- What do you see as positives and negatives of featuring artists on Resonate?
I assume here that featured artists are currently picked by the Resonate staff. not by an “algorithm”.
(+) : a good opportunity for handpicking overlooked artists and bring them to the spotlight.
Now, how do we define “overlooked”, and why handpick one artist over the other, I’m not sure. I think if we bank on the “human” aspect of our platform, if this is tied to a curator team that users of Resonate would gradually get familiar with, it could simply be based on each curator’s interests and their own definition of what’s overlooked and worthy of being shared on the front page.
(-) : If the picks are being made by the same restricted group of people, we might see the same genres/styles/types of artists being over-represented.
I’d like to know this is being handled by a team that has a wide range of tastes. Maybe if the “author” of the pick is shown, with a small writeup on their part on why they chose this artist, would allow people to “follow” specific curators according to their tastes, and know where to look when they want to go outside their comfort zone.
As a takeaway from this reflexion, I think I’d like to see a team of curators being put to the forefront of Resonate, get to meet them (who they are, what they like, what they’re like, where they’re from, a bit of background, etc.), understand what to expect of them. Ensure there is enough diversity there so we cover as much ground as possible. Maybe rotate in community members who would volunteer and subscribe to a list to be called upon to pick an artist and write up about it.
- How can the design of the Player foster good first impressions for folks visiting Resonate?
My first impression when opening the page is that it’s cold. Feels automatically generated, lacks a human touch.
For example :
- How about integrating some of the artist’s bio in here, in a way that’s welcoming and entices me to explore this artist?
- Use a “profile pic” if possible instead of a logo. If that doesn’t fit with the artist’s aesthetic (wants to remain anonymous, doesn’t want to bring attention to the person(s) behind the music, etc.), encourage artists to provide something that feels more like an artistic statement than a brand.
- To follow-up on the curators aspect I was talking about earlier, alternative idea to integrating the artist’s bio : put up a writeup from the curator on the artist instead. Or a quote from an interview. Or an original interview. Foster the feeling that this is more than just an algorithm picking random artists from a library of files - that it’s humans sharing their love of music, and discussing about it like two people sitting at a party/bar/place chatting up about what they like. And keep those tidbits (esp. if they’re content made for/by Resonate) on the artists’ pages forever afterwards - slowly building over time.
- What are designs and tools that could be alternatives to featuring artists?
I’ve been reading up and building a digital garden lately (thanks Hakanto for sharing the articles about that!) and they have this notion of “backlinks” where you’re shown what pages are linking to the page you are on at the moment.
Ultimately, this could be represented as node graphs (looks a bit like a starmap) where you can see how all pages on the website are linked to each other. Like a web. Which is a notion we kind of lost along the way of building the internet, it seems.
Anyway, it’d be a cool discovery tool to represent artists as an interconnected web - using location, genre, band members, label, tags, references : maybe defined by the artist itself, allowing them to link themselves to other artists they like or are influenced by - but also allow listeners to add links themselves, maybe with a voting system (e.g. 14 people said this artist sounds similar to this other artist - 3 people said this artist sounds like this OTHER artist - etc.)
Pretty sure this is all things that have been done elsewhere already (I’ve seen nodegraph / cloud-type representations of music artists/bands somewhere before, for example…).
