I discovered TheSixtyOne just yesterday. It’s a music discovery site, much like last.fm, but with a few twists. There’s a game involved, where you can spend points on a song to “bump” it up the list of popularity. Once popular enough, a song becomes hot. The catch is you get more points when people bump the same song *after* you’ve bumped it. So basically, if you get there first, you have a better chance at scoring points.
Now, I’m in love with this site. It’s so well done and put together that I can’t stop using it just for those reasons. Nevermind that it’s full of great music. The little pop-ups, auto-refreshing pages, automatically skip to the next track on the page you were on, even if you’ve navigated away from that page. Just so many little pieces done so right.
However, I can’t help but feel the system can be easily “gamed”. I’ve started scoring decent points already and I’ve only gotten a few songs bumped. I’m now level two and can start to earn double points. It stands to reason that the more songs you bump, the more points you get. So the more points you get, the more songs you can bump. If you’re lucky, you can get in early on some greats like Radiohead and Spoon, both of which are sure fire point scorers if you can get in early. I’m not really sure what the point of it all is though. What happens to the “Hot” list after a while? Do songs fall off of it? Is it only there for the top songs, only to be replaced by other top songs? Guess we’ll see.
For now, I’m listening to some great music.
