I don't like the looks of that. It doesn't thrill me. I want any music site I go to to be alive and in love and above all passionate. Perhaps it's a good technical solution, but if I were an artist who was pouring his life into creating music, I wouldn't want a site that feels generic.
(Perhaps something like muxtape.com? Though Zed marked it as a site found wanting, I'd say there's a chance it moves to letting musicians sell their music directly, considering the people involved with its direction now.)
"Bleak-looking"? For a site that wants to sell people things? I'm curious what the strategy behind that visual concept was - doesn't it fly in the face of what most sales sites are supposed to achieve?
The sparse design of the site actually appeals to me. I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I may not be a typical example of the general population of musicians but I was at least once an "artist who was pouring his life into creating music".
The music must speak for its self eventually... why not immediately?
I'm a fan of sparse myself. That's not the problem.
The information is poorly organized and lacks a logical makeup. The name of a song is only slightly bigger than the information line, and it's all a single line so right now I'm seeing one artist name broken up into two lines, which is ugly. The list of "trendsetters" list people who haven't made much money, which discourages me if I'm going to sign up.
That gradient is awful - it's both imprecise and bland, and serves no purpose. (With gradients, there's got to be a very specific purpose to including one. If you're doing it just to decorate your background, keeping it tight and not leaking it onto the content is essential.)
The color scheme of "red, white, and gray" doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. That dark red looks poor for links, and it makes it look like link color was selected just to so that the default color couldn't be blue. (I prefer blue links to that bland state of red.) The underline style is just an underline, which is also unexciting. These things are all design choices! With every single aspect of the site you're making you've got a choice to make something that's exciting and appealing, or you can choose to follow status quo, but if you do that's bad design.
When I visit a web site that sells music and the first thing it says to me is "Buy a song, get paid every time it sells again," the message is that I should buy music not for the joy of music but for the sake of making money. That's the big scheme here. From the customer point of view, that's the model, and that's shit. Compare that to Amie Street: "The best place to discover new music." Still not perfect - I have a lot of complaints about Amie Street as well - but at least it sets up the idea that music should be special.
The "Trendsetters" system enforces this. THe best users are the ones who have made the most money from picking popular bands. From the user perspective this makes sense. From the artist perspective, I'm going to tell the person who thought this was a good place for me to sell my pride and joy to shove it. Next to that, the "recent events" showing reveals one users, "lalas1", giving a lot of albums 5 stars and telling them all "i pre oredered your new album! love your music, im a big fan!". My initial reactions are: "That's a silly username," "This person's a mindless groupie," and "This place chooses to highlight spam and senseless communication," all of which are things that turn me away.
The thing that bewilders me is that Popcuts has a good visual point of reference: every album has album art. This has been done before, with Coverflow and with the iTunes store and with the iTunes screensaver on the Mac (which looks gorgeous). When you're asking yourself how to design a music site, you've got three basic elements to choose from: you can try and create a music-driven layout, like Muxtape's (where every line plays a band's song); you can use a graphical approach, which looks inviting; or you can go the text-only approach, which is cluttered and conveys no emotion whatsoever unless you focus hard on typography - dark red helvetica in this case does not appeal to my sensibilities at all.
There's nothing unique on the page. I keep having to skip back over to it because I can't keep the design in mind past one or two critique points. The top bar looks generic. The search bar stands out, but only because it is too small. The fieldsets are used twice a page, which means they're no longer outlining anything interesting and eyecatching and look essentially like tables. The bottom line of links looks essentially the same as every other site. The color scheme is forgettable, there is no grid in place, things don't align.
If I were a musician worth anything at all, and it's my goal to be worth something one day, I would require a web site that respects itself enough to look good. There's a difference between minimalism and bland.
The music must speak for its self eventually... why not immediately?
Because here, the music DOESN'T speak for itself. The web site's design does. It says "I'm ugly and plan, and I'm not organized, and I use a generic free flash player for my music, and the second-biggest number on the page tells people how much money they'll make back after buying my CD. That's the information the site I've chosen to express myself has deemed most important."
There's a difference between a site being ugly and a site getting out of the way. The best site for art is one that you don't notice. Then the music does speak for itself. In this case, the web site speaks first, and it has an irritating voice.
After such a long reply, I almost feel guilty not giving something back.
That gradient is awful ... With gradients, there's got to be a very specific purpose to including one. If you're doing it just to decorate your background, keeping it tight and not leaking it onto the content is essential.
The gradient is not the greatest, sure. I don't agree that gradients are a design element that can apparently only be used with the precision of a laser though. I have previously included gradients on a design just because I felt like it. Sometimes the best designs come from what you feel like adding, that's what makes a portion of it art. The design in question turned out fine and was complimented by friends and strangers alike. I do agree that you need to be careful if the gradient is going to sit behind actual content, but do not think that there is some kind of unbreakable design rule that states that gradients cannot sit behind actual content. I don't like when the end of a gradient does not blend fluidly into the background colour however, that does look cheap.
The other design criticisms you mention are coming from your own subjective taste. Nothing wrong with that, but I won't comment on this subjective opinion.
The points you make about the site seemingly highlighting the money over the music I think are valid... From my point of view being a person with no connection to managing the site whatsoever. But I suspect I would feel differently otherwise.
Perhaps if I used the site more, I would be more annoyed with it, but visiting a few times and just clicking around, I don't seem to have as much of a problem with it as you do. But at the same time, I haven't bought any music... Maybe that says something too.
Oh, certainly I'm being critical! I figure that perhaps the criticism I've got might help the people making their service, and if not then criticism's not hurting anybody.
The theory is good, but where art's concerned the form is concerned entirely with the function. Things like showing me a feed of activity doesn't particularly inspire me, and it doesn't make me see enthusiastic about the music being sold along that feed.
I think they're doing a great thing: I'd like to see an open model get huge. Right now it's lacking.
(As a counterexample regarding site design: when I saw the new Muxtape for the first time I began mentally planning an album's worth of music, because I thought Muxtape was so lovely that having a band to be on the platform was something I wanted. Beautiful design attracts beautiful things.
I'm sure they'll eventually run into gaming issues, if they ever care (after all they'll be raking in the cash on every purchase).
Great way to think of music distribution in a totally new way. I hope this catches on, since it may actually be a replacement for the current model that might actually work for everyone's benefit.
If only someone at the labels actually wanted to be productive...
I gotta say, the idea sounded a bit off to me at first but after poking around the site I really think the possibility of getting in-store-credit or even a partial return on your purchase makes the site sticky in a good way. I doubt anyone will be getting wealthy off of it but it does seem to encourage user involvement in a really interesting way.
This site seems a bit too "pyramid-y" to have a long lasting appeal. However, I think the model is at least worth experimenting with -- at this point, just about ANY model in music sales is worth experimenting with.
Cool site - I really liked it but it maybe because the featured music just so happened to be in my taste. But I also like the idea of getting paid back for buying music. Very creative concept
