HN user
A music for ppl who like to listen whole albums and keep track of what they discover (and maybe share it with friends). Something like Goodreads, but for music.
Original HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862
That's slightly different from my experience, in which I built a niche social network for music explorers, but it also has bookmarking features.
I noticed a sustained usage from very few people (perhaps 10-20 users), even after a year.
So clearly there's some value other than the social aspect of the site. Not sure what to make of it though.
Throughout all these years, I got convinced that human recommendations (those from a close circle of friends I trust) are the best source of music discovery.
[Shameless plug] That's why I created https://digs.fm, which is kinda like Goodreads but for music.
Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862
I always loved listening to music. However, the past few years I started more actively exploring new (old) music around the world and actually listening to whole albums. (I'm always amazed by the vast amount of good music that exists out there, waiting to be discovered and experienced)
I've a few friends that have the same itch and so we were constantly exchanging recommendations via different communication channels (Signal, email, Slack etc.)
So I started building a website that's "like Goodreads, but for music releases". You can mark albums as "want to listen", "listened" and "dig" (loved), organizing your lists with tags and notes and share them with others. You then have a public activity profile and you can add other users as friends and see their own activity.
Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862
Nice to see last.fm on the front page, it brings back fun memories when we were mocking each other about leaving the player playing all night just to get the stats up.
Shameless plug: I'm a firm believer that human recommendations are superior, which is one of the reasons I'm creating https://digs.fm, something like Goodreads but for music[1].
Totally agreed. Even though YouTube's Related Videos section is at times very decent for music recs., human recommendations are unparalleled.
That's actually one of the reasons I've created https://digs.fm (think Goodreads but for music).
I haven't switched out of table view since I started using the site. Also I've been almost exclusively using the mobile site, you do have to scroll in list view to see the notes.
Yeah the list view is not suitable for mobiles since it's a table. I'll have to come up with another way to display the tags and notes in the thumb view. I've put a ticket to tackle it, because apparently more people are using this on mobile every day.
Can you see others' notes/tags? I don't see them, but maybe I'm missing that too.
So notes are private, but for tags I have a ticket to add a setting to choose if it's going to be public or private. Right now they're private. I think I'll prioritize this.
It definitely would be cool to see if people click "want to listen" from someone else, I've already seen albums move from profile to profile. You could even track how each album spreads, and show a "virality" chart...how "contagious" it is, and then how many people actually listen or dig the album eventually.
That's a neat idea, it never occurred to me, thanks! Added it to the backlog.
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As a minor suggestion, if a comment talks about a release in general (like a review), then it might be more suitable for it to be added on the release page (as opposed in a "Listened" or "Digged" activity item). If you scroll down on a release page, you'll see a "Community discussion" section, and if you add a comment there, it will appear in your activity feed.
Hey thanks for the report, this should be fixed by now.
That's what the "Notes" text field in My Lists (make sure you switch to the table view) is for. Have you seen it?
Also, you can add tags to your items, as a means to organize them however you see fit.
One little quirk I noticed is that adding albums from bandcamp doesn't seem to work if the artist is using a custom domain.
Just a heads up, this is now fixed.
Hey, thanks for the amazingly kind words. That's very encouraging to hear!
One little quirk I noticed is that adding albums from bandcamp doesn't seem to work if the artist is using a custom domain. I tried it with the browser extension and by copy-pasting the URL. Maybe you can change the way a bandcamp site is detected? Does the code only look at the URL to determine if it's bandcamp, or does it load the page and try to parse it?
I didn't know custom domains were a thing with Bandcamp. I've added a ticket to tackle this somehow (seems like they all CNAME to dom.bandcamp.com, so that could be useful).
Another issue I ran into is the search; it seems like you need to type the album name exactly and with correct spacing and punctuation, not just partially.
Searching is something that could be improved a lot. Thanks for that specific example, it really helps. This'll be prioritized soon.
I'm torn on this one, because I really liked being able to make an account without providing an email address, but social notifications might be more useful if I didn't have to go to the site to see them. Definitely should be opt-in, but I think the option to receive email notifications
Yeah there's already a ticket for that. I totally agree with making it opt-in. I myself despise notification noise I didn't explicitly asked for :) This will be definitely done short-term.
This is just a personal nice-to-have feature and I know it can be somewhat contentious (if you are looking towards future monetization licensing might be a headache), but I would love more open source code.
This is something I occasionally considered a few times myself. To be frank, the code is far from a point that I'd be comfortable releasing at this point. I haven't considered monetization yet (not even remotely), but I would like leave that option open.
Perhaps I could start small, and release some code I've written to wrap the MusicBrainz database and make it available as a Rails model.
This definitely needs more consideration - not something that's likely to be done soon, since there are other things I'd like to focus on (like those you suggested, polishing and bug fixes).
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Thanks a lot for the amazing feedback!
Not yet, but it's something that could be implemented long-term. So, if I understand correctly, are you talking about an album/EP/single release? Can you please provide some examples of what you searched for and didn't found?
Note that you can paste URLs straight from Discogs/Spotify/MusicBrainz/Bandcamp in the search box, and it will take you to the release page in Digs.
That looks very interesting and close to the spirit of Digs. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll definitely check this out and perhaps borrow interesting ideas!
Oh I love Dego & Kaidi :)
That's true! All release groups from MusicBrainz are fed into the Digs database.
I'm a member on ListenBrainz (I also hang out in #metabrainz). It's an awesome project, thanks for your work.
I think that the my other comment comparing Digs to Last.fm (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32552617), applies pretty much for a comparison with ListenBrainz as well.
While they have some overlap (i.e recommend tracking users, statistics), they do differ in the fact that the one defines "listen" as "listen (new or repeated) of a track/album/artist", while the other defines "listen" as "first-time listen of a release".
Also, the other main focus of Digs is providing a way to organize your "Want to Listen" list (with tags, notes and more on the way), as a means to stay on top of all the music you found interesting at some point. The problem I had, specifically, was that I had "Queues" of things I like to hear in the future (albums, mixes, etc.) in 3 or 4 different sites: YouTube, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Discogs, Spotify. So I wanted to have a single way to organize all these (that's why Digs knows how to parse URLs from these services) and share them with friends.
All in all, I love ListenBrainz and I believe there is room for both sites in this world, since they tackle slightly different needs.
Thanks for the suggestions. It's true that the UX definitely lacks in many parts, and in many others it's unclear what one should do after they sign up for the first time.
Let me try to clarify a few things. First and foremost, Digs is supposed to be a bookmarking tool (you add and organize albums to lists). Then, it's a social network.
It's not created with the mindset of it being a music streaming service. That said, for convenience and pragmatism, a web player is included if the release was added via a Spotify, Mixcloud or Bandcamp link, or if the corresponding MusicBrainz release had a Discogs URL associated with it. Ideally, every release on the page should include a web player - this is something I'm trying to figure out how to do automatically, without enormous amount of human moderation. (I understand this is all technicalities, I just wanted to explain how it works currently.)
I see a feed of albums from strangers.
The "Community updates" feed is the default if you have no friends added yet. If this is too noisy (and after this post it will be, for almost all people I assume), then you can switch to "Friends' updates" by clicking on the dropdown arrow. The choice will be persisted and you won't see that noise again.
If I'm sharing music: - I want a quick way to share music
The current way to share music, is passively, i.e. by having friends (your friends will see your activity in their home feed). The active way to share is to click on the "Recommend" option, from the action dropdown button in a release page (e.g. https://digs.fm/releases/2782921-DJ-Shadow-What-Does-Your-So...).
Edit: Signed out and noticed you have "continue with spotify" on the logged out / sign in page https://digs.fm/users/sign_in -- that wasn't available on your home page https://digs.fm/. I would've signed up with spotify if available and maybe that would've exposed clearer UX?
The Spotify SSO is currently broken, so I've disabled it until I fix it. Apparently I forgot to hide it from the sign_in page as well - thanks for bringing this up!
It would be nice to see all listeners to a particular artist or genre/tag. That would make it easier to befriend like-minded listeners. I imagine the success of this website will partly hinge on the edge density of the social network, so the more avenues you provide users to find friends, the better.
Great suggestion. Truth is, I was focused so much on the core stuff (indexing releases, implementing the bookmarking system, user profiles etc.) that the friend discovery aspect is almost non-existent. What you suggested seems like a great start though.
Yep, this will be done definitely in the short to medium-term.
I'm sorry for that. There's an outstanding bug on the Spotify implementation. It'll be a while before it's back to working again (pending action from Spotify).
Any suggestions to research are more than welcome!
Sorry for that, I found the root cause, unfortunately it'll be a bit before that's fixed, I guess (depends on action on behalf of Spotify).
I myself wanted to mark mixes as listen later, among regular album releases. So that's why Mixcloud URLs are supported in the search box, and it will fetch the actual mix.
For example: https://digs.fm/releases/57246010-Monkey-Shoulder-DJ-JAZZY-J...
A public API will be implemented long-term. Releases are all fed from MusicBrainz database (2.6M releases atm), so I'd say that chances that you'll find what you're looking for are high.
And if not, then you can add a release by providing a Spotify/Discogs/Bandcamp/Mixcloud URL in the search box, and it will fetch the proper metadata.
Yep, that's on my radar definitely, probably in the long-term plans. It's a great idea.
See my comment at the top level for a comparison to Last.fm. Let me know if that clarifies things. (I use last.fm too!)
A few people mentioned that this has some Last.fm vibes. While that's true, here's my thoughts on how they differ and what prompted me to create Digs:
Last.fm mostly answers the question: "What I've been listening to mostly, this month?" whereas Digs.fm aims to answer the question: "Which album I discovered (i.e. listened for the first time) AND liked last month?".
This essentially comes down to the fact that Last.fm tracks "listens" of an album/track/artist, no matter if its the first time you're listening to it or the 1000th, where in Digs.fm _you_ (manually) track the _first listen of a release_.
Likewise, Digs aims to answer: "which album did my friend discovered and liked?" or "what album does my friend wants to listen to?". The premise is that, the fact that a certain person (which I know) found this interesting, is a good signal that I might be interested to that as well.
So, I'd say that, while they do share similarities, they're different tools that aim to tackle different needs. I myself was using Last.fm around 2008, then forgot about it until last year. I activated it, but I haven't looked at it ever since. I'd say it's a good tool to look at the yearly reports once or twice a year, but to me that was about it.
In contrast, I use Digs daily (I'm biased :P) to see what my friends discovered, add new albums to listen to my lists or pick something to listen from my "Want to Listen". Also, I love discussing about something that I listened or someone else listened (this is done by commenting on activity items).
Ultimately, I wanted a way to track and organize music discoveries (not listens), and make it so that I can easily share them with friends, and perhaps spark a discussion around those.
In fact, a few people asked for an integration with Last.fm, in which you could import the albums/artists from Last.fm in Digs, and add then manually add those that you want to a list.
I tried signing up with Spotify, but after accepting the authorization on Spotify's side, I was redirected back to digs.fm but not signed in.
Ugh, a friend also reported this to me but I couldn't reproduce it. Mind letting me know what browser you're using? If you don't want to disclose, feel free to email me at [redacted].
Thanks for reporting this.
P.S. I'll post a comment regarding comparing to Last.fm soon :)
I'm in the same boat. In my experience, fellow human beings are the best source of recommendations. I constantly get great recommendations from a few friends and family members (I have to admit, maybe I'm lucky).
This is actually what prompted me to create https://digs.fm - I wanted an easy way to see what music my friends digged lately (something like Goodreads, but for music).