Show HN: Digs.fm – For passionate music explorers (like Goodreads but for music) (digs.fm)
As someone who's constantly on the look for new music to discover and being very deliberate about the things I'm listening, I needed a better way to organize the albums I want to listen to, listened and liked. And also I would like to see the discoveries of other folks who I know I like.
So I started creating the tool I wish I had in the first place. In Digs, the basic idea is that:
- you can add music releases (albums, EPs, singles, mixes) in three lists: Want to Listen, Listened, Digged. You can also use tags and notes to better organize these lists.
- you get a public profile where your activity is visible (i.e. what you added to your lists). Example profile: https://digs.fm/alskn.
- you can add other people as friends. Then you'll see their activity in your home feed.
- you can either like or add a comment to any activity of your friends (or yours)
- you can explicitly recommend a release to one of your friends
You can think of it like Goodreads, but for music. I would assume it's mostly targeted to people that like to listen whole albums and would like to keep track of what albums/mixes they want to listen to, sometime in the future.
This is very early yet and there are a lot of rough edges.
You can find a few screenshots of the basic functionality in the homepage, from where you can also create an account - https://digs.fm.
I'd appreciate any feedback, thanks in advance!
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EDIT: I figured it's worth expanding a bit on some highlights:
- In the search box, apart from searching, you can copy/paste any release URL from Discogs/Spotify/Bandcamp/Mixcloud/MusicBrainz and it will basically fetch the release and then you can add it to your lists.
- There are browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome, so that when you're on some of the aforementioned sites, and you stumbled upon an interesting album, you can click the extension icon and the item will be added to your "Want to Listen" list.
- For certain releases, you'll notice there's an embedded web player, for convenience.
75 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadI tried signing up with Spotify, but after accepting the authorization on Spotify's side, I was redirected back to digs.fm but not signed in. Now when I click "Continue with Spotify", the page just refreshes without logging me in because I've already accepted the Spotify authorization.
Ugh, a friend also reported this to me but I couldn't reproduce it. Mind letting me know what browser you're using? If you don't want to disclose, feel free to email me at [redacted].
Thanks for reporting this.
P.S. I'll post a comment regarding comparing to Last.fm soon :)
I don't see myself in the New Users list on the main page. Perhaps it's completing the authorization on Spotify's end, but not creating the user account on the Digs end?
Absolutely! https://www.last.fm/dashboard shows shows about 500 scrobbles (track listens) per second, in the "All Time Scrobbles" section of the page.
(Disclaimer: I work at last.fm.)
I was a passionate, early user of last.fm. On its face, your service is similar in its goals. How does it differ? How do you think it’s better?
A good question to ask myself: why did I stop using last.fm? My quick response is life (becoming a father, the pandemic and a lack of live music) and possibly something to do with migrating from an ipod to Spotify. Also, I still use my account a bit to see historically what I’ve been listening to and what the ear’s of some friends have discovered. That is, I’m still scrobbling!
the new user experience leaves a lot of user gap (i signed up with username/password). ideally you'd give me a way to pull in my spotify/youtube history and generate recommendations off of that.
right now my recommended/recommending tabs are empty. huge cold start problem.
i'll leave now but just telling you why new users might churn.
Last.fm mostly answers the question: "What I've been listening to mostly, this month?" whereas Digs.fm aims to answer the question: "Which album I discovered (i.e. listened for the first time) AND liked last month?".
This essentially comes down to the fact that Last.fm tracks "listens" of an album/track/artist, no matter if its the first time you're listening to it or the 1000th, where in Digs.fm _you_ (manually) track the _first listen of a release_.
Likewise, Digs aims to answer: "which album did my friend discovered and liked?" or "what album does my friend wants to listen to?". The premise is that, the fact that a certain person (which I know) found this interesting, is a good signal that I might be interested to that as well.
So, I'd say that, while they do share similarities, they're different tools that aim to tackle different needs. I myself was using Last.fm around 2008, then forgot about it until last year. I activated it, but I haven't looked at it ever since. I'd say it's a good tool to look at the yearly reports once or twice a year, but to me that was about it.
In contrast, I use Digs daily (I'm biased :P) to see what my friends discovered, add new albums to listen to my lists or pick something to listen from my "Want to Listen". Also, I love discussing about something that I listened or someone else listened (this is done by commenting on activity items).
Ultimately, I wanted a way to track and organize music discoveries (not listens), and make it so that I can easily share them with friends, and perhaps spark a discussion around those.
In fact, a few people asked for an integration with Last.fm, in which you could import the albums/artists from Last.fm in Digs, and add then manually add those that you want to a list.
I can see how this kind of a service can be useful, especially in recommendations, if you are able to answer what music did the digger like from his diggs. Because, as we musicheads well know, not everything we dug out is gold.
For example: https://digs.fm/releases/57246010-Monkey-Shoulder-DJ-JAZZY-J...
Some thoughts:
- Since most music can be accessed instantly as part of a subscription, the "want to listen" list may lack purpose for most users. If I want to listen to something, I'll listen to it at that time or very soon afterwards. So it'll be in my "listened" list already, and maybe my "digged" list too. Goodreads has a "want to read", but that makes sense for many people, since most people still pay for individual books and often buy physical copies. Books also take a lot longer to consume. Some sit on my shelf for months, partly finished. So there is that backlog of books to get through that doesn't exist to a significant degree for albums. Maybe it doesn't matter though - the list may still serve a purpose for those who want to use it.
- It would be nice to see all listeners to a particular artist or genre/tag. That would make it easier to befriend like-minded listeners. I imagine the success of this website will partly hinge on the edge density of the social network, so the more avenues you provide users to find friends, the better.
Good luck!
Great suggestion. Truth is, I was focused so much on the core stuff (indexing releases, implementing the bookmarking system, user profiles etc.) that the friend discovery aspect is almost non-existent. What you suggested seems like a great start though.
And if not, then you can add a release by providing a Spotify/Discogs/Bandcamp/Mixcloud URL in the search box, and it will fetch the proper metadata.
https://www.music-map.com/porcupine+tree
Not sure how well this works for what you have in mind, but it may help. I'm not a fan of the "just play stuff related to the artist I'm listening to" to find new things, rather I would prefer to get a list of artists and explore those on my own.
I just signed up and am very confused on what I can do. I see a feed of albums from strangers, but there's no way to listen to it. If I want to add music, I have to copy and paste links shown at the top of my screen (they're not even hyperlinked).
If I'm discovering music: - I want a quick/easy way to listen to what's in front of me - I want a quick/easy way to get recs from friends
If I'm sharing music: - I want a quick way to share music
I feel like these are your core experiences and I'm having trouble finding my path through any of them. I see there's a browser extension and a bunch of community features, but the first user experience (at least on web) for any of those core paths above isn't there.
Can you deliver on one of those paths in a really easy way? Looks like you've already got tie ins with discogs. Can you start with just a spotify web player? I think the preview of a song can be made available publicly, which would at least get a delightful enough first experience for listeners (listen to what you see if it looks interesting -- not sure many would "save" without that or at least some solid meta data)
I want what I think this product is supposed (based on your description) to be to exist, so I hope this feedback is helpful.
Edit: Signed out and noticed you have "continue with spotify" on the logged out / sign in page https://digs.fm/users/sign_in -- that wasn't available on your home page https://digs.fm/. I would've signed up with spotify if available and maybe that would've exposed clearer UX?
Let me try to clarify a few things. First and foremost, Digs is supposed to be a bookmarking tool (you add and organize albums to lists). Then, it's a social network.
It's not created with the mindset of it being a music streaming service. That said, for convenience and pragmatism, a web player is included if the release was added via a Spotify, Mixcloud or Bandcamp link, or if the corresponding MusicBrainz release had a Discogs URL associated with it. Ideally, every release on the page should include a web player - this is something I'm trying to figure out how to do automatically, without enormous amount of human moderation. (I understand this is all technicalities, I just wanted to explain how it works currently.)
> I see a feed of albums from strangers.
The "Community updates" feed is the default if you have no friends added yet. If this is too noisy (and after this post it will be, for almost all people I assume), then you can switch to "Friends' updates" by clicking on the dropdown arrow. The choice will be persisted and you won't see that noise again.
> If I'm sharing music: - I want a quick way to share music
The current way to share music, is passively, i.e. by having friends (your friends will see your activity in their home feed). The active way to share is to click on the "Recommend" option, from the action dropdown button in a release page (e.g. https://digs.fm/releases/2782921-DJ-Shadow-What-Does-Your-So...).
> Edit: Signed out and noticed you have "continue with spotify" on the logged out / sign in page https://digs.fm/users/sign_in -- that wasn't available on your home page https://digs.fm/. I would've signed up with spotify if available and maybe that would've exposed clearer UX?
The Spotify SSO is currently broken, so I've disabled it until I fix it. Apparently I forgot to hide it from the sign_in page as well - thanks for bringing this up!
On another note: I was ecstatic to discover recently an iOS app whose main purpose is similar to this: Albums (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/albums-album-focused-player/id...). It has incredibly tight integration with Last.fm and is perfect for people like me who prefer music in whole-album form.
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.
You can pin your recording jam, recommend tracks to users, view statistics in your listens, create and listen to playlists. We are actively working on adding various type of recommendations for users and also intend to add more music discovery features in future.
(- a ListenBrainz Dev)
I think that the my other comment comparing Digs to Last.fm (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32552617), applies pretty much for a comparison with ListenBrainz as well.
While they have some overlap (i.e recommend tracking users, statistics), they do differ in the fact that the one defines "listen" as "listen (new or repeated) of a track/album/artist", while the other defines "listen" as "first-time listen of a release".
Also, the other main focus of Digs is providing a way to organize your "Want to Listen" list (with tags, notes and more on the way), as a means to stay on top of all the music you found interesting at some point. The problem I had, specifically, was that I had "Queues" of things I like to hear in the future (albums, mixes, etc.) in 3 or 4 different sites: YouTube, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Discogs, Spotify. So I wanted to have a single way to organize all these (that's why Digs knows how to parse URLs from these services) and share them with friends.
All in all, I love ListenBrainz and I believe there is room for both sites in this world, since they tackle slightly different needs.
Never ever did I expect to see Dego mentioned on HN. Kaidi and him are dons.