WeAreHunted.com Powers New Music Discovery using Social Sound Waves

WeAreHunted.com is revolutionizing the way we discover new music by scouring the social landscape and identifying what we’re all talking about, sharing, watching and listening to.

Recommendations, dynamic playlist creations and more recently, social influences, have emerged as new ways to discover new music.  WeAreHunted.com takes this to the next level by using semantics and social monitoring to understand what we’re listening to and what we want to listen to.  The service was set up by founders Ben Johnston and Nick Crocker in April 2009 with an objective “to deliver users exactly what they want — amazing, new music, every day”, Crocker May 2009.

By using semantics and social gauging, it comprises 99 tracks that are making the most noise online at the time of use and by various filters including Twitter, genre, time period, emerging, songs and artists.  Powered by Spotify Core, MySpace, YouTube and Boxee, it facilitates on site streaming of the audio/video of choice and is displayed in a delightfully simple and stylish grid of artist thumbnails.

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Create and share your own playlists are features too of the free service and you can only admire the quality and the personal touch by which the recommendations are being made to you.  Their not being made by an ultra complex algorithm but from sentiments and positive noise made online which is key to the quality of tracks being promoted by the service.

A Spotify chart and playlist was an easy win for WAH and one that will definitely help build it’s reputation to a wider audience, though they need to develop their own platform to really be successful in this market.

So they have a great product, with a social and semantic search algorithm which I strongly believe will be an ever present in digital music services not before long, so what next? A few thoughts came to mind…

• Mobile, Mobile, Mobile – A trending term in my reviews for the Appetite blog, it’s essential to ensure users who have access to your market, have access to your product, and in this case, iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps are essential.
• What are your social network streams saying about the music their listening to and discussing, I for one would like to know, in addition to the wider audience.
• Develop a community, a network of users with profiles filled with juicy data as well as their new discoveries would be another way of strengthening the music results they produce and create a strong active user base to work from.
• Tighter relationships with social networks, by automatically posting playlist additions and ‘likes’ to Facebook and Twitter it’ll create a stronger traction and increased exposure for the product/brand.
• Desktop application, again covering all forms of access a user may have.  It’s not good enough to have just a web app, or just a desktop app anymore, Spotify and iTunes have paved the way on this one.

WAH is a fantastic way to discover your next favorite band through a real time chart that takes into account not sales, but positive noise and sentiment from across the web and key social portals.  It’s the start of something, whether WAH will take the initiative and drive forward will depend on regular innovation from Johnston and Crocker in the coming months.  No doubt Apple and Spotify are already evaluating how to implement this type of technology into their products and subsequently WAH will have to get moving fast.