Dear community,
We are planning to fine-tune the ranking system to give musicians(verified) more voting power to filter content for the system and eventually present more high quality content to listeners. Currently musicians have same voting power to listeners. Our plan is to make it higher to 3x because we sense musicians have a better position to judge and evaluate a musical work. What's your ideas about this direction? Please let us know because your opinion matters.

https://musicoin.org/nav/track/0xe552ec8adbb1b978a6087ea5f4f1e018ab2fbd3b

Cheers
Isaac

I've been using the like and vote button a lot, I feel it is absolutely necessary to show your support and this is also an awesome way to do that. Could be viable to give the artists more unrestricted voting power, it would be more a case of trying that out to see how it works.

This is a tricky one. I'm not sure musicians are generally in a better position to judge the quality of music. In fact my experience on SoundCloud is that musicians tend to form groups and help each other out so you may find the same thing will happen and you will just end up with those that have the best network rising to the top.

There are systems in place for SoundCloud where people take advantage of the ranking system by charging desperate musicians a fee to be reposted across large networks of accounts and as this site becomes more popular (and especially as there is money involved!) this will undoubtedly occur.

So the short answer is: I'm on the fence

I was thinking the same thing to be honest, that's why I said it would be more a case of trying it out to see how it works. But I have to agree with you on the fact that musicians and other people could take advantage of the voting system and in this case as you say, there is also money involved so it could be a high risk factor.

Can we just not put any value on those voting buttons? They do nothing other than a stupid thumbs up.

Music is subjective to everyone. Some love a track, others don't. That's just normal, but there is really no point in visualizing this. We're human, that's all there is about. And musicians are human too. You won't believe what kind of stuff I can get around.
I'd rather see "sharing" encouraged, because - remember - the actual support comes from plays.

I'm not keen on this idea. For the reasons @juxta mentions. Also if we are going to attract Listeners to buy coins, then they need to feel empowered on the site and able to collectively filter/vote/reward what they like. Giving Musicians power to influence the rankings is counter to that.

@neon-insect By "sharing" you mean, shares on social networks?

@infinity

Uhm...i could set up a whole ideas topic about that I guess^^
When I wrote my post, i thought about the newsfeed here (https://musicoin.org/nav/feed).
From my point of view, this is actually a really well built in tool for people already on the site. And I'd like to see interactions like "hey, check out this track" more. Something like "shares" could be a seperate feed in an additional column or something like that.

Like personally, I have my three guys here, that I follow, of which I know we share a similar taste of music. So...the thumbs up just doesn't mean anything to me because I can't see it (no matter if 1 vote or 3), but a share of these guys would make me jump on that track immediately (like current comments and tips do already, but the feed is very fast, so I miss it quite often - I even miss comments on my own tracks quite often).

I wouldn't want to so anything alienate listeners, or to make them feel "less than". In essence, all music platforms are supported by the active listeners, the music creators are trying to be heard.
Music is subjective, and feelings based so I think music creators and listeners are in the same field. I have heard listeners describe and discuss music in as much detail as music creators. I don't think musicians are generally "better" at evaluating the meaning a song to a listener.

Most music sites rely on mob-rule as its default (and that's shown not to work so great) so I think this proposal is in the right direction. I think that this is already in place but I think that at the very least people should be a registered user on the site before their vote counts for anything. (1 user, 1 vote.)

But I'm more concerned about the fact that it's simply a lot of work for both the users and musicians to have to make informed choices about what "quality" means for something like music. I studied musicology for a few years and one thing that becomes obvious is that people generally have a lot of trouble talking about music in general because the language we use to describe musical concepts tend to be inadequate.

I think in the long run there will have to be a class of users that primarily focuses on curation as their main role, similar to how critics, reviewers, and tastemakers operate in traditional spaces. Musicians just want to make music and fans just want to listen -- I think you'd get better results if you give some weight to people who're really excited to do this stuff, imo. And it'll eliminate a lot of the conflict of interest issues that may lead to abuses of the system, which has always been a problem in the space as well.

Semi-related to my other project here about revamping the categorization and tagging schemes of Musicoin. Join the discussion if you have some ideas!

https://forum.musicoin.org/topic/87/musicoin-music-discovery-categorization-and-tagging-systems-design

I'm not sure of this idea. Eventually I'd assume the majority of people using this platform will be listeners just from the fact there are more non-musicians than musicians in the world. The listeners are the ones who drive this economy. Without them the artists make no money. I feel like when you see a song that is highly upvoted it should be one that listeners like and not more influenced by musicians votes. Sometimes the most technically appreciated songs by musicians aren't always the best songs for the masses.

everybody think that he/she's the best, but only crowd make tham the best

@im To my mind this can only provoke musicians to kind of collusions. So I don't think it's a quite a good idea either.

@im And what if just try two different separated vote systems for musicians and for other uses and two charts - so we could compare the results. This, in my humble opinion, would be great.

If I understood the initial proposal, I believe that we need to find out an algorithm to rank and present Musicoin's best choices on the landing page in order to attract more listeners and streams.
I don't know the stats regarding the listeners streams vs the artists streams (even though artists are good enough listeners as well), but we need to attract more traffic. So I think that we could address this in two moments:

• A ranking based on musicians votes being greater then listeners (by 2 or 3x as per @im initial proposal);

• A ranking based on equal voting when a balanced ratio of streams by listeners and streams by musicians is achieved (again, assuming that at the present moment streams from verified artists are bigger then the others)

If possible, the landing page suggestions should be based upon the listeners historical streams and musical tastes, and a general criteria (as described above) should be applied only when there is not enough historical data.

I feel uncomfortable about this suggestion. For starters, it's so subjective. Any attempt to filter out poor material shouldn't hamper music discovery or give an unfair advantage to artists that have a large fanbase already who can be roped in to vote.

@kate-mclaughlin Great posts. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on how www.blockitdown.com could work can you check it out and drop me a line team@blockitdown.com thanks Tim

@metkraming There is no BEST (musician, painter, human being or whatever) out there! In my opinion voting in general makes no sense (especially for Art). Everything on this planet is totally subjective (it's an illusion )... Talking about music, there is something like an individual taste. If you like something, you keep listening to it. That's already good enough! If somebody wants to support the artist with extra money it's good, too. I think it's not nescessary to have this thumbs / thing. The music someone loves, another person dislikes... So who needs voting? It's always the same... if somebody is rich (or has many friends/connections whatever) wins. Now, with the great possibility of streaming music, it would be great to listen borderless and without preselections (many votings). The music industry manipulated the individual taste over so many years already... even categories for the genre are already little borders in my eyes. I think you can find great music in any genre! Every peace of music is a result of someone being creative and therefore it's worth listening to it. Another thing is that the Artist of the week should be randomized every time when you visit the page. It's fair and better for exploring new music. We can make the world a better place with small adjustments here and there. Everybody is equal! Art is free, so please be you and open minded! Please vote for no more votings!

Pretty dope