KosmikRay.
KosmikRay was a high profile member who used to set up all kinds of crazy events, like having a song bumped to 1000 before it could hit the homepage or getting as many comments on a song as it had bumps. He used to put a lot of effort into showing new artists around and getting listeners involved in the community (as he thought there was such thing as a community). He was also the driving force behind a number of so-called upload parties, which were like massive online rock festivals with a lot of stages and spectators.¹.
In June 2008 KosmikRay's account was terminated by the owners of T61. His profile was deleted, together with a huge amount of either usable or entertaining comments on walls and songs. Officially because he continued to violate the Terms Of Service, but the owners never explained which terms exactly were violated. This led to a lot of speculation and co-founder James Maio wrote an open letter to the T61 members, which also mentioned spamming and upload parties.

It is true that before June 2008 some bands would visit almost every Comment Wall available to promote their music. And KosmikRay would stop by to promote upload parties or radio bumping. But there was always the possibility to block members from walls. Then in October, just when we were organizing the Max Bumps awards - coincidently or not - another measure was taken against spamming. From then onwards it was no longer possible to copy and paste the same message onto more walls. Finally last month, when the redesign took place, the number of characters allowed in a comment got reduced to a mere 250. In addition, the forum was taken down, tuneboxing (the ability to send song discoveries and messages to other members) got turned off and the listener bio editor stopped accepting links, images or other html tags.

Without tuneboxing , unrestricted messaging, the freedom to create a profiling bio and a forum to interact with the site owners, there's not much left of the social features of T61. We have to trust that the developers to have their own good reasons for these measures. Maybe it's all for the better that no new KosmikRay or Maxbumper will arise to organize events that alter an unbiased music discovery. But it's hard to understand how the new Sixtyone can still be beneficial to artists.
A new music industry, one that is not directed by only a few major record companies, needs a community to evolve. But there's no community at T61. There are listeners and artists, who are members of a private site, where they need to obey the rules the owners impose. The success of new songs is not in the hands of the listeners, where it belongs, but in the hands of a few developers who are probably thrust worthy, but then again, maybe not.

¹The idea behind the upload parties was to get at least 30 artists to upload a new song within just one hour and to get as much listeners as possible to bump the sparks out of them. The most exciting party was the one KosmikRay and friends organized as a tribute to the late Michael Paul Miller.

It's the new Sixtyone! (3)

Summarizing previous chapters (part 1 and part 2) it all comes down to this:
- The Sixtyone is not the game it used to be a year ago.
- Despite what they say on the About page, it's not a democratic site. It's a private project that lacks proper social features.

Does this mean that artists and listeners should avoid t61? Certainly not. It only means that the founders have a different view on how a revolutionary music site should look like. We can jump low or high, but at the end of the day we have to respect the choices that are made by the people in charge. Either that or move on to the next site.
Now I don't know if you know T61 as well as I do, but if you did, you knew that moving on isn't easy. If not because of the friends ¹ you made, than most certainly because of the music you've heard. Within the last twelve months over 25.000 songs were either uploaded by genuine artists, or downloaded by the T61's own scraping system ². A lot of these songs probably don't suite your taste or reach your standards, but after 10 months of membership I could easily make a top 100 of songs that should be number one and a top 200 of songs that would be number two.
Obviously, the quality of music is solely the merit of the artists who created it, but the people behind T61 deserve some credit to. They pay the rent (not unimportant), the design is neat, the persistent audio player is a treat, tagging is a great new feature, the artists bio automatically displays when you play a song, there are several ways to discover new music and so on, and so on. So no matter how critically I was about The Sixtyone, the music and the way it's presented are ace. The question is: is it good enough? Is it good enough for listeners who want to play an active role in the promotion of ambitious indie artists? Is it good enough for artists who want to be in charge of their own success? Is it good enough to support a music industry that is led by performers and audience, in stead of businessmen? Are we in need at all of a site that can fulfill these ideals? Maybe not, but thinking of the old T61, I know it sure would be awesome.

If I had to define the new Sixtyone in just a few words, I would say "It's a good site to find and collect great music, but don't bother about the game - it's hardly functional - and don't think you're part of a community, just because you've found some social features."
 
Ten months ago I truly believed I participated in a killer project that could change the ways of the music industry. Today I'm a member of just one of those music sharing sites. The new Sixtyone is OK, but I liked the old one better. Much better.



¹At T61 it's easy to find other people who are as passionate about music as you are. But knowing these people doesn't mean you form a community inside. For that you need to sign up for a listener group (max. 1) or meet outside at Max Bumps or Plurk.
 
²Scraped music is music that wasn't uploaded by artists, but downloaded by T61 from various music blogs and added to the pool of songs. Scraped songs are a minority. More about this subject here.

It's a scrape

You may not know this, but not every song you can listen to at The Sixtyone, was uploaded by the artist, or an artist's agent. Some of the songs that arrive at the Browse Recently Uploaded pages are not uploaded at all, but downloaded by T61's own robot: a script that the developers run daily to check some selected music blogs for new mp3's. Any new audio file that meet certain criteria will then be downloaded and added to the music pool.
The whole process of checking and downloading content from other websites is called scraping. So any song that T61 fetches from other sites is called a mp3 scrape. Scrapes used to be identifiable on T61 by an extract of the original blog post in the song's comment area, but not anymore. If you don't care about the game or interacting with artists, you probably don't care where the music at T61 comes from. Otherwise keep reading to learn how you can tell the pushed from the pulled.

At this time there are seven music blogs that T61's scraping robot checks for new songs. These are Aquarium Drunkard, Welikeitindie, Soul Sides, Stereogum, Sucka Pants, Gorilla Vs. Bear and Palms Out Sounds. With some exception the pulled songs appear daily between 3:00 pm and 4:00 pm GMT (10am - 11am EST / 7am - 8am PST). If there's no artist account, one will be created on the fly. In that case the robot also checks Last.fm for an account and scrapes bio and pictures from it. For an example take a look at the T61 and Last.fm profiles of Jeff Mangum

The robot can't take human decisions. If it could, it would be able to avoid little mistakes like creating two accounts for the same artist. This happens when several blogs share music from the same artist. The slightest difference in the spelling of the artist's name causes the robot to create extra profile pages. Even minuscule typing errors can cause this behavior. The last time we saw this happen, was on January 4th, when the robot scraped three songs from Soul Sides. All three songs were performed by the recently passed away Jamaican artist Byron Lee, but two profiles were created, only because in two songs Dragonaires was miss spelled as Dragonnaires.

Some keen listeners who care about their Listener status, who like to compete with each other and/or just want to tag a song with their screen name, always make sure they know which scrapes get pulled in advance. Even T61 co-founder James Miao takes advantage of this possibility. Yours truly likes these aspects of T61 very much, so he's not the one to complain about advance knowledge, but competition becomes more fun, when there are more competitors, don't you think? Worse is that a lot of listeners give feedback on scraped music or artists, while these artists possibly won't talk back at all. They don't know they're on T61.



As a matter of fact, they possibly don't know at all how well their music was sub legally spread around the blogosphere. The whole mp3 blogging phenomena seems to be based on the assumption that when an artist allows one blog to share some music, he unknowingly allows every blog to copy and share it as well. I guess all is fine as long as the artist remains unsigned, but what if the indie becomes a major? Isn't it more than likely that their record company demands that T61 withdraws the music from the pool?

So there you have three reasons why mp3 scrapes should be clearly flagged as scrapes. They sometimes cause annoying errors like duplicate profiles, some listeners wrongfully think they can interact with the scraped artists and it's not certain at all whether mp3 scraping is a legitimate action. It would be best if the developers of T61 reinstate some identification, but as long as they don't, here's what you can do to identify the scrapes yourself.

Method 1. Create an account at The Hype Machine. This site scrapes music from hundreds of blogs, including the seven mentioned before. Once your account is active, click on the link Blog List in the footer of the hypem.com page, locate the blogs you want to follow and favorite them, by clicking on the grey heart. After that go to your profile dashboard, click Watchlist Songs and choose Via Blogs in the sub menu. Doing this opens a page that lists every song recently published by the favorited blogs. If you are used to following syndicated feeds in your browser or a special feed reader like the free Feedreader, you can also create a feed of this page.

Method 2: If you don't want to go through the hassle of creating yet another online account, just check my Watchlist Songs Via Blogs page at Hypem. You can even syndicate that page if you please.

We should be aware that the T61 developers can change their scraping policy whenever they want. So if you're still in doubt whether a certain song was scraped or uploaded, use either The Hype Machine or Elbows to do a song search. If the song was published by any music blog, these sites can tell you when and where.

For those of you who like to have some more information on the subject of audio scrapes, here are some interesting reads:

• MP3 blog (Wikipedia article)


• The Music Blog Boom (somewhat outdated article in the online edition of Rolling Stone)


• Is this legal? (Music blog The Blah Blah's music scraping policy)

Evonity, 2009

A special thank you and big hug for my friend SallySilvera, who at my request kept track of almost every scraped mp3 during the last six weeks of 2008, to help me put this information together.

Story also available at Evonity.org

How to become a top rookie

I'll be honest with you: I have never been a top rookie at The Sixtyone. I have the habit of loosing every point I win, by bumping every song I like, instead of just the songs I thought were homepage material. The only reason I made it to level 16 so far, is that I occasionally prohibit myself from being Romantic. But since it's not that hard to guess what you need to become one (a good profit rating) I think even I know what it takes.

As long as you're at a low level, say something less than eleven, it's relative easy to make profit out of your bumps. As a rule of thumb you could say that the earlier you bump a song, the more profit you will get from it. The risk of loosing points on songs that don't do as well as you might have expected when you early bumped it, is not particular high. As long as you stay away from unpopular genres (classic, electronic, jazz and the likes), experimental or controversial music and poor productions, you should do fine. Songs by established artists are expensive to bump, but as long as you're at a low level, you should be able to even make profit on these. Don't take my word on it, but you shouldn't be too considered with the decline of your total score, when you browse the today page. As long as you're looking out for quality music instead of an emotional treat, you should do fine. Every point spend on good music, will return sooner or later.

Then again, you might wonder why anybody would want to be a top rookie, or a Sensei of Soul for that matter. Gaming with music probably seems a bit immoral to you. Maybe you think that bumping songs because you expect them to become popular, instead of bumping them because you like them, or camping around the upload pages just to get that first bump, is childish and even compromising. Of course you can find and enjoy the best music to be found on the Net, without clicking that big triangle. You can also perfectly support artists by commenting on their songs and walls. But if you want artist to become popular on t61 you need points and you only get these by making profit on bumps.

I know that listeners at levels below 11, who want their favorites to become everyone's favorite, can get quite frustrated by this. I've read a lot of complaints about not making enough profit to be really able to support all the great music. Just hang in there, sooner or later you reach a point where you still care for music AND games, but stop caring about points and levels. When you get there, you stop being a rookie and start being a regular. In the mean time, don't try to convince the developers of t61 that they should downgrade on the game aspect of the site. I happen to love the game - not as much as the music that arrives in uncountable measures of rhythm, tunes and lyrics, but enough to hardly ever search for indie music outside t61.

It's Street Music by Evonity

Evonity posted this to his blog, Evonity.org and asked me if I'd be interested in cross-posting. Check it out!

When Caro uploaded Back It Up, after I brought The Sixtyone to her attention, I wrote on her Comment Wall:

The Sixtyone is like going to a pop festival every single day of the week and decide together with the other festival goers who'll be on the main stage.

But after giving this quote an extra thought, I come to the conclusion, that T61 is more like a shopping center with street artists on every corner. The first time you enter it, you receive a pouch full of coins (which are called 'bumps' for no particular reason), which you may spend any way you like.

When you walk across the mall, you'll find that you spend your playing money according to your mood. When you get bored you start walking faster and faster and spend money less and less. When you are cool with everything, you flip over coins at almost every busker you pass. And when you want to do some real business, you keep a good eye on every artist, just to make sure they gain you some profit.

In other words, when you're at T61, you'll be either a miser, a philanthropist or an investor. Being a miser or a philanthropist is easy. You either keep your hand close to your wallet, or scatter your bumps in any direction. Being an investor is a little more challenging.

Some people might consider the business approach of Listeners to Artists as somewhat odd. When both the jukebox and the tokens to put into it are free, how can one be an investor? How can it even be appropriate to behave like one? But take it from me: the moment you start thinking about your Listener status - your level or your ranking - you changed from a generous art lover into a sharp businessman or -woman. While still trying to enjoy the music you love, you'll find yourself checking all kinds of different data: your stats, the number of previous bumps on a song, the scale of success of previous songs by the same Artist, comments on songs, status of Listeners who bumped a song before you etc. etc. Every time you want to bump a song, you try to estimate the return on your investment.

I actually don't think that it's the business role itself that is challenging. It's the fact that you're most likely both the philanthropic music lover and the sharp businessperson at the same time. You definitely want to show your love for Artists and their songs by donating bumps to them, but you also know that only the very wealthy Listeners - those who are on the Leader board Top 50 (who happen to have twice the savings that I have ;-) ) can afford to be that generous. The rest of us always feel that strange (secretly attractive, even addictive) dilemma of having to choose between throwing a coin to show love, or funding a coin to make profit.

But then what about the Artists? As real buskers they know that appreciation is not only measured by the amount of coins in the hat, but also by the number of people who stop to listen and the time they spend listening. So at the end of the day, they probably not only calculate their earnings, but also look at the size of the audience and the magnitude of the feedback they received. If this is true, than maybe it's a good idea to add songs to your playlist and give some written positive response*, especially when you're in business mode and only want to spend bumps to receive points.

*An exception can be made for blogscrapes, you know, those songs which come from other blogs, instead of directly from Artists. They might be a good investment, but they won't feel your love. When at the shopping center, it's like throwing your coins towards a record player with a picture of the band behind it.

Fantasy Football!

Come join your fellow thesixtyone listeners in Fantasy Football! The league is brought to you by Yahoo! Fantasy Sports. There are only ten spots so join fast! It is a great way to talk about the ol' pigskin and meet members of thesixtyone. The league ID is 336868 and password is, appropriately, maxbump! Our live online draft is set for Monday, August 25 at 10:00pm EDT. To join, click here! See you on the gridiron!

TODAY on the T61 Fan Podcast - Puke Ass - Ep 00018

Punts and “Puke Ass” Bagman with music from the following groups:








This is titled “Puke Ass” because I made Bagman laugh so hard in episode 00017 that he threw up. This week he started off our show with more talk about how damned sick he is AGAIN.

If you wouldn't mind boosting my fragile self-esteem...

Podcast Alley Vote button


Perhaps you could subscribe to Bagman on T61 as well.

Reward for taking the music outside

The Sixtyone rewards you for all kinds of achievements. You can get bonus points for listening to a certain number of songs (Listen Up), seeing your first bumped songs reaching the homepage (Sensei Of Soul) or spending significantly more points on songs than you earn from them (The Romantic). But you won't be rewarded for taking music from T61 music outsite with you.
The T61 music player contains a little Share button. You can use it to retrieve either the code to embed the song in your own homepage; the code to paste a link to the song in your homepage; send the link by e-mail to a friend.
I use all Share options quite a lot and thus helping the music reach people outside T61. But do I get rewarded for that? No! Well, I think it's great to hear the best music you can imagine for free and even game with it. It's also great that you can actively support Artists, by promoting their works of art and give them usable feedback. But an Artist would benefit even more from us, if we extend their audience by promote their music outside T61.
I would suggest that, to encourage Listeners to promote music they like outside T61, a new Achievement should be developed: Radio Plugger. The function should count the number of plays a Listeners personal blog generates. It should also count the number of songs he sends through e-mail. The sent mail could contain an abuse link which, once clicked by the receiver, penalizes him for spamming. It shouldn't also be too difficult to signal click fraud.

Concerning ’groupthink’ concernes

A week ago co-founder of The Sixtyone, James Miao, wrote an open letter to the community, explaining what he considered to be 'groupthink' and why he sees that as a thread to T61. His epistle caused quite some upset, mainly because James confirmed that one of the important forces behind all kinds of social activity, the user known by the name KosmikRay, was banned because of violations of the Terms Of Service. The ban eventually resulted in the termination of the KosmikRay account.
The owners of The Sixtyone wanted to make sure that Listeners can make independent choices, something that they see endangered by what they call groupthink and mob mentality. James: "it drastically limits the voice of the community to specific subsets of power users, which is exactly why so much injustice pollutes today's record business."

He doesn't make it all clear what he considers to be mob mentality, although he mentions a phenomena invented by KosmikRay, called Upload Party - more about that later.

Mob mentality

Maybe what he meant was, that no group of members should become influential enough to dictate the success of a song or an artist. But I've never witnessed that kind of groupthink.

Of course there was this bunch of Second Life members who promoted T61 in their virtual world and promoted SL artists on The Sixtyone. They possibly succeeded one or two times in getting some of 'their' artists on the homepage, but you could hardly call that groupthink, or even worse, mob mentality. The SL'ers were supportive to some artists but were never able to push them or their songs into the top charts, or prevent others from reaching the billboard. The Listing part of the T61 community is too individual and too smart to let others determine their good taste, not even if the Second Lifers were really aiming at that, which I doubt.
And than there was KosmikRay. Ever so now and then he came up with some exciting event or campaign to add some fun to the fun and some glue between members. The greatest event he was able to organize, was the Mega Upload Party in remembrance of late blues singer, writer and guitarist Michael Paul Miller (1952 - 2008). KosmikRay got more then 61 artists to upload a new song within the time frame of only a few hours. It was as if Artists and Listeners attended a virtual music festival, where Listeners were bumping every song, instead of applauding for them.
The backside of this type of organized events was, that for a brief period of time attention became drawn away from what was normally going on at the browse pages, causing KosmikRay and his friends being accused of gaming the system on several occasions.

Adding Fun to the fun, playing games within the game

It's quite odd that the term 'gaming the system' is used to brand activities - that were organized with no other intention in mind, then to have some entertaining, social interaction with the community - as an act of violation. Especially when you take into account that the system is a game and that the participants only used the tools that were supplied by the system itself: wall comments, browse zero pages, tuneboxes, multibumps, first bumps, playlists and what not. It's not unlikely that the creators and owners saw these events as a thread to their own plans with The Sixtyone.
To take counter measures against mob mentality is defendable, not only from an owners' perspective, but also from a community's standpoint. Nobody wants to see some big music label spending sky high budgets just to viral advertise anything they like to the top of the game. But none of these things were going on. The Mega Upload Party, the campaign to raise a Temple Scene song to 1000 bumps before it hits the homepage and the First Bump Scramble were no examples of mob mentality. They were examples of games within the game. Nobody who joined these events realized that they did something wrong. Yet, within a few days, the freedom to comment on any wall you like, or send any Listener you like a tunebox was taken away, the account of a very active and highly respected member was terminated and one off the co-founders introduced the terms 'groupthink' and 'mob mentality', associated these with events of good intention, and declared them unwanted.

Game psychology

I believe the whole groupthink epistle was written to justify measures (the ban of KosmikRay and the block-by-default of the Listener walls and tuneboxes) against a certain way of using T61. There was definitely no mob mentality going on. When James writes: " the only way we can reliably shed light on good new music is when listeners make independent decisions", he might be right in itself, but the unbiased mind he wishes for every Listener is not endangered by groupthink.
As a matter of fact, it's not endangered at all, but it is surely influenced by the system. Elements like Leader boards, first bumps, max bumps, points, levels, revives, achievements, listener subscriptions, Sam and James being top 40 Listeners and Artists being featured on the official T61 blog, do have their effect on the ability to make independent decisions. This is just plain game psychology and there wouldn't be a game without it. The amount of influence is determined by the ability of the Listener to recognize and deal with this game psychology. It wouldn't surprise me if the top Listeners are all individuals who master these influences.

In other words, if you want te be good at the game* you have to learn to control yourself, which is not easy with all the great songs that you come across.

A small group of loud members

What happened last week with the ban of KosmikRay, the block-by-default of comment walls and the open letter by James, was rude, unnecessary and poorly explained. It gave way to anger and polarization, which was foreseeable and also dealt poorly with. The Listeners who dared to express their anger were described as being part of a small, loud group. As if the silence majority of members agreed with the measures taken. But it is more likely that the majority of members just wanted to have fun, hear good music and try to become better at the game. They don't want to be bothered by disputes between the owners and a small group of unsatisfied Listeners.
What constantly is being overlooked is, that the small group of members who vent their opinion, is a group of very active Artists and Listeners. People who promote and advocate The Sixtyone outside. People who try to get new Listeners on board, as well as new Artists. People who bring their membership to a higher level, by adding some A&R support to Artists (which was the case with - amongst others - KosmikRay, of whom a professional Artist said to me: "I recieved some good advice from KosmikRay - many actually.") People who take the music they discovered at T61 outside through blogs and podcasts. Their involvement with the site causes some of them to be critical.
Instead of diminishing those as just a loud group of complainers, you should listen to them and talk with them - not talk at them, or ignore them.

Evonity, June 30, 2008


* On a site note: Being critical is sometimes mistakenly being implied as being against Sam and James. Of course the founders of T61 need their fans to applaud for them. That gives them the energy and spirit to continue their work, but they also need their critics to stay sharp and far ahead of the competition.
* I happen to be one of their critics, not by choice, but by involvement. I don't think this will change. But to once and for all make it clear that in the end, I'm on their side, I hereby truthfully declare that:

• I am grateful for The Sixtyone - the system is a work of art, in fact, it's the best thing I came across in the past thirteen years of surfing the high waves of information and interaction.


• I acknowledge that T61 is the property of Sam Hsiung and James Miao and that they can do whatever they want with it.


• I trust the owners to develop a site for the benefit of an independent music industry.