PIXEL MAVERICK

I love music.

I love beautiful web design.

I love discovering something great while it is still relatively unknown to most of the world — still obscure, hungry and pure.

It is because of these three great loves that I find the indie music site TheSixtyOne so amazing.  I originally heard about TheSixtyOne from a TechCrunch article and was blown away.

Here is a quick review of some of the best features of this site.

The Interface - The interface is beautiful in it’s simplicity.  The band has the ability to upload a picture that best represents them while their song is playing and that pic spreads the entire span of the browser.

Band Info - The information about the band appears in small partially transparent overlays that pop up throughout the song.  If you want to know the full info on the band you can click it, if you don’t you still learn some factoids about the band without interfering with the primary experience.

The Navigation - The navigation is minimal to keep from intruding on the main experience, but simple and intuitive so the user figures out how things work within a few seconds of interaction with the interface.  The “Info” overlays are clickable, and you explore bands by using the large Prev/Next arrows on the sides of the browser.  The main navigation is unobtrusive at the top right & the Action tools (Share, Fav, Download) are accessible from the toolkit lockup on the left side of the browser.

Additional Band Content - In addition to being able to write band info that appears in the previously mentioned overlays, the bands are able to upload additional content (Images, etc) that appear occasionally much like the info overlays.

The Variety - TheSixtyOne features bands that span all areas of music from SoCal to Folk.

“Wattup …braaaahhhhh?”

“Sometimes we just play concerts alone in the woods for the trees”

“One of these Sons of William is not like the others”

If you want more content and connection from TheSixtyOne you can also check out their Facebook Page or their blog, although from the dates on the posts for both of those it does not seem like they are very active.

TheSixtyOne is not a replacement for iTunes or Pandora.  You need those music options for on demand & preferred channel listening, but TheSixtyOne is definitely a beautiful vacation from those options when you want to find something new.

Hopefully the owners of TheSixtyOne will keep to their core offering and we never see them sellout and veer from that simple brilliance by adding stupid content like the crap that MTV spews these days.

I hope this review is helpful to any music lovers, and that more people and enjoy TheSixtyOne as much as I do.

If you grew up on MTV music videos like me (…they actually used to play music videos on MTV btw), then you will love the Palladia.  I am not crazy about ALL of their programming, but the concerts and MTV Unplugged series that they show are amazing …great footage, 10801 high def.  I watched The Killers and Muse concerts the other night and now I am hooked.

As I was watching it, I realized that they are missing a huge opportunity to leverage social media to gain a deeper engagement with their existing audience & gain more fans by letting their existing base’s SMEDIA activity spread the word.

I am definitely NOT recommending that they clutter up the incredible concert footage by streaming tweets onto the screen or anything.  Don’t mess with the best thing about the channel.  I am however, recommending that they do a better job of using social media to connect the people who are watching a concert or anticipating one that is coming up.

A few suggestions…

• Connect up twitter and Facebook conversations while a concert is playing
• Connect up Facebook conversations while a concert is playing
• Aggregate the twitter & Facebook conversations on the site displayed next to the available video
• Get the band involved for 1st runs on concerts; let them interact with the audience as part of the twitter conversations
• Let people browse through all the concerts & tag all their favorites to create a personal playlist that they can share to Facebook
• Leave the concert footage uncluttered, but display some of the top tweets & facebook posts at the bottom of the screen while the commercials are running
• Make the videos available online on thier site.  It is not going to be as high quality of an experience as watching it in HD on a bigscreen, but make them available & make them easy to share and embed.
• Provide easy event scheduling tools on Facebook and on the site to allow people to have Palladia parties

The last recommendation has nothing to do with social media, but everything to do with Palladia not making the same mistakes as MTV.  Keep it focused on the concerts and the great footage, and under no circumstances should Jersey Sbore ever make into the programming.

I normally don’t pay attention to car commercials.  I appreciate some sexy car porn videography as much as the next ad geek, but let’s be honest they all sort of look the same.

It’s funny what a great song can do to help make you look up and watch a commercial.  I did a doubletake when I looked up and realized that it was Lincoln that applied these cool tunes.  Who?  Lincoln…I thought they were dead, or at least most of their core customers were really old.

Blue hairs or not, I love the song picks they made for their commercials over the past year.  Great covers of two of my favorites songs.

Under The Milky Way (The Church)

Major Tom (David Bowie)

This post definitely falls outside of my core blog focus of advertising …but it falls squarely in the “stuff I thought was cool” category that I am prone to post on occassion.

I stumbled across this band/ song earlier this week and keep listening to it.  Great song, and a very interesting background on the two guys that make up the band.  They both went to Harvard (where they formed the band originally) and instead of taking that degree and conquering Wall Street they dumped their talent into music.  If this is the type of music that they produce then I am glad they made that choice.  Enjoy!

In case the embedded video stops working click here to see the video for this badass song.