thesixtyone

» see thesixtyone.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed thesixtyone at every stage. by 2008 i was on last.fm plus pirate mp3s pulled off warez forums, and gamified indie music discovery for the american yc-startup crowd never came up in my browsing. still. so this is a distance-obit that reads what other people wrote about it while it was alive.

the site was named after u.s. route 61, the highway that runs from new orleans up to memphis and beyond. that road is the physical origin of most of the blues canon, so the naming was a statement of taste. the founders were james miao and samuel hsiung, from paul graham's y combinator batch. the alpha shipped in january 2008 and the beta opened publicly later that same year. joi ito and reid hoffman put in follow-on money.

the mechanic was the interesting thing. indie artists uploaded tracks under creative commons or standard licensing, and users listened through a curated feed. every user had a pool of "hearts" (a soft currency you accumulated by listening and by promoting songs early) that you spent to boost a track up the ranking. if you hearted a song before it broke big, you earned reputation. it was collaborative filtering wearing an rpg's clothes. neogaf and hacker news both described the shape as "music-social-network-with-an-mmo-layer" at the time. it worked for a couple of years before the 2010 redesign pulled the rug on the core community.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the redesign that broke it ~

in early 2010 the founders shipped a rewrite that stripped out much of the rpg layer and replaced it with a simpler stream-and-recommend feed. the change was pushed without a community-preview period. active heart-hoarders and top-ranked promoters lost their standings overnight. a change.org petition ("let thesixtyone live") went up within a week and pulled a few thousand signatures.

the founders stood by the change. traffic and engagement dropped after the redesign and never recovered to pre-2010 levels. by 2013 the site was still online but quiet. the community that had been the platform's engine had moved to bandcamp for uploads and to soundcloud for discovery. thesixtyone kept going anyway, mostly on inertia.

~ the day it died ~

this part i was not around for. in april 2017 the front page was replaced with a farewell note. the servers would close at midnight on 1 may 2017. the message from the founders read: "2007 to 2017. thank you for being a part of it. thesixtyone was our baby for most of our twenties. we're incredibly sorry we weren't able to keep things going in the right direction." nine and a half years from the alpha, seven years since the redesign that broke the momentum.

no acquirer and no archive. no offline mode either. some of the tracks survived on the artists' own sites or on bandcamp. most of the ranking data and heart history went with the servers. what stayed was the change.org petition, still standing at a few thousand signatures, and a small subreddit of users who had met each other through the game layer and stayed in touch after.

~ what remains ~

thesixtyone belongs to the second wave of pre-spotify indie music services alongside [[muxtape]] and [[blip-fm]]. [[purevolume]] and [[imeem]] were the label-scale versions of the same window. thesixtyone was the y-combinator small-team version.

the thing worth remembering is that gamified discovery mostly did not survive as a category. rpg-shape scoring and hoarded reputation pools got absorbed into every social feed by way of upvotes and likes, but no music service ships that vocabulary as a first-class discovery layer anymore. thesixtyone tried it as a first-class layer for nine years and could not scale it past the crowd that liked the game.

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