Site: thesixtyone
by Matt on 17 March 2010
thesixtyone.com It's a musical adventure through all sorts of bands and genres right in your browser. #ep13
More like this
Music reviews
Site: We Are Hunted
App: Mflow
From the podcast
Pros
Adventure in music
The whole idea of this is pretty great and brings something new to the many music streaming sites that are cropping up out there. You arrive, music plays and your whole browser is taken up with a great big image of the band and all sorts of odd controls.
You don’t really know what you’re going to get next and this adds to the exploratory nature. It’s a site that rewards exploration and spending time on it. Quite literally: there are actual rewards to be had for doing tasks on there in the Quests section.
A detail that I really like is the song title and track time countdown in the header title field. Great use of this space, especially when you’re on a different site and just want to see it on a tab in the background.
Most importantly there is tons of good music on here. And not an ad in sight. Get in.
Cons
Bum note
Some odd things happen on this site, with panels and boxes sliding in and out and tweets and images popping up in the middle of the page/screen. Whilst fun to start with, this can get a bit frustrating.
Each song page/screen is only as good as the photo they have of the artist and this can really vary.
The labeling is odd and really takes some understanding: top, hot, posted, cc, moods, open mic, revive. I’m still not sure what half of these are.
Agree or not? Give us your opinion. Or don't (no-one will make you).
Let me make things easier for you to understand. T61 once was a great site, but as you’ve noticed, the new design has a few “issues”, just because they’ve cared too much with design and forgot about user-friendly interfaces. There’s still the old layout if you want to take a look: old.thesixtyone.com. At this point they’ve removed the social features of the old site too, but you can have an idea of how clear and how better the old version was if you compare to the new one. Let’s face it, what’s more important, music or big pictures on the background? What is better, to have a list to quickly browse songs, or to have patience enough to click many times on the next button until you hit the song you’ve heard last day? Seriously, what’s wrong with that place? I’m all for changes, but the old layout is a lot more user-friendly and it was a lot better than the new one. I’m not even talking about the exposure of new artists - that is currently almost zero on the new site. On the old layout, there was a recently submitted section where you could check the most recent songs, so you could see what was really new to the site and be the first to listen a song.
In a few words, the old T61 and the new site are two completely different sites in fact. Sad, it didn’t went from water to wine, but the opposite. Hope you enjoy your music experience on T61 but mine is nearly over. Good luck!
Hi Rafael
Thanks for the message. Great bit of history about the site we weren’t aware of.
Having had a play with the old site it is immediately more user-friendly and clearer what is going on! It isn’t very visually inspired but it does work quickly and easily.
Seems like a strange decision for them to abandon usability in favour of looking different. A short-sighted idea perhaps?
I seriously have no idea what they’re aiming for now. What I do know is they’ve ignored all the users that were extremely active on the old site - spending hours a day trying to find songs and meet new artists (me included). The new site came out all suddenly and apparently with not much beta-testing (they were running a private test, but seriously, when they’ve came with the new site there was more bugs than I could count on my hands). They’ve been also investing into a massive merchandising and attracting a lot new users, but most of them doesn’t spend much time on the site. I wonder how great it could have been if they have made the same investments on the old site.
There’s also an issue with the developers. They don’t care that you use their service at all. That’s why you don’t have a feedback button on the new site (what?) and they’re pretty much ignoring what people are saying about the new site and how much people are missing the old one. I don’t get the point of it.
And all the ignoring is more annoying than the new site. For real.