It’s a question I’ve been asking for awhile. Many of us have noticed that the room is not what it used to be and even though we have people posting their stuff in there and occasionally there is traffic, I feel that the overall layout and the way the music is presented could be modernized.
This is a discussion for how we could make the board more active with as little effort as possible.
The questions right now are:
What’s good about the Listening Booth?
What about it could use improvement?
Do you post your music in it? If you do, are you getting quality feedback from other users?
What improvements/implementations/changes could be made that would make you spend more time in the Listening Booth?
How will the forum benefit from this?
Possibilities:
Rating and/or review system, sort of like Reddit.
A “What’s new?” feed like Soundcloud where the latest tracks are auto-fed to a wall that also updates as new tracks are posted
A personal “artist profile” implementation where people can see your latest LB posts and play them all from one page (sort of like a soundcloud profile or am automatic X ARTIST music landing page)
A “gamified” system that rewards people who give lots of feedback replies and/or also post a lot of music. This could also decide how this board is moderated (people who put the most care into it are enabled mod powers to help maintain the channel)
Yes! God, that would be insanely cool. There are so many great releases that fall off the face of the earth that I feel like it could actually bring more people onto the board.
Implementing such a thing sounds like a bitch, though
This is a good idea that we’ve thrown around for awhile here and there. How can we make it ours and how can we make it interesting and fun? My brain is resting ass to mouth but I am interested in this. Shouldn’t be that hard to implement thanks to our robot servants I MEAN friends.
Yes the idea would be is we can adapt certain traits of other systems but adjust them so we makes it ours.
dude I signed up for RateYourMusic before I looked at it (n00b) and saw that Kendrick Lamar To Pimp A Butterfly was number one over OK Computer and uhhhh… yeah… Kendrick I love you butttttt… OK Computer is better than anything you’ve ever made, stick that in your pulitzer and smoke it. also fuck any voting system that retains albums at the top. i prefer something like, top voted album gets showcased on the front page of the forum in a little widget for a week/month then automatically is set free back into the flock (drops back into the voting pool). nothing remains at the top beyond a certain amount of time, because that seems boring. all that does is invite lazies to see it at number one and continuously upvote it without sifting through everything else by going down the list. and really what is rateyourmusic, internet 1.0, even worse than we are? Dear RYM: ok computer came out almost 30 years ago, yes yes thanks for making it mr radiohad sir but yeah… get over it lol, let’s go ahead and archive that under classic rock. know what I mean?
also I never want us to Rolling-Stone ourselves and release a “100 best” every other year and it’s the same fucking albums. I’m thinking something more like Reddit (vote gets moved upwards on page) with the user intention of content writers at Pitchfork, but the more you do around other parts of the forum affects the weight of your vote in the LB (how involved you are basically.) A new user can upvote a track and we wiil say, “yes thank you very much for voting, fellow forum citizen everyone does their part”… but an OG like @bfk who has a million hearts on all his posts, he will like a track and it shoots to the top of the pile.
ALSO
Limit on LB posts. i know that will get pushback. but I don’t think anyone wants to see the top 10 tracks are say, 10 @johnmusichead posts, nothing against you john, you’re just very prolific. say something like 3 a month? Idk what our traffic is in there right now. show of hands, who is regularly posting in the LB (I can’t be arsed to look at the moment but will later)
I would definitely say that the ratio of who posts and when does bottleneck the LB and makes people like me nearly avoid it altogether, but I think there could be a handful of solutions that don’t exactly restrict the amount of posts people could make (I still stand by the idea that more posts = a good time, and I always encourage people to make more shit).
What if there was a system (either via tags, categories or some other slut magic) where we could view anyone’s recent work in some kind of a condensed setting? That way, if someone like JM signs up a year ago, posts 20 tracks per week or whatever, that’s perfectly cool, because I can listen to them all in a central location and maybe say, “Wow, I think tracks 49, 32, and 8 could really be part of an EP”, but it also encourages me to check out someone else who maybe posts one track per month.
I’d also be more inclined to use it if it also involved users’ video / image / other work. Let’s say I want to check out wayne’s generative ambient streams, but they’re too scattered and I forget where they’re posted. Well, maybe they’d coexist wherever he posts music so I can scroll up and put a little more attention onto them and drag other users into checking them out because I really think he’s got something incredible going on in that department, but it’s sort of gone unnoticed.
This would definitely make me want to use the LB more (on both ends), but that might just be me. I know we deemphasize or emphasize our own work for various reasons, but that doesn’t mean someone on the listening end is going to feel like one is weaker than another. An even distribution of being able to check out each other’s work could maybe equalize things a little bit, and then having a rating system in place could really show the creator what their strengths or weaknesses are, according to the community. Something like that might mean a little more than, “Nice track! Check out my track!”.
Also, in recent memory, some users have gone so far as to do ‘behind the music’-type videos but I’d love to be able to track them down again as part of their pool of work. IIRC two separate ones from a single user were posted in two completely different threads (I apologize if I’m misremembering) and it’s kind of a crap shoot if I’ll ever even find them again, or maybe I will on a rainy day when I’m browsing and don’t actually feel like watching.
actually this is absolutely correct. in no way do i want people to post LESS at all.
I really really really like this idea.
so kind of like a Soundcloud “what’s new” stream or even a Facebook wall, but there’s a landing page for anyone’s profile. Hmm this could be an interesting concept
i appreciate your comments. I myself am uninspired to post in the LB because it gets just as much attention as everywhere else and to me this should be the place that i’m the most excited to post something.
the key for me I think is i want things to be as simple as possible, and I want it to be automated with maybe a few select of you who will be hanging around in there anyway to moderate things and make sure shit doesn’t get out of hand. we’re working a pretty small active userbase at the moment which is a good opp to test this sort of thing out. @jazzyspoon had a really good idea and even contributed a generated script in the soundcloud player thread I posted – which went bunk pretty much immediately because guess what I do not have time to sift through each post as it comes in and add it to a soundcloud player, assuming you’re even posting it from Soundcloud (some of you don’t). yeah maybe something like the Bandcamp community walls for their artist profiles, but put into a thread. it’ll take some thinkin’ and considerin’ to know the best way to do this and I’ll probably consult co-pilot or gpt or something… but in my case this takes some additional learning of these systems. I think we should wait for some of the more code-experienced chaps to chime in for their input (if they have time.)
not at all, there are some good ideas here
crazy how we can shift from shitposting/trolling to brainstorming productivity/engagement ideas in 3 seconds
I love the idea of an album review spot, especially a pre release so people could help shape an IDMf/personal release, but I still feel like this was something the LB was a good tool for long ago.
The issue I have with the LB these days is it used to be a place for (mostly tactful) critical feedback and perspectives. Most of the old guard who grew up in this environment went on to either get too musically grown up for us (you know who you are) and/or ran out of the free time in life to contribute. I try to give a Saturday morning run of mix reviews occasionally and I get a lot of hurt responses from newbies, but I truly believe there is value in having someone with a decent ear/experience/studio reviewing your mixes/ ideas and contributing helpful responses.
These days, my studio time is mostly spent on things I can’t post publicly (yet) so I can’t contribute there for mix feedback most of the time anymore. Also, half of my music has always felt inappropriate in genre anyways.
There used to be a rating system in the old site, which was pretty cool, but I get why it got skewed unfairly occasionally and wasn’t always a fair representation of skill or execution.
It might be a good idea to look at how reddit implements this type of thing so it doesn’t get entirely out of control with one-offs and circle jerks.
Defining the scope would be first - are we talking:
Specific styles only?
A pre-defined “new releases only” time window every week/month/quarter and maybe one “albums you might have missed” thread?
Only the music from people active on the forum or any album that exists?
Who can post & how often? (mostly you don’t want everybody and their sister come here once to pimp their own questionable release and disappear right after that)
All in all, the main question should be: how will the forum and label benefit from this?
I know we’d like to have more traffic, but I also know more traffic = bigger chance of random people polluting the site (and much more work for the Mods who have to clean the mess!).
As it is, we have the “What are you listening to?” thread. How many people actually bother clicking on the linked vids? (note that I’m not going to pretend I click on all of those… sometimes I do, sometimes I want to do it later and forget, other times I look at the vid screencap and I go “nope”, etc.). Wouldn’t it be the same result if we did that with an album and a review (and it could be even fewer clicks, since people seem to prefer clicking on video links)?
Personally, I’m not interested in album ratings (here or anywhere else). It’s so highly subjective and unlikely to influence my view on an album anyway… A constructive review, on the other hand, may make me want to check the album or single reviewed.
I wish there was a 200% reaction, but I’ll have to settle for 100%. You summed up everything I was thinking, especially “how will the forum and label benefit from this?”. This seems like a lot of time and effort to recreate the wheel (time that could be spent shitposting or…you know, making music). The internet is full of this stuff and the majority of it is low-effort filler that just bloats a place or starts flame wars.
My take is rating creative efforts is dumb as fuck and harmful overall. Opinions on art are subjective, nuanced things that deserve to be discussed and pondered, or just skipped if it’s not your thing. It feels like some stupid “I Rated All The Paintings in the Louvre” type of deal, and now throngs of people are running past art they may potentially enjoy to see all the 5-star stuff because the reddit hivemind told them what’s good. Just because it’s easy and convenient doesn’t actually make a thing useful. Make people put in the effort of an opinion instead of just pressing ‘like’.
To be clear, I’m not at all against people reviewing albums, I’m just very much against ratings of any sort. Make a ‘Music Review’ category and let people post their thoughts on albums and let other people talk about it with them. Skip the whole rating mechanism because it’s distracting and doesn’t add anything except to push less popular things down the list, which is in my opinion a terrible thing. Have an album you love that you think is falling through the cracks? Sell me on it. Hate the album I just told you I loved? I want to hear why. Having potentially good art with a 1-star rating because someone completely missed the point or has opposite tastes to me isn’t helping anything unless they can justify why.
I haven’t read all of the replies fully yet but I want to make clear that this isn’t really about rating, it’s more about encouraging engagement and seeing how we can, with as little effort as possible, optimize that room to make it make more sense on this newer platform and in this current mind state we’re all in. If it’s something we all can agree and vote on and maybe even work on together, the small amount of us left that still lurk or post here, i think it might be great to take something that’s sort of dilapidated and tweak a couple things to make it more of an inviting space where we can post WIPs and actually get real critical feedback. i’m not interested in reviews of released music or rating it either. that’s all for now, i’ll be bak to check in on this later. going kayaking in a little bit!
I think it needs to be explicitly decided exactly what the hell we’re talking about. My understanding from @KvlT’s original conversation is he was talking about albums in general (eg What Are You Listening To), not albums or tracks from people here (LB/Member Releases)? Those are two different kettle of fish for sure.
LB has always been for feedback and I think that’s the value of it. The only way to drive engagement there is a combo of more music being posted coupled with quality critique. I don’t have a clue how to incentivize that. Virtual double-stuffed Oreos? Turn off reactions so people have to comment to be seen? Post length minimum so people don’t just say “good job”? Or does all that just de-incentivize people doing anything in there? Is that any worse than it is now?
Best case scenario: this place gets a solid reputation for “IDMF will put you through the ringer, but they know what they’re talking about”, which is I think was the mojo the site had before the crash/rebuild.
I don’t see anything wrong with album reviews, but I think it’s just making a new category (maybe overwriting Music Marketing which has a whopping total of nine threads ever) and be done with it. Let the community decide how it works, because it’s a cart destined to go off the rails knowing the users here Best case, people start doing in-depth reviews and it drives some traffic here from SEO or whatever because people deep dive on crazy deep cut shit that other places don’t.
Hope you had a good time kayaking! I went a couple of weeks ago and had a blast despite the wicked sunburn.
Yo first of all, I changed the OP post in this thread so the conversation won’t be so confusing right off the bat like it was. I was super blazed when I moved @KvlT’s post from another thread to make a new one. This is not necessarily a convo about creating a review/rate section, it’s more about how can we optimize the LB and music sections in general maybe (?).
Ok I’ve finally read everything and I’ll try to add my input best I can. @morphic I’ll answer these in order.
Nah. I don’t think that’s our style. I say all music is welcome even though obviously it will mostly be electronic music for the most part. but why not just allow everything, you know? but we should think about allowing users 3 genre tags so they can label their thread if they want (I want to get rid of the [GENRE] template in the thread title.)
I’m not sure you mean about the time window? But I do like the idea of “what you missed in the Listening Booth” or “New Music” notification that is seperate from the “new posts” notification thingie at the top right.
In my mind this would operate to serve those who are active on the forum. The general Music Scene Chat would be where people post reviews about albums or talk about non-forum related music. But even that is not really clear…
People above “trustlevel_1” can post in the LB, which I believe takes 30 posts to reach that. I’ll have to revisit the allowances in our trustlevels. We used to have so much spam bombarding us here but now it’s really only occasional. I’m not so much worried about spam as I am people abusing it.
Oh wow, this shows that I definitely don’t go in there enough. I haven’t seen any butthurt. Task for me is to actually run through the conversations in all of these threads and see who is actually active. which brings me to my next point here, how many of us who are posting in this thread actually actively checking in and/or contributing to the LB? it’s ok to be honest, I don’t care. for me I’m like… maybe 30-40% of the time I sign in? I’m really half-assed. I need to actually go in there and use it before I start coming with ideas to how to change it. I’ll do that tonight.
This is the main question in my mind too. Is this is an “ain’t broke don’t fix it” situation? The gist I’m getting though is that a lot of you don’t use the LB because you are disappointed by the amount of activity you get when you do. Let me know if I’m wrong.
Because we have low traffic right now, we can worry about the pollution later, but also set up systems to automatically handle, should whatever we do increase traffic somehow. I’m not super concerned about that the moment. We have a good group here right now, lots of respectful folks. It’s weird lol. but good.
I do…
Yeah, maybe ratings are not a great idea.
yeah for sure, I’ve mentioned before that I’m looking for the easiest possible way to make something function the way we want and take the least amount of time to implement. I ain’t got time to reinvent this place and I don’t think that’s necessary.
exactly.
What about a system that forced people to write X amount of words before rating? And that alongside, if you want to post a track, you must review a track…?
personally I want people to put effort into reviewing instead of just posting thread after thread of their track day in day out. Back in the day it was more honor system… people who posted in the LB would naturally hang out in there and review WIPs without us asking them to. That was just the culture.
That’s something I’ll have to think about but possibilities are things like
badges (yay lol)
moderation abilities
ability to post more tracks without reviewing others
run remix competitions
featured on GPR release (this is up to @Manton not me)
personally like I said before I don’t have time to write album reviews, and I’m more interested in this forum functioning as a colloquium where people can discuss what they are working on and give advice/feedback on WIPs.
ended up going out to a bomb af Oaxacan restaurant instead. Just as happy!
Ok so what do y’all think about some kind of feed system that auto-loads the newest tracks in the LB? Or artist profiles that have everything they have posted in one widget you can play from the same page without opening the thread (“go to thread” link is present though). this would be alongside a sort of “follow member/artist” option so you get notifications too.
Not sure the coding/workload of any of this yet. just brainstorming
Yep, my first 3 questions in the “defining the scope” part of my post were because it wasn’t quite clear what we were talking about initially. Basically I was wondering what would be the use of reviewing and rating the last [insert whatever artist not related to this forum] album from whatever artist in whatever genre. Time window was about not doing: “here’s my review for this Aphex Twin album from 1993”, which would be rather pointless.
Here’s an idea for you: decide on 3-4 categories for the review. Make it a template that one must fill to create the review. This way it is more structured than “insert X amount of words” and it can help someone better see where the improvements may be needed.
Example:
Overall song:
Instrumentation:
Dynamics/progression:
Mix & mastering:
… you get the idea.
Finally, these are excellent ideas:
Linking the members to their music via their profile page would simplify searches and hopefully help with people listening to more than the odd track here and there. It’s UX, right? The easiest it is for people, the most likely it is to succeed.
I would add to this, as it goes beyond the LB itself:
On the member/artist page, link songs/albums that are a (or part of a, in case of compilations) GlitchPulse/IDMf release on Bandcamp (or allow members to do this themselves, so they can choose whether they want to do that or not, and it’s less work for you). This way, people can buy the releases if they want. Not expecting a miracle here but maybe some people won’t be cheap asses and end up buying a few things during a Bandcamp Friday or something.
I think this is a cultural problem with the site more than anything. This place hasn’t been about music in a while, as much as we may want it to be. It’s a social coffee club for people that like and sometimes make music. This signal to noise of Side Room vs actually talking about music production is abysmal, distracting and in no way promotes new people showing up and posting their art or reviewing other people’s.
This has happened over and over for years - new person logs on and says hi, posts a track or two, maybe pops into a random conversation, gets low to no engagement and dips. In the meantime there’s been 200 new posts about some movie or game and the inequity of the world and what people had for dinner, because that’s what the veteran members here do (myself included). Obviously some of those people would have left anyway because it’s the internet, but we do nothing to retain users that are here for the art and not gabbing about their day.
I get why Side Room is there. I understand the idea of building community and personal relationships beyond the music, but it’s completely lopsided and the music has taken a backseat to chit chat. We’ve self-spammed ourselves out of having music at the forefront of the site and it makes it hard to attract and retain users who are specifically here for music, and thus the LB. All that worked out fine pre-crash because there was a critical mass of users keeping the music end of things alive, but it doesn’t seem to be true now.
I don’t know how to fix this, but I think until it’s addressed things like the LB and the label and even the technical/technique discussions are going to be a minor side note of the site.
This place should be an artist collective of musicians or a hub for musicians….
The blatant quid pro quo of people just coming and spamming their music and leaving has been detrimental to the culture…
In addition to the bukkake shitposting by myself and others over the years has also been detrimental…
Kvlt and few select others…have been actively eveloning this place and pushing boundaries with dsp and modular gear…props to them maybe we should follow their example.
Also the amount of feuding ive seen in the past where people get butthurt over their quality of music or when people have a sense of superiority about their music…has been ridiculous…
Because ego ≠ talent + hard work.
Sorry tangent…
I agree with you…
We should be encouraging the creation of art/music more.
Yeah I mean I guess the question is, what do we want?
Not trying to force anything, and if it’s nothing but keep it as is, that’s ok too. I’m getting really good insight from this thread tbh. Also I don’t really know what I want.
We have had a pretty good thing going for a bit. I genuinely enjoy so many of the conversations we’ve had lately. Honestly when I log in I’m excited to see what people responded to this and that topic. I know a lot of it is the general banter, and I don’t want to fix what ain’t broke, but maybe the main point of this thread was that I feel maybe there’s something we want we don’t even know what it is yet. This place can stay the same forever for all I care but it’s ok to tweak things and try stuff out – especially since @Manton and I were able to get the backend access. that’s currently his wheelhouse, not mine. And that dude has gone above and beyond in taking IDMf Netlabel and turning it into something that has a real potential for being something substantial.
I get excited talking about this stuff. We’re this random small blip on the corner of the internet and shit, and I’ve known some of you for like almost two decades. So much has changed. tbh I’m not looking for this place to be blowing up in registrations and noobs coming on here posting their shit then bouncing, but I am interested in implementing stuff that makes those of us who stuck around all go “oh wow, ok that’s sick”.
so far the profile idea that shows recent music posts and WIPS or things that have been released on label seems like a great idea. I think I’m going to look into that for now and see what the options are.
I think this can also be a discussion about what’s not working or what seems like fat that needs to be trimmed. I agree with what someone said about the music marketing room being kaputz… we should remove that…
and yeah also if you want nothing to change and you like things how they are that’s ok too. There’s no timeline here, and I’m not in a rush. I’m looking forward to hearing the opinions of some of the people who aren’t able to login as much, to read what they have to say.
Best case, people start doing in-depth reviews and it drives some traffic here from SEO or whatever because people deep dive on crazy deep cut shit that other places don’t.