Show HN: Digs.fm – For passionate music explorers (like Goodreads but for music)

A few people mentioned that this has some Last.fm vibes. While that&#x27;s true, here&#x27;s my thoughts on how they differ and what prompted me to create Digs:<p>Last.fm mostly answers the question: &quot;What I&#x27;ve been listening to mostly, this month?&quot; whereas Digs.fm aims to answer the question: &quot;Which album I discovered (i.e. listened for the first time) AND liked last month?&quot;.<p>This essentially comes down to the fact that Last.fm tracks &quot;listens&quot; of an album&#x2F;track&#x2F;artist, no matter if its the first time you&#x27;re listening to it or the 1000th, where in Digs.fm _you_ (manually) track the _first listen of a release_.<p>Likewise, Digs aims to answer: &quot;which album did my friend discovered and liked?&quot; or &quot;what album does my friend wants to listen to?&quot;. The premise is that, the fact that a certain person (which I know) found this interesting, is a good signal that I might be interested to that as well.<p>So, I&#x27;d say that, while they do share similarities, they&#x27;re different tools that aim to tackle different needs. I myself was using Last.fm around 2008, then forgot about it until last year. I activated it, but I haven&#x27;t looked at it ever since. I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s a good tool to look at the yearly reports once or twice a year, but to me that was about it.<p>In contrast, I use Digs daily (I&#x27;m biased :P) to see what my friends discovered, add new albums to listen to my lists or pick something to listen from my &quot;Want to Listen&quot;. Also, I love discussing about something that I listened or someone else listened (this is done by commenting on activity items).<p>Ultimately, I wanted a way to track and organize music discoveries (not listens), and make it so that I can easily share them with friends, and perhaps spark a discussion around those.<p>In fact, a few people asked for an integration with Last.fm, in which you could import the albums&#x2F;artists from Last.fm in Digs, and add then manually add those that you want to a list.

Selfish, but possibly not alone in the following request…<p>I was a passionate, early user of last.fm. On its face, your service is similar in its goals. How does it differ? How do you think it’s better?<p>A good question to ask myself: why did I stop using last.fm? My quick response is life (becoming a father, the pandemic and a lack of live music) and possibly something to do with migrating from an ipod to Spotify. Also, I still use my account a bit to see historically what I’ve been listening to and what the ear’s of some friends have discovered. That is, I’m still scrobbling!

I like the concept. I&#x27;m missing the social side of music since moving away, physically and musically, from my school and university friends. It would be great to find music friends across the internet.<p>Some thoughts:<p>- Since most music can be accessed instantly as part of a subscription, the &quot;want to listen&quot; list may lack purpose for most users. If I want to listen to something, I&#x27;ll listen to it at that time or very soon afterwards. So it&#x27;ll be in my &quot;listened&quot; list already, and maybe my &quot;digged&quot; list too. Goodreads has a &quot;want to read&quot;, but that makes sense for many people, since most people still pay for individual books and often buy physical copies. Books also take a lot longer to consume. Some sit on my shelf for months, partly finished. So there is that backlog of books to get through that doesn&#x27;t exist to a significant degree for albums. Maybe it doesn&#x27;t matter though - the list may still serve a purpose for those who want to use it.<p>- It would be nice to see all listeners to a particular artist or genre&#x2F;tag. That would make it easier to befriend like-minded listeners. I imagine the success of this website will partly hinge on the edge density of the social network, so the more avenues you provide users to find friends, the better.<p>Good luck!

I&#x27;d make a feature request for goodreads-style public lists. Anyone can start a list with a certain theme, anyone can add books to it out upvote them within the list. It&#x27;s great for manually curated discovery.

I am a programmer and an active DJ myself and as such a type of person I do a lot of music organizations into different playlists. For example, each month on Soundcloud I keep one playlist of &quot;Mixes to listen&quot; (usually private) and one playlist of &quot;Favorite mixes for month X&quot;. I&#x27;ve been doing this for a few years already. You can find these at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soundcloud.com&#x2F;ulterior" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soundcloud.com&#x2F;ulterior</a><p>I can see how this kind of a service can be useful, especially in recommendations, if you are able to answer what music did the digger like from his diggs. Because, as we musicheads well know, not everything we dug out is gold.

Seems cool. This project gives me some last.fm vibes. Do people still use last.fm? I used to be a big user of Last.fm back in the day, but just slowly lost my interest to make sure my Last.fm &quot;scrobbler&quot; was always running. Havent thought about that site in years.<p>I tried signing up with Spotify, but after accepting the authorization on Spotify&#x27;s side, I was redirected back to digs.fm but not signed in. Now when I click &quot;Continue with Spotify&quot;, the page just refreshes without logging me in because I&#x27;ve already accepted the Spotify authorization.

Does anyone remember &#x27;the sixty one&#x27;, I used to use that all the time to discover music, was really cool - sadly, I left with the rest after the redesign plus overall the music discoverability market was already shifting away from it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Thesixtyone" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Thesixtyone</a>

I&#x27;ll give this a go. I was an active Last.fm user for years and still miss that kind of interaction; a DeviantArt but for music listeners...

If you were able to have as many releases as rateyourmusic.com and provide a public API then I&#x27;d be very interested. But due to the userbases of sites like rym and discogs who have contributed a lot to the information and number of releases on those sites, it&#x27;s hard to see how new contenders in this particular space can compete

I like the idea a lot -- I&#x27;m someone who listens to a lot of music, constantly gets music recommended by friends, and recommends music to friends. I also design&#x2F;PM software.<p>I just signed up and am very confused on what I can do. I see a feed of albums from strangers, but there&#x27;s no way to listen to it. If I want to add music, I have to copy and paste links shown at the top of my screen (they&#x27;re not even hyperlinked).<p>If I&#x27;m discovering music: - I want a quick&#x2F;easy way to listen to what&#x27;s in front of me - I want a quick&#x2F;easy way to get recs from friends<p>If I&#x27;m sharing music: - I want a quick way to share music<p>I feel like these are your core experiences and I&#x27;m having trouble finding my path through any of them. I see there&#x27;s a browser extension and a bunch of community features, but the first user experience (at least on web) for any of those core paths above isn&#x27;t there.<p>Can you deliver on one of those paths in a really easy way? Looks like you&#x27;ve already got tie ins with discogs. Can you start with just a spotify web player? I think the preview of a song can be made available publicly, which would at least get a delightful enough first experience for listeners (listen to what you see if it looks interesting -- not sure many would &quot;save&quot; without that or at least some solid meta data)<p>I want what I think this product is supposed (based on your description) to be to exist, so I hope this feedback is helpful.<p>Edit: Signed out and noticed you have &quot;continue with spotify&quot; on the logged out &#x2F; sign in page <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;digs.fm&#x2F;users&#x2F;sign_in" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;digs.fm&#x2F;users&#x2F;sign_in</a> -- that wasn&#x27;t available on your home page <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;digs.fm&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;digs.fm&#x2F;</a>. I would&#x27;ve signed up with spotify if available and maybe that would&#x27;ve exposed clearer UX?

As a longtime Last.fm user (I have scrobbles from 2007 on), I’ll have to give this a go.<p>On another note: I was ecstatic to discover recently an iOS app whose main purpose is similar to this: Albums (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;albums-album-focused-player&#x2F;id1469948986" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apps.apple.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;app&#x2F;albums-album-focused-player&#x2F;id...</a>). It has incredibly tight integration with Last.fm and is perfect for people like me who prefer music in whole-album form.

Thanks for sharing. I signed up and will try it out. I&#x27;ve been using a combination of LastFM recommendations, Top lists from rateyourmusic, and just random findings on the internet for my music discovery.<p>I&#x27;ve been looking since 2015 and have never found anything that comes close to rdio [ RIP :( ] in terms of music recommendation &#x2F; discovery.

I like this idea a lot - I run <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asti.ga&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;asti.ga&#x2F;</a> which is a streaming service for your own music library.<p>A lot of our customers value the importance of curation, and it seems curation is an important part of Digs. Maybe the two could be integrated somehow? We already integrate with Last.fm.

How is this different from Rate Your Music or Album Of The Year?

Have you checked out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;listenbrainz.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;listenbrainz.org</a> ? It features a lot of similar functionality.<p>You can pin your recording jam, recommend tracks to users, view statistics in your listens, create and listen to playlists. We are actively working on adding various type of recommendations for users and also intend to add more music discovery features in future.<p>(- a ListenBrainz Dev)

Nice! Have signed up and will play. What would work for me especially is some kind of API, so we could integrate it into, say, music players...

just signed up!<p>the new user experience leaves a lot of user gap (i signed up with username&#x2F;password). ideally you&#x27;d give me a way to pull in my spotify&#x2F;youtube history and generate recommendations off of that.<p>right now my recommended&#x2F;recommending tabs are empty. huge cold start problem.<p>i&#x27;ll leave now but just telling you why new users might churn.

&gt; Add a Bandcamp album by entering <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;2000black.bandcamp.com&#x2F;album&#x2F;lord-dego-2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;2000black.bandcamp.com&#x2F;album&#x2F;lord-dego-2</a><p>Never ever did I expect to see Dego mentioned on HN. Kaidi and him are dons.

Music (discovery) on the Web, i.e off-device, and not integrated seems DOA to me for various reasons.

I like Hype Machine a lot. I listen to a lot of new music - music by artists with no prior success. I am part of a small audience of music listeners. But consider if you want to make value in music, elevating the new artist is a goal.

Good job but a heads up: this has been done a gazillion times... loads shutdown after a short run. Worthwhile researching others for reference at least

Sign up with Spotify not working on my end though.

There&#x27;s a Chinese site called Douban which is like this but for film + books + music + game + ... all on one site

I&#x27;m trying to login with Spotify but kept redirected to the home page.

I cant find my favourite music. Can we add new entries?

I thought the past tense for dig was dug? :)

I&#x27;ve been using this yesterday and today and love it! Others in this thread have mentioned similar services but I hadn&#x27;t heard of most of them so I&#x27;m excited to try digs for awhile. I&#x27;m an avid last.fm user but am pretty much using it for data on my current listening. The social aspect has pretty much died on there, and is off to a great start on digs. Their recommendations are ok, but I like the idea of recommendations from friends rather than algorithms. I may not be your typical user (do not use streaming services, buy music on Bandcamp or buy physical CDs and rip them) but do fall into what I perceive to be your general target audience: I tend to be a full album listener and am always looking for new music. One thing I have used it for so far is adding albums I have already purchased on bandcamp but haven&#x27;t had a chance to listen to yet to &quot;Want to Listen&quot;, as well as albums that are brand new to me that I see on other&#x27;s feeds.<p>- One little quirk I noticed is that adding albums from bandcamp doesn&#x27;t seem to work if the artist is using a custom domain. I tried it with the browser extension and by copy-pasting the URL. Maybe you can change the way a bandcamp site is detected? Does the code only look at the URL to determine if it&#x27;s bandcamp, or does it load the page and try to parse it?<p>Example:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;music.einavjackson.com&#x2F;album&#x2F;--2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;music.einavjackson.com&#x2F;album&#x2F;--2</a><p>- Another issue I ran into is the search; it seems like you need to type the album name exactly and with correct spacing and punctuation, not just partially.<p>Examples:<p>I tried to look up &quot;tUnE-yArDs w h o k i l l&quot;. It wasn&#x27;t case-sensitive, but I ended up having to type all those spaces in the album name.<p>Hot Chip has a new album called &quot;Freakout&#x2F;Release&quot;. I tried to type &quot;hot chip freakout&quot; and it couldn&#x27;t find it, but once I added &quot;&#x2F;release&quot; it came up.<p>- I&#x27;m torn on this one, because I really liked being able to make an account without providing an email address, but social notifications might be more useful if I didn&#x27;t have to go to the site to see them. Definitely should be opt-in, but I think the option to receive email notifications or notifications through the browser extension would be perfect.<p>- This is just a personal nice-to-have feature and I know it can be somewhat contentious (if you are looking towards future monetization licensing might be a headache), but I would love more open source code. I found the browser extension on Github but it would be fun to see all of it, and I would definitely contribute to development given the chance.<p>Anyway, thanks for the cool site, I&#x27;ve had a lot of fun with it so far and can&#x27;t wait to get a few more friends and start getting really good recommendations.