Playlouder - Music is the Network

You people. Here's a suggestion - why not have news stories, album reviews and features in different sections? That would rock.

they are under different tags if people want to use tags to classify them. we're not going to impose classifications on people

And next time I go to a supermarket, and I find all the produce in a massive pile in the middle of the floor, and I see a shop assistant and he says "you want beans, flour, milk eggs and corn flakes?" Okay dive in - we're not going to impose classifications on your food." then I'll go to another supermarket. Or kill myself.

go on then

alternatively, just use the tags

fuck tags dude, seriously!

what is this web 2.0 obsession with tags anyway?

yahoo lost the war by trying to put everything into categories

ordinary tags are rubbish - we made smarter tags

we need to make it easier to find things by tag, i think.

svenhunter, what about a supermarket where if you wanted baked beans they were simultaniously in the 'canned goods' aisle, the 'legumes, nuts and pulses' aisle, the 'easy hot snacks' aisle and the 'cheap and nourishing' aisle, so that whether you were looking for any one of these things, you'd find them easily?

fear tim for he hath read thee long tail

the supermarket is a place for consumption, whereas we're a place for production too

we do need better tools for tag-based browsing, though. and these will come.

haha, to paraphrase eric raymond, it's more like a bazaar than a supermarket

or a cathedral for that matter

I appreciate the tagging system, I just don't see that it's a case of either or

and another thing while we're all having a grump ...
am i the only one who gets miffed when trying to open the thread/chat thats listed in the top left corner - only to have to battle against the effing 'People' dropdown all the time ?

I'd suggest that a prominent feature on the homepage should be "content with tags you care about". Then I'll customise my own homepage based around news and album reviews, rather than having to awkwardly stalk people who might write things I care about.

soon you will be able to stalk tags, artists, labels, and other things beyond people

so you could stalk 'news'

for example

i think you might appreciate being able to get 'news' tagged content just from people you rate rather than anyoldone

Ok this is interesting, have a look at this "old" chat about tagging. I think that here in Playlouder they believe in tags and they think that things might organize and categorize themselves rationally like wikipedia is supposed to be a reliable reference of knowledge which is not the case is it ?

It's kind of a new religion of the web 2.0 . the Site creators think ok we've got an idea we've got no money, let's leave people do the work themselves, they'll think they are free. But in the end ends up something like Myspace News or some other brainless communities. We want freedom and participation but we need a certain form of regulation and we need editorial.

Otherwise all this is going to turn into a turtle soup. We used to talk about that Paul Sanders and I know you'd really like to believe in the NEW RELIGION but please, you who have SENSE, don't let them go to far on the TAG DOGMA...

but please, you who have SENSE, don't let them go to far on the TAG DOGMA... .

joe - we're not building a single community, or a single editorial voice - we're building a space in which communities and editorial voices can form, and making music and tools available to them.

ambitious I know, but we hope the vision will become more and more apparent as we add more tools. Stalking is one of the next major steps towards it.

can we have a mission statement then? other than the crap on your extreamly vegitarian

home page

you talk like a politician's rhetorical environment policy. you really think this site needs a reeducated crusty. can we vote employees off the site? if not, why not?

does applied effort imply an employment opportunity. if we are to work, down size and open source, unless control is really necessary!!!!!!!!!§!!!!!!!!!!

I've been involved in a couple of sites that have attempted to do what you're trying to do - and it doesn't really work. It CAN work but you need to be building those communities actively and- especially in the early stages like this - overachieving on the content you're providing. And I hate to say it but there's been a real drop in the number of news stories being put up here

that is something we can do something about - we have made a handful of broadband accounts available in return for new content being added to the site, and will look for ways to encourage more people to add topical content

we would always prefer to make incentives available in an open way - so all people get equal chance to benefit and so it's obvious who is incentivised. to date we have simply not had the development time to do this properly, but at some point we shall.

fuck tags. put things into sections. I know with the net here we're trying to 'break things down, brother' or whatever but sometimes established systems last so long because they're A GOOD THING. I can't imagine how the Plalylouder writers feel when all their reviews and articles are lumped in with clubs ads and people's bloody profiles. I don't bother with Playlouder a quarter as much as I used to. You've pushed me to DiS to be honest. There's such thing as too much freedom....I don't want to have to tag things. I want to be able to just browse around.

Also, how is Playlouder making money now? I don't see ads and I well imagine you get a fraction of the hits that you used to get. Are you all working for free?

yes

every member is a playlouder writer if they want to be

if people want to use the tags as sections then that's fine - we will make it easy to do it that way

the combination of tags and stalking means that you can decide which writers and which tag/sections you want to see - and that's fine

so can everyone else

I have to agree with Jacques here. I go to DiS now for music news. This site is very difficult to navigate around, the colours are deeply unpleasant, and why on earth the content and chat colours are almost identical is beyond my comprehension. This idea that everybody is equally talented as a journalist is utter guff, quite frankly. There are a lot of factors in being a good music writer. Whilst I do like the open-door policy, as it were, it is very unrealistic to expect quality writing as a result - it pretty much reduces matters to a lowest common demoninator framework whereby you are as good as how many people 'stalk' you. There still ought to be room in music journalism for educating people rather than pandering to mass consensus. Plus I think it is rather offensive to expect people to write for you for free. This is just one example of what is happening right across the music industry. Few are being paid for such lofty privileges as having an ability and working hard at it, and the quality writers and bands are not able to reach their full potential because their voices are lost in an ocean of drivel, quickly devoured by short-memoried consumer readerships and then sinking with barely a trace. Free broadband is hardly an incentive unless you're only expecting 3 hours work a month out of people.

you will have noticed that we don't rate members by the number of stalkers they have - you can if you like, but the site does not

we hope that people will stalk writers whose writing they think is good - that's why we made a tool that lets you follow the writers you rate, rather than insisting that you get whatever the site chooses for you

nor do we see Playlouder competing with DiS - they offer very different services.

and as for the broadband - it does come with unlimited music downloading, which might not be worth much in the context of limewire and bittorrent, but at least the creators get paid

So, be honest, how many hits does Playlouder currently get compared to the old site?

A nice idea in theory, but if for 18 quid a month you get to download unlimited numbers of songs and broadband, then really how much can artists be getting paid? A negligible amount, assuming that about 8 quid of the 18 effectively accounts for all the downloads. Probably ends up being less than 10 pence a song. I am unable to offer a better solution to the problem of free downloading but a relatively successful band in terms of downloads via PlayLouder would perhaps see about ten pounds a month to be split between however many people wrote the song. Therefore, is it really worthwhile bothering with at all? Said musicians would be vastly better off busking.

stalk people who's writing they like? well, i generally like the writing of the Playlouder writers but they don't seem to be writing hardly anything anymore, I presume not by choice. Trying to make the users the writers? That's fair enough but that's not a music site, that's just one glorified excuse for a mesage board. You're trying to be more communal but ironically it has the opposite effect. If the site is what the user chooses it to be, everyone has a difference experience of the site, there's no shared experience which actually makes it all very disjointed and actually isolates people intead of bringing them together.

we're not trying to be more or less communal - people can be as communal as they like on the site. we set out to make tools for people who want to use them, so we don't distinguish between users and writers.

i'm not sure how many of the members have actually added content - all of them are Playlouder writers

and on the subject of the return for the artist - a subscription model generally returns about 3 times the cash per year to the music industry per user than selling music by the unit does

it's a bit complicated by varying degrees of substitution and by the tendency of some big music buyers to spend less on subscription than they would on units, but still works out positive for the industry overall

you are right however, most musicians would be better of busking - unfortunately we can't fix it so that most musicians get a living wage, and nor can any other business

All sounds very cold and impersonal if you ask me. I see there's 9 people online now.

And most of them are Playlouder 'staff'

your point?

I'm sure that's quite clear

have you had a rummage in the new music we added recently?

we do need to improve the way we help new members discover what they can do with the site. any suggestions?

back later..

I am quite saddened by what has happened to the site. What exactly is the plan? At the moment the site seems be a cross between an infrequently-visited music message board and a version of Limewire where you have to pay. I'm rather unsure as to what PlayLouder now has that is likely to attract people. It used to have good music reviews, interviews, and news updated regularly and full of proper honest opinions and much humour. If people are after news, they want regular updates, so they'll go to DiS, or similar. If people want to download music they will probably do it for free. PlayLouder currently seems to want to have several roles, on the cheap, but its services simply cannot compare with other similar websites at the moment. I think it needs a serious re-think. I genuinely hope it re-establishes itself given time but a lot of work needs doing in my opinion.

I think you can have your cake and eat it if you want. You can have these tags and stalking, but for those who don't want that, a bit more structure with the basic site. So, not just everything thorwn in content, but a bit for news, a bit for reviews, a bit for features/interview, a bit for reviews by users. Also, try and make some money....put ads up or whatever. You have some great writers, Luke, Doran, Jeremy, Sven etc. Put them on a wage and let them write write write. It seems Playlouder wants to be something completely different from what i want. maybe I'm old fashioned. But even then, you have some great writers and I think that they're being wasted.

New design concept is very post-modern - Derrida would be proud of you...

...and thesvenhunter: Amazon don't run supermarkets, but if they did...