I see a lot of dupe tracks in hype machine — like on the ‘popular’ page right now, there’s 2 listings for the Kanye West vs Radiohead remix song [which is hot btw!].this one has been favorite’d 29 times.
this one 12 times.
What if you started to group the same songs together — and maybe under the song listing, showed more links [blog posts] to that same track. It matters to the user how many times a song has been favorite’d [to help us discover songs that people think are hot] — but I don’t care if that same track is favorite’d 29x for one posting, and 12x for another. I want to know it has 41x.
What about checking the MD5 hash of these mp3s from these sites? If they match, then they are for sure the same song/file — just posted different places on the web.
More ideas..
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I’d love to comment on tracks. I know I can comment on the blog page, but as mentioned above, these tracks are posted all over the place. I don’t want to visit everyone’s blog post to see people’s comments. Plus, this gives you more UGC on your site. Make it easy to comment on the track on a search results page [or '/popular' page] — or on the individual track page. Use some javascript hide/show magic.
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Let me “favorite” artists. Or go out to my last.fm account, pull down all the artists I’ve listened to in the past, and start doing like a “google alerts” email to me daily that shows some new tracks by those artists on Hype Machine. [maybe old tracks will appear that people post on their blogs, but i already have -- maybe i'll not like this]. Or maybe a page on your site that’s like my own personal radio — and shows the latest mp3s that have posted for artists that I like.
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There are 2 embed codes on each track page; you should have a Flash widget embed that plays the song right through it — and also of course links to more songs on hype machine, etc. Also, have a link next to each track on a results page [or '/popular' page] that says ‘share’ and then opens up right there links for me to copy the embed codes].
What ideas do you have for a better Hype Machine? Post in the comments…