By Eliot Van Buskirk
A new, playable music chart is like a Billboard chart for the P2P generation — and you can play anything on it with a single click.
It would take an army of listeners to keep tabs on all the music being recorded and posted to MySpace, YouTube, BitTorrent and the like. How to filter it all?
We Are Hunted, a clean and simple music chart cuts to the chase. It tracks the most-favored music on P2P and social networks, Twitter, web forums and blogs. It then presents the 99 hottest tracks (according to its calculations) through an intuitive Brady Bunch
-style interface. Best of all, it slaps a play button on each track. Clicking the play button starts the song playing right there on the page, using links to YouTube audio tracks, record label sites and other internet locations that the site’s automated system finds online.
BigChampagne, Elbo.ws, Hype Machine and other sites track similar information, but We Are Hunted is far simpler for consumers to use, with big play buttons in the middle of album covers and other images that scroll past in batches of nine from right to left. It’s a preposterously easy way to hear the most talked about
of the current day, week, month or year.
“So many websites are too complex, too wordy, too long,” said Native Digital’s Nick Crocker, one of the site’s founders. “I wanted this site to be digestible in three seconds … to deliver users exactly what they want — amazing, new music, every day. There’s lots of work to do, but I think the foundations are in place.”
Right now, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are the hottest band on We Are Hunted (screenshot to the right), which makes sense considering their rock-solid performance on the most recent Saturday Night Live.
“We do this by continuously sampling the noise from news, blogs and social media,” said Stephen Phillips, lead programmer for Wotnews. “We monitor the mainstream press, blogs, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Last.fm, iLike, bit torrent, Limewire, and more.”
In addition, he says the site detects whether the press and people on social networks like or dislike a particular track and uses “semantics to understand who people are talking about, clustering and classification to group related artists and their noise, and network analysis to uncover the connections between artists and the people who write about them.”
A few slight nitpicks: The only Buy links on We Are Hunted go to the iTunes music store, and in a couple of cases, it played live or remixed versions rather than studio versions of songs. Also, if the site gets popular, it could swamp some of the servers upon which its system relies.
Regardless, We Are Hunted is getting saved in my FireFox toolbar. The site has already introduced me to a slew of great new music in the brief time I’ve been testing it.
The site is a collaboration between
Wotnews and Native Digital — the same firm that helped develop the first major label music blog in the world
. The founders plan to eventually include advertising, but Wotnews general manager Richard Slatter says the more interesting opportunity is for “organizations with an interest in music to engage in the right way with the conversation and to monitor what activity is occurring.”
