Next Big Thing Launches Reddit For Music & Music News
Next Big Thing launched on Monday as a "Reddit/Hacker News For Music." It's basically a site where people posts links to music or music news articles, comment on them and upvote them. All it needs now is a thriving community so check it out and consider getting involved.
Frequent Hypebot contributor Tyler Hayes created Next Big Thing with "technical help" from Jared Moody. As Hayes explains:
"I was looking for a good hub of music news, articles, and rising artists and never really found it. Sure, Reddit has a music section, and you could follow individual sources on Twitter to get a similar experience, but a dedicated hub of diverse music related content was missing. Now Next Big Thing exists."
"This isn't revolutionary, if you've used any service since ~2005 when Digg was king, this won't blow your mind, but the aim is for functionality right now. Elegance is important, but only after you have something worth making pretty."
Currently the site features a choice of Top Links, based on upvotes, or Newest Links. They can be further divided into Articles or Songs.
Participants can upvote items and discuss each one in separate comments sections. You can also have a simple profile.
There are only a handful of rules such as no spamming and "keep all comments respectful." Once you get 50 reputation points (oops, don't know what those are exactly) you get to downvote.
You can only vote once on a link and you can't vote on your own links.
It Takes a Village
Next Big Thing could certainly be a useful and enjoyable service if folks get involved. The quality of the community is going to be key to its success.
But, given that Reddit started with lots of fake accounts, "build it and they will come" is never an assured outcome.Of course Reddit was intended to be vast while Next Big Thing is focused on a clearer niche.
Nevertheless even a small niche service can require a lot of human effort, much more than people might expect for such a simple site as Next Big Thing, and music is no small niche.
Recently I ran across a Twitter confab in which people were discussing the need for a music-oriented equivalent of Techmeme. On a humorous note, one fellow suggested he might code something over the weekend as if Techmeme could be recreated by programming.
Given that they have a relatively large staff that gets paid actual salaries, I think the human element hadn't entered his equations. And given the hit or miss quality of Techmeme coverage, one realizes that building a Musicmeme would be no small task.
But Next Big Thing is off to a solid start and doesn't need anything like the resources of Techmeme or Reddit to be a success. It simply needs quality people who care and are willing to take the time to get involved.
[Thumbnail of Ellington Ratliff in Radio Disney's Next Big Thing courtesy Ana Rivas.]
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch/@crowdfundingm) also blogs at All World Dance: Videos and maintains Music Biz Blogs. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
Interesting name choice. Do they know that NextBigSound is already a music company with $6M in funding?
I just checked it out. It looks like there’s more music publicity news than music business news. So it might be more of interest for people wanting news about artists than about music business (which is my particular interest). But artist news can be further broken down by artist and genre. So hardcore fans might seek out sites which focus on those individual artists or genres.
Most music news seems to fall into these three categories:
1. Music news for industry people or who follow the industry.
2. How-to articles directed at musicians.
3. Music articles for fans.
reddit has all these components and massive scale, with a capitol m. The beauty of it is that they have literally millions of “sub-reddits” that are effectively dynamic pages built around content topics that get created every single day. A major challenge to monetize (as they would need to be updated manually in the adserver/exchange) and for non savvy users unaccustomed to the reddit experience, the conversations can be extremely difficult to find.
If Tyler & the folks at NBT can tackle that piece they should be on good ground. Best of luck & have fun!