Having reviewed feedback and site activity in the past couple of months, we’ve just published a change to our Popular page.
Here is what’s on the page now:
Popular (default view) - the most favorited tracks from the past 3 days. Once a track is older than 3 days, it will not appear on this list.
Popular Last Week - the most favorited tracks of the previous week.
What changed?
The previous version of the Popular page offered two views: a view based on the number plays & blog post clicks and a view based on the number of favorites. We found that determining popularity by the number of favorites made the process more transparent and easier for everyone to understand — what do you think?
Anthony Volodkin
Taylor McKnight
Zoya Feldman
Scott Kidder
Arkadiy Kukarkin
i like it very much! keep on progressing
June 3, 2009 @ 7:25 pm
Might spread your readers even further across the site when i’d say a number dont even have time to skim the Top 100 properly. How about marketing Hype Machine a little on a number of blogs to build the audience firstly?
June 3, 2009 @ 9:01 pm
I think that it’s a much better way of communicating what’s popular. When under listens, often it boils down to whats got enough keywords which are popular at the time. With the hearts, its obvious what users are “loving” and not just playing because it has remix in the title.
June 4, 2009 @ 10:49 am
I’m not sure if this is a better way to monitory popularity. A lot of hearts, doesn’t necessarily mean a song is popular. A lot of plays and blog clicks does. Any song can get a lot of heart. I think you will see the number of hearts going through the roof. I don’t mind the change, I just don’t think it will make the top 100 more representative. I liked the old structure where you both have plays and hearts better.
June 4, 2009 @ 11:56 am
I like it.
Would be cool if we could have the popout player back!
June 4, 2009 @ 1:26 pm
I absolutely hate the change to the popular page please allow users to choose their default. I would rather see the most played song instead of the most favored.
June 4, 2009 @ 6:10 pm
I’m with Ryan, I think play counts/downloads are a more accurate way of showing what’s popular.
June 4, 2009 @ 7:05 pm
Having the ‘Most Played’ was a skewed metric, as songs getting more plays would jump up the list and eventually get more and more plays, in a snowball effect. I think the ‘Loved’ way works quite well. Now, if only I could see this in Songbird again, it’d be awesome!
June 4, 2009 @ 8:26 pm
keep up the good work. loved the site for over a year, nothing else comes close. thanks.
June 5, 2009 @ 2:20 pm
I like the change, but I would still like to see the Popular page ranked by the ratio: (number of favorites)/(number of plays)
June 5, 2009 @ 3:18 pm
Lovin the new page. Still think the player should be enabled for skipping through the song, but hopefully we will see that soon.
June 5, 2009 @ 8:53 pm
I would very much like to see both a list based on favourites (hearts/loves or whatever you want to call them) and another list based on number of clicks and listens.
In addition to that I think it would be interesting, just as B said here above, to have a conjoined ultimate list that takes BOTH number of favourites AND clicks’n'listens into consideration when calculating the most popular songs’ ratio. I think that list would be the most accurate one. So my suggestion is you either create ONE such super-list or two different ones like you had just until recently.
June 6, 2009 @ 4:50 am
I am more interested in what is getting the most plays/clicks than what is getting the most hearts. People’s criteria for hearting a song varies much more widely than their criteria for just playing it. Bring the old style back where we could pick!
June 6, 2009 @ 9:01 pm
Having to sign in to use your player,Sucks !
June 7, 2009 @ 1:55 pm
Have to agree with Michael: signing in to play any song kind of sucks.
Add to that, I think the fact that a Grizly Bear song just entered the top 20 most popular songs after being online for less than 2 hours, kind of proves that this new systems is kind of flawed and doesn’t really monitor popularity at all.
June 8, 2009 @ 12:35 pm
That’d [plays+favorites+clicks all together] be cool, I agree. We’ll be working on this.
June 8, 2009 @ 5:40 pm
I agree with Anthony: you should create some metric that’s calculated as the weighted average of plays and favorites (gotta be weighted or plays will swamp the hearts). I disagree with all those saying plays are a more accurate indicator of popularity. A lot of users play down the list of hits because they don’t know whether they like it before they play it. And once they’ve played it, it’s gotten their “vote” under a plays-based system.
Additionally, people use Hypem as a music discovery service. The songs that I like I normally buy and play them that way–something that hypem can’t track. Hearting songs captures variation within the songs that people are listening to.
June 9, 2009 @ 11:53 am
Thank you for this change! I don’t see how number of plays is any indicator at all of quality. I play the song because it is popular, not because I like it. I play plenty of songs that I don’t ultimately like. Having the most played songs get played more obviously creates a cycle that doesn’t let brilliant but lesser known finds get to the top. I can’t understand why anyone would prefer it the other way.
June 11, 2009 @ 3:17 pm
less information, less understanding. Don’ t count on me to love you for that move, though it certainly greatly compresses the good juice.
June 12, 2009 @ 5:37 pm
Haha, i just tried the two popular pages, and i guess all I have to say is spontanously that people have funny flavours. Well as for what goes for Remixes or Cover Versions, i’ m loving it!
there could be an option like: hype it, apart from songs that are just to be loved by me as a deadprez loving ipod gangster-hypem-user, as being credited to appeal to the whole nancy sinatra people around here.
June 12, 2009 @ 5:56 pm
The new popular page is awesome! Thanks for the change. I don’t understand why people even think that the number of plays reflects popularity. If I like a song I give it love, and if I don’t like it I don’t. Ultimately I listen to a lot of songs I like and a lot I don’t like, and the heart is the only way to differentiate between the songs I like and the ones I don’t.
June 14, 2009 @ 11:40 am
it makes sense. if you really like a song, favorite it. because most of us are here for music discovery, you listen to a variety of tracks–just because you skim through a track, doesn’t mean it was popular. it just means it was uploaded in a place that was highly visible (or saw high traffic).
June 21, 2009 @ 2:05 pm
Great update! I hope you continue to add more additions like this.
June 22, 2009 @ 10:38 pm
To be honest. i miss the old popular page. i liked seeing which songs were ‘listened’ to more and ‘loved’. I guess it brought more of a wider variety of songs.
June 26, 2009 @ 2:34 pm
Hi,
I love this website! I think the popular page is probably the most important part of the site. I think you could make it even better by doing a weighted sum based on #favorites. Specifically, songs could be ranked based on the equation: today’s rank = #favorites + yesterday’s rank*0.5. The advantage to this approach is that there isn’t a hard cutoff (like 3 days) where songs just dissapear. You could use a short term constant like 0.5 for a very recent ranking and a longer term constant like 0.9 for a longer term ranking.
J
July 6, 2009 @ 3:02 pm
Love this site– It’s the best music site on the web. I check in every day. Keep up the good work!
July 24, 2009 @ 5:27 pm