(Warning Song is NSFW)
The winner of this week’s site of week award was the innovative music site, iJigg. What makes iJigg so unique is that unlike sites like Pandora or Last FM, they let you find music in a more social environment. Artists are encouraged to upload their tracks to the service, where users can vote and comment on the ones that, they think are the best. Just like Digg, the more votes a song gets, the closer to the home page it gets.
The site is still very young, they only had their beta launch last December, but already their traffic is going in the right direction. This really is a very unique way to find music. By interacting with real people, instead of a recommendation service, it opens up possibilities to find things way off the beaten path.
One of the other cool things about iJigg, is that the site isn’t just for North American listeners. They support Portuguese, French, Japanese, Thai, Hindi, Chinese, Spanish, German, as well as other languages. Users can either filter songs for certain languages or you can use the global language support, to find music that is good, even if you can’t understand the lyrics.
I was able to find a little bit of mainstream content on the site, but overall, it looked pretty clean. iJigg has a feature where people can report copyright infringement and they take the song down. When I first checked out the service there was a great mash up of Modest Mouse’s Float On and The Beastie Boys, but by the time I had gotten registered, they had already removed it. Not knowing whether or not content will be there later on is kind of a drag, but I can appreciate iJigg’s efforts to keep the site on the up and up, even though they depend on user submissions.
I just wish that the studios would quite freaking out about the mashups and realize the promotional value it can have, when people discover an old song all over again.
Overall, iJigg has created a very impressive set of tools that you can use to find new music. The community is developing nicely and already it’s a fun place to hang out. Even though, I’d like to see more mainstream content in the search results, I’m just as happy to find artists who are still trying to make it and who appreciate the extra attention. There really is a lot of amazing independent music out there and it’s neat to see a site that is helping them connect to eager listeners.
Congratulations to iJigg on winning this week’s award. You can check out their blog here. If you’d like to nominate a site for site of the week, feel free to send me a link and I’ll be happy to check it out. The nominees for next week’s award are listed below. Please vote in the sidebar.
#1 by Zaid on June 27, 2007 - 5:12 pm
Hey Davis, Thanks for taking time to write about us! I’m glad you enjoy iJigg and will continue to work on getting great music from little folks to the ears of consumers like you and I.
–Zaid
#2 by davis on June 27, 2007 - 6:21 pm
Thanks Zaid, you keep rockin and I’ll keep coming back. Tuning the social networks into new music is an awesome service to be running.