Here's an idea i had kicking around: instead of having a "likes" system where songs could just rack up points in the form of likes, how about each user has along with their profile a list of 3-5 currently-recommended songs? if the list is full, a newly-recommended song pushes the least-recently-recommended song off the list.
one might be able to see someone's recommendations easily, just be hovering over their username or something.
pros:
- an intuitive way of sorting through the cruft of new songs
- songs that are recommended by artists are more likely to get their fair listen.
- songs that appear too many times in too many peoples' recommendations list will experience a natural falloff in their popularity over time.
- if an artist has crappy recommendations in his list (either songs that are his/her own, or songs that just absolutely suck) then other users will naturally disregard those recommendations (at least until the artist picks better songs).
- a natural incentive to hunt for good songs and recommend them
- a natural incentive to ALSO keep your list of recommendations fresh
- a natural incentive to ALSO keep your list of recommendations original from other artists' lists, by recommending otherwise unknown but deserving songs
- if you recommend good songs, it's also more likely that your own music will get listened to more often
- the transient nature of the recommendations list helps to discourage the "popularity contest" aspect of 8bc, as well as attempts to "game the system".
cons:
- "recommendations" is a very clunky word, how about something with less syllables?
i'm sure there are probably some cons that i haven't thought of, but i have to head to work. what does everybody else think?
