Protected: Calling All Nerdcore Artists

(Fan) I love the idea, I was in the same situation as you looking for the smaller artists and this site would have been (and hopefuly will be) a fantastic resource!

This is a really interesting idea and it would certainly be a community I would like to be a part of from the ground up.

That is a great idea, and a noble quest to boot. Your feature list is already quite impressive, – and you're correct it will be a lot of work. Gauging reactions in this manner is sure to let you know whether you're on the right track or not. I'd think you're onto a winner for the artists, and the fans.

Just to keep the comments in one place – from Shael Riley:
“It's been done, but if you think you can do it better, have at it.”

In an effort to continue transparency and demonstrate my wish for this to be everything I believe it can be, I'm posting a public link to the wireframes I'm working on for this site. Feedback is encouraged

http://iplotz.com/app/viewer.php?k=f250318df884…

That's sort of how I feel, Dale, and what I meant about not wanting to step on toes. I'm certainly not an expert, and I'm a relative newbie as a fan (only a few years now), so I don't want anyone to think I'm trying to speak to what the scene needs like I'm some kind of an expert. I'm approaching this solely as a fan who wants to help, but I'm leery about coming off as a know-it-all or asshole for meddling.

Hi Billy – thanks for taking the time to reply I might take you up on that as things progress – I'll need some guinea pigs for the artist area. Will we be seeing you at Nerdapalooza this year?

So you want to be the DE FACTO nerd music website.

I love the idea that it aggregates info from other sites. There should be a timeline in which it pulled bits from other sites like date> new pictures (cause its plugged into a flickr account or two, three?) date2> new video (cause its plugged into Youtube) Blah blah. Pulling in info from other places is awesome and yes, its a bish to input data multiple times, especially when you didn't remember that SoundCloud posts to Twitter for you when you already tweeted something. If i was a fan i'd want to see what activity some band has been up to. Maybe this site only pulls band pictures from Flickr/Picasa to enforce the mentality that data comes from other sources to here

I love the idea that you can add to the site yourself. Clean is a must but it would be cool if it could be customizable so that your page isn't the exact same template as someone else's page. That would be a turn off for a fan I think.

For making it easier to find music, why not have a Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly and Yearly top 10 lists culled from the on-site voting? Also, how about fan accounts as well as musician accounts? The top 10 lists should be from fans only. Maybe an Artists Choice List in which artists vote for music by other artists.

A section for music videos would be cool too.

Maybe all of the artists could tag themselves from items in a tag cloud, petition more words to be added to the cloud. Each song, not artist, needs to be tagged. Like, i want more songs on gaming or star wars. Oh this new song about star wars is good, lets see if i like what else this artist has made, etc. Maybe bigger acts need a 'has influenced' tree branch for fans to follow breadcrumbs to other artists.
Buttons for random song, random video, random band profile.

If the site and methodology becomes popular, I would hope that you would sell the backend to other subgenres.

So to summarize what I think this site should provide is –
For Musicians: Aggregation with other websites, personalization
For Fans: Voting, links to/from like artists, top 10 lists, streaming music

Haha – your comment was so long, I was braced for an ass-reaming It's not actually that *I* want to be the DE FACTO nerd music website. I just feel like there are so many others that come close (or not at all) and still don't really solve the issue of helping connect fans with lesser-known, good musicians.

So macroscopic goals are to:
1) Connect music lover to musician, making a Fan
2) Make it easy for a musician to share content, make Fans

newsfeeds, announcements, etc. It's funny, when I find a new artist I like, the first thing I do is guess at a twitter name and search facebook to see if they have a fan page – because that info doesn't live anywhere else in one spot.

It sounds like for artists, on the page in which they populate URLs for your site to grab content from you'll also want to make a “Get One!” link to sign up for %servicename%. Making it easy to enable themselves seems important but I don't want you to be babying people. IMO this should be a tool for people to plug into and go.

I'll have to chew on the customizable design thing – I would honestly kill myself if it turned into another MySpace… lol. Hopefully, the fans are focused on the music, and not the animated gif Calvin-pissing gif in the background

Maybe there are 5/7/9 color pallette choices that are randomized and you can change it if you want? Most def a band picture that is selectable (from a list of Flickr/Picasa pics?)

Vids I figured would be handled via YouTube. The artist could either paste in a playlist URL(s), or add specific videos by pasting in their urls into the admin. My goal is to allow updating the profiles almost automagical for those artists who have their shit together – youtube channels/playlists, RSS feeds for their site, etc. But also provide options for folks who don't have that much tech juju.

Hmm, making your own YT playlists is easy. Don't baby people but give them simple directions. Playlists are great, you just gotta make a note to add videos to it everyone once in a while.

Also figured each song AND artist would be tagged, but also the ability to upload lyrics will help sort out some of that by way of searching and tags.

Oh that's good. You can also ask to plug into someone's website and maybe they have a keyword they use for lyrics as a post tag or category that you can use for your searching/tagging of an artist? I want to populate my site with posts with song lyrics, wait on that!

You can see the beginning of the wireframes here:
http://iplotz.com/app/viewer.php?k=f250318df884…

(Doubleclick in flash is broken in FF 3.5+ – try Safari or something else.) The Artist admin page isn't done, but the homepage shows you the direction I'm going in. Very simple, very friendly, and easy to use.

LOVE the “has influenced” idea. Absolutely love it. Genius. I owe you a beer at Nerdpalooza

yay i like beer! I'm hoping people will make little family trees, maybe that can all be aggregated together.

Awesome! Since I posted this, I've gotten some great brains to help with the concepting and feature set, to make sure we stay on track with respect to providing the best for fans and artists alike. We've expanded the feature set a bit, and it's very exciting! Right now, my quorum consists of myself, Dale Chase, HexWarrior, intEighty from Dual Core, Z from Hipster, Please, and funky49. The enthusiasm and ideas are incredibly exciting, and I've started to work on some code already

Your unbridled enthusiasm is downright infectious… lol

I totally grok the semi-jaded responses some people have, the “been done” remarks. But I stand by my assertion that it *hasn't* been done before. At least not the way I see it being done.

Hey geno – yep, this is still happening I'm hoping to have a working beta by Nerdapalooza. Totally grok your concerns about types of music. What I figured we'd do is handle that by way of careful categorization (with the help of Z and others.) I don't know if we want to limit it only to nerdcore, or if any kind of nerdy music should be included, and just organized into it's own set of categories and sub-categories. This would give a platform for nerdy-but-not-nerdcore artists like Marian Call. On the other hand, I don't know if trying to be everything to everybody would be a bad idea for some reason.

Was wondering if I could be of some help to the project? Backwards ricky and I run the original Nerdcore archive of sorts. (just wanting to help in any way heh)