We Are Hunted

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

~ the goodbye ~

we are hunted's peak years overlap with my last.fm / hype-machine era but the site never crossed my radar in ankara. music discovery in the early 2010s in turkey meant youtube and last.fm scrobbles plus whatever the msn-friends-of-friends chain was pushing. i was aware of the "chart made from blog buzz" idea in the abstract. the specific brisbane-to-san-francisco site that formalized it did not reach me.

the pitch was clean. we are hunted crawled the music web all day: blogs, tweets, youtube, facebook. it counted mentions and weighted freshness. the resulting signal became a top-40 chart of songs nobody had heard yet. by 2012 the ingest was around 100,000 music articles and 40 million music-related tweets a month, running on a small python and postgres stack. the co-founders (stephen phillips, richard slatter, michael doherty, nick crocker) had built it in brisbane in 2007 and formally launched the public site on 17 april 2009. wired and techcrunch both covered the launch and it got 100,000 visits in its first week.

the death came on 11 april 2013. twitter had quietly acquired the company in late 2012 and let it keep running while twitter music was built behind it. on the day twitter music was announced, we are hunted posted the goodbye note and shut the consumer site. the team moved to twitter's music product. twitter music itself lasted just under a year. it shut down on 18 april 2014.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it did ~

the interesting technical part was the freshness weighting. any competent web crawler can count mentions. the harder problem is deciding when a song is "new enough" to still be a discovery and "hot enough" to still be a bet. we are hunted's chart moved fast: songs entered near the top when the blog volume spiked and decayed as the mainstream press caught up. by the time radio picked them, they had dropped off entirely. the effect was a chart you could actually use as a filter for "what should i listen to right now that isn't on the radio yet."

the interface was minimal on purpose. a numbered list with a play button and a small artist blurb. no comments, no accounts required to browse. the site's whole opinion was the ranking, and the ranking updated itself.

~ the twitter arc ~

twitter bought we are hunted because twitter had music data and no idea what to do with it. the entire feed was full of song links and gig reactions and "what are you listening to" posts and none of it surfaced anywhere. the plan was to turn we are hunted's ranking engine into a twitter-native chart. the launch product, twitter music, shipped on 18 april 2013 with a #music tab and an emerging-artists chart.

it did not work. the app was slow and the recommendations were shallow. the discovery loop stalled without the outside blog signal we are hunted had been trained on. twitter shut it down 12 months later. co-founder stephen phillips later launched wonder.fm as a spiritual successor. it also did not last.

~ what got buried with it ~

the acqui-hire era ate a lot of small music-discovery sites in a short window. songza went to google, rdio went to pandora, lala went to apple, mog went to beats. we are hunted going to twitter fits the same shape: a small team with a specific opinion about how music should surface, absorbed into a larger platform that could not preserve what made the opinion sharp. the ranking survived for a year inside twitter music. it did not survive the platform's failure to sell the product.

the piece worth remembering is the pre-algorithm feel. we are hunted's chart was not a spotify recommendation. it was a crawl of what humans were actually writing about, converted into an ordered list. the modern equivalent runs inside a recommendation model you cannot see or read. we are hunted's chart, when it worked, was a chart you could argue with.

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