A music for ppl who like to listen whole albums and keep track of what they discover (and maybe share it with friends). Something like Goodreads, but for music.
Throughout all these years, I got convinced that human recommendations (those from a close circle of friends I trust) are the best source of music discovery.
[Shameless plug] That's why I created https://digs.fm, which is kinda like Goodreads but for music.
I always loved listening to music. However, the past few years I started more actively exploring new (old) music around the world and actually listening to whole albums. (I'm always amazed by the vast amount of good music that exists out there, waiting to be discovered and experienced)
I've a few friends that have the same itch and so we were constantly exchanging recommendations via different communication channels (Signal, email, Slack etc.)
So I started building a website that's "like Goodreads, but for music releases". You can mark albums as "want to listen", "listened" and "dig" (loved), organizing your lists with tags and notes and share them with others. You then have a public activity profile and you can add other users as friends and see their own activity.
Nice to see last.fm on the front page, it brings back fun memories when we were mocking each other about leaving the player playing all night just to get the stats up.
Shameless plug: I'm a firm believer that human recommendations are superior, which is one of the reasons I'm creating https://digs.fm, something like Goodreads but for music[1].
Awesome, thank you! Any plans to allow you to put a little note about why you want to listen to an album/where you heard about it/etc? Also maybe if you click "want to listen" from someone else's post, show that somewhere? I'm starting to get a pretty long queue to listen to, it would be nice to see a little info to help me decide what to try next.
Ohhh, I see it in list view. :) I haven't switched out of table view since I started using the site. Also I've been almost exclusively using the mobile site, you do have to scroll in list view to see the notes. I'll try out the tags. Can you see others' notes/tags? I don't see them, but maybe I'm missing that too. I think it would be cool to bring the social aspect in there too. I left a comment on my own "Want to Listen" post yesterday for the purpose I'm thinking about.
It definitely would be cool to see if people click "want to listen" from someone else, I've already seen albums move from profile to profile. You could even track how each album spreads, and show a "virality" chart...how "contagious" it is, and then how many people actually listen or dig the album eventually.
Still having a lot of fun with this, thanks again!
> I haven't switched out of table view since I started using the site. Also I've been almost exclusively using the mobile site, you do have to scroll in list view to see the notes.
Yeah the list view is not suitable for mobiles since it's a table. I'll have to come up with another way to display the tags and notes in the thumb view. I've put a ticket to tackle it, because apparently more people are using this on mobile every day.
> Can you see others' notes/tags? I don't see them, but maybe I'm missing that too.
So notes are private, but for tags I have a ticket to add a setting to choose if it's going to be public or private. Right now they're private. I think I'll prioritize this.
> It definitely would be cool to see if people click "want to listen" from someone else, I've already seen albums move from profile to profile. You could even track how each album spreads, and show a "virality" chart...how "contagious" it is, and then how many people actually listen or dig the album eventually.
That's a neat idea, it never occurred to me, thanks! Added it to the backlog.
---
As a minor suggestion, if a comment talks about a release in general (like a review), then it might be more suitable for it to be added on the release page (as opposed in a "Listened" or "Digged" activity item). If you scroll down on a release page, you'll see a "Community discussion" section, and if you add a comment there, it will appear in your activity feed.
Sorry, one more tiny thing. I listened to an album from the "Want to Listen" list, I just marked it Listened but the update says "digged". I don't think it actually added it to Digged, just something I noticed. I'm gonna start using that Canny link for these, sorry this probably isn't very convenient for you.
Hey, thanks for the amazingly kind words. That's very encouraging to hear!
> One little quirk I noticed is that adding albums from bandcamp doesn't seem to work if the artist is using a custom domain. I tried it with the browser extension and by copy-pasting the URL. Maybe you can change the way a bandcamp site is detected? Does the code only look at the URL to determine if it's bandcamp, or does it load the page and try to parse it?
I didn't know custom domains were a thing with Bandcamp. I've added a ticket to tackle this somehow (seems like they all CNAME to dom.bandcamp.com, so that could be useful).
> Another issue I ran into is the search; it seems like you need to type the album name exactly and with correct spacing and punctuation, not just partially.
Searching is something that could be improved a lot. Thanks for that specific example, it really helps. This'll be prioritized soon.
> I'm torn on this one, because I really liked being able to make an account without providing an email address, but social notifications might be more useful if I didn't have to go to the site to see them. Definitely should be opt-in, but I think the option to receive email notifications
Yeah there's already a ticket for that. I totally agree with making it opt-in. I myself despise notification noise I didn't explicitly asked for :) This will be definitely done short-term.
> This is just a personal nice-to-have feature and I know it can be somewhat contentious (if you are looking towards future monetization licensing might be a headache), but I would love more open source code.
This is something I occasionally considered a few times myself. To be frank, the code is far from a point that I'd be comfortable releasing at this point. I haven't considered monetization yet (not even remotely), but I would like leave that option open.
Perhaps I could start small, and release some code I've written to wrap the MusicBrainz database and make it available as a Rails model.
This definitely needs more consideration - not something that's likely to be done soon, since there are other things I'd like to focus on (like those you suggested, polishing and bug fixes).
Not yet, but it's something that could be implemented long-term. So, if I understand correctly, are you talking about an album/EP/single release? Can you please provide some examples of what you searched for and didn't found?
Note that you can paste URLs straight from Discogs/Spotify/MusicBrainz/Bandcamp in the search box, and it will take you to the release page in Digs.
That looks very interesting and close to the spirit of Digs. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll definitely check this out and perhaps borrow interesting ideas!
Original HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862