Stay on Music's Cutting Edge with Thesixtyone

Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

There’s a ton of great music out there – much of it from bands none of us have ever heard of. Since there’s just so much music available, it can be hard to wade through the bad in order to find some of the good.

Thesixtyone is aiming to fix that by creating a Digg-like interface for finding and hearing the best of indie music, as well as sharing it and promoting it elsewhere. You can hear the best and most popular of the indie world, or go in search of deeper cuts. It’s like an Internet radio for music you’ve never heard before – cool, right?

Thesixtyone starts with the music. All the songs are uploaded by the artists themselves, and are available to be listened to by the masses. You can listen to any song, in its entirety, with just a click of the mouse. The play/next controls live at the top of the page across the site, which means that if you go to a different page, your song continues to play. The lack of that feature is something I hate about MySpace and other sites, and definitely moves thesixtyone up a few notches in my book.

Once you find a song you like, click the heart next to it to share your feelings with the world. You’ll be asked to log in (which you can do by creating an account with thesixtyone or by logging in through Facebook Connect), and you can rate away. You’ve only got a limited number of hearts to give out in a given day, though – it helps to keep people from gaming the system.

Some songs can be downloaded for free from within thesixtyone, and others can easily be found from Amazon or iTunes. You can also easily comment on songs, share them with other people, and even embed players for individual songs into just about any Web page.

If you’re not looking for another social site to get involved in, though, just head over to thesixtyone and play a few songs on the front page. Those are the most popular, most-liked songs, and they’re a fun mix of great songs that you’ve probably never heard before.

In addition to just listening, thesixtyone rounds up a collection of YouTube videos for many of the songs, letting you watch music videos, live performances, and user-made videos right from within thesixtyone’s interface.

Like Digg, thesixtyone lets you sort popular results by “hot right now,” “top songs,” and “recently posted.” You can also sort songs by your mood, or even see songs from SXSW ‘09, where a ton of great new music was introduced. There’s also a search for Creative Commons material only (awesome if you’re looking for music to use, sample, and mess with to your heart’s content).

I love sites that are useful without having to get involved, and are even better once you do. Thesixtyone fits that bill well: listening to music is easy, and rating and discovering music as a member is fun and interesting as well.

Though thesixtyone certainly isn’t the first site that wants to help you find the best of the indie music world, it’s one of the best at pushing great music in front of you, and is my newest destination for finding the artists I get to feel cool knowing about before they make it big.

Where do you find music online?

Photo: hebedesign

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