I’ve been thinking a lot about some stuff posted in a thread about starting a net label a little while ago and wanted to hear some thoughts on an idea I have. It’s something that could possibly be part of this site, but I’m so interested in it, I’m thinking about doing it myself if I could find a few collaborators. I'd hope maybe the owners of cm.org will add their two cents too
Like most of you, I enjoy making chiptune music but I’m also a huge fan of listening to it. I find it’s a lot of work to find the specific retro inspired stuff I like. I have checked out many web shows, blogs, and about a million bandcamp pages. I often download huge chunks of stuff, and then sort through it and end up deleting most of it since it’s not the style I’m into. Its kind of a lot of work and it seems like there should be a better way. I follow lots of blogs, but you usually only get a smattering of releases that writer knows about, it’s not super comprehensive. Since I don’t buy most of these albums before paying, looking at previews on bandcamp is particularly time consuming.
I know I don’t have the resources to create a chiptune version of last.fm or Pandora. That’s outside my level of resources and knowledge, but we could make something a bit like reddit with a twist…
A page where any user can submit a new chiptune song or album. If its soundcloud or bandcamp, the embedded player can be displayed. There will be a huge set of genre, style, description tags you can choose from. The site wouldn’t actually hold any music, since that would get expensive and it’s something i would hope could be free to use.
When you come to the site to look for new music, you’ll select the tags that fit music you like. Maybe like Rock/Chiptune or "NSF only" or Chiptune+Shoegaze, whatever it is you’re into (seriously, make some chiptune+shoegaze!!). It’d be fairly flexible so you could tag several genres but also target very specific things.
The site will display albums that match that criteria. As you listen you can rate them thumbs up if you like them. The site will keep track of ones you already looked at so it’ll only show you new releases or ones you haven’t seen (if you’re backlogged). There’d also be a second list that shows the top rated ones regardless of time. Over time, with user support, the site would become a huge repository or chiptunes that users have voted on. The final thing that’d be awesome is if it sent an RSS or email of new things that come out that fit the genre you like.
It’d be a pretty simple site to build. In fact, I’d offer my own skills and time to build a MySQL database that does most of the work, I just need someone who could build a front end and a login/user system and tie everything into my procs. I'd also take the time to fill it with as much existing stuff as possible. I threw around the idea of doing a kickstarter for this too, but wanted to see what people thought first.