As should be obvious to any longtime eMusic user, a big part of our energy this year has been directed towards improving our website. And it’s all been under the umbrella of one, very basic goal: We want the eMusic product to be an awesome way to find music. That’s as plain as we can state it. To do this, we launched in-line sound samples and a brand new download manager, we completely overhauled the album pages, pulled in outside content, gave you more and more powerful means of discovery. And today we present a new and powerful recommendations engine and a new homepage experience.
Some of these rollouts have gone without a hitch. We like those. Others have had their share of hiccups, and we know it’s not an easy thing to deal with. Thanks for bearing with us. One thing we want to stress is that when we launch these new features, we are looking for your feedback; it helps to guide us, points us in certain directions, points us away from others. eMusic isn’t carved into stone. It’s a fluid product that will always be iterating, always seeking to perfect itself. Who knows how far we’ll get, but we are working to get there — wherever “there” might be.
Here’s why you are seeing today’s changes: We’ve been unhappy with the recommendations engine we’ve had on the site. Among that engine’s responsibilities were user lists on album pages (more on those in a moment!), neighbors and “Your New Arrivals.” But we thought there should be more, that new users especially would benefit from a deeper tool, a better algorithm. And so today we unveil the first stage of integration with our new recommendations engine, a group called MediaUnbound. We tested pretty much every recommendations engine on the market, and we’re very excited to be working with MediaUnbound. These are music people, and we think they make a great addition to eMusic.
Now, as I mentioned before, this likely won’t be a perfect marriage at the start. To begin with, the reason why user lists disappeared from album pages was this integration. The queries to return really kickass recommended user lists — and trust us, we use user lists all day, too — weren’t optimized, and it was slowing down the whole site. With that in mind, we made the tough call to remove them until we could make it so they didn’t cripple everything. They’re back now, and we’re sorry for the inconvenience that their disappearance might have caused. (I should mention that there’s definitely a possibility that they still might be problematic, in which case we would temporarily pull them again, but we are doing everything in our power to prevent that. One of the temporary concessions we are making is the nickname of the list creator won’t appear on the album page for now. But again, that’s just for now!)
Today’s most visible new change is the new homepage, which I freaking love. It’s a much cleaner, more sensible presentation of information, and it also let’s you see so many more albums on the homepage at once. The old homepage maxed out at about 20. This one maxes out at about 40. We like those numbers.
You will also notice a brand new dropdown menu next to the welcome message on the homepage. That let’s you browse between different album sets that we thought you might find helpful. Here’s what they are:
1) Music You’ll Love – These are the recommendations from MediaUnbound based on your history here at eMusic. These are only going to get better and better over time; they are based on your download history, your ratings, all of your on-site activity. So the more you participate, the stronger these should be! (And please note that some of the data matching is still being processed, so your recommendations will be weighted towards newer releases at first; within a few days it will reflect relevant recommendations across our entire catalog.)
2) New & Noteworthy – On the old homepage, there was a section of three to four albums at the top of the page. That’s what this is, only 28 display at once now. These are chosen by the editorial team, and reflect the best of the site. We only put stuff here if we fully stand behind it.
3) New Arrivals – This replaces “Your New Arrivals,” also from MediaUnboud. Albums added in the past 30 days recommended for you.
4) Best Sellers – Top albums from our PowerCharts.
5) New Audiobooks – I’ll give you one guess!
6) Freshly Ripped Today – Okay, try to guess this one, too!
Anyway, you get the idea. Soon you will be able to choose what you want your default data-set to be when you visit the site. Kinda hot, right?
We’ve also shifted the magazine into this Notes From the Digital Underground space, which will be a hybrid between our old magazine and 17 Dots. Same with Today’s Buzz at the bottom. Basically, we are looking at what’s worked in the past, and improving on it.
Suffice it to say there will be some bugs here. But we’re on them. We really appreciate your patience, and we are going to do our best to make it worthwhile. Remember: we want to develop and evolve eMusic into the best place on the web to find great music. We know that on a cultural and community level, that’s true. Now it’s time to make sure the technology is there, too, and we’re psyched that you’re here to experience it.
The new homepage is uber-sexy. The Charts List in the lower right is a little confusing since they’re not numbered…they’re just kinda a list. But I love the drop-down menu thingie up top! Still would love to see a more prominent link to the message board, though. And new Bon Iver coming in January? Woot!
I love clicking through on music you’ll like links on album pages so I’m looking forward to using this. Of course I sign in and the first thing that comes up on under Music I’ll Love is “currently unavailable”. Got to love launching new technology.
Just refresh if you get “currently unavailable.” It’ll be there.
just been playing with it and i do like it. it is soooooo much better than the older recommended list and seems extremely more relevant.
but, there is always a but
there is so much javascript going on it’s rather sluggish on my computer. do we need to animate everything?
as with the fist round of redesigns, i personally thought everything was too big and as a result i have to scroll more. thankfully you have lots of collapsable windows but it really is apparent on the homepage with the charts so far down. funny they are deemd less important, i used them loads to see what was new. what usability testing did you do?… sorry i do this sort of stuff for my day job
Much better recommendations, and not a bad design either. This is my favorite of the changes that have been made.
sounds great.. if only i can visit it. since last October i’ve been greeted with this message even though i’ve been a loyal subscriber since January 2006:
Hello,
Thank you for visiting eMusic. We’re sorry but eMusic is not currently available in your area.
If you have a question about eMusic, please send an email to offerquestions@emusic.com and be sure to include “My eMusic Account” as the subject line.
Regards,
eMusic Customer Support
hey yonan, lemme look into that for you. can you email us at 17dots at emusic dot com?
I’ve had several album recommendations for albums I’ve already bought off eMusic. I had this problem with the old site, too. I wonder what’s causing that. If you guys need an example, I’m getting Juana Molina’s _Un Dia_ recommended even though I bought it, love it, and put it in my top 10 on the recent survey.
how heavily does this rely on my ratings, i wonder?
the old recommendations were pretty useless for me, and the new ones are only slightly better. i’m wondering if it’s because i basically never rate anything.
instead, i tend to bounce over to lastfm/audioscrobbler, check its recommendations, then bounce back to see which are on emusic. the recommendations over there have been way more on target–and, frankly, are the main reason i’ve stayed on emusic the past few months.
sorry to be kind of negative. that wasn’t the point. i’m all for anything that improves the recommendations. i’m just wondering if maybe i’m causing my own trouble by not rating anything. . .
. . . updating, i made a bunch of ratings and the recommendations got better. i also discovered a thomas dolby disc i didn’t know you had (yay!) and that the long blondes have quit (sad!). i should make ratings more often!
Love.
I’m getting nothing but electronic and dance reccomendations. Also it’s not filtering out albums not available for download in my country (Australia). And also… i can’t seem to find my way to dozens, features, and i have no ‘ads’ down the sidebars, just white space. Anyway… I’ll be patient.
Since downloading & installing new toolbar & Download manager have had trouble with both IE & Firefox crashing ?? will see how it goes
Looks good, although not sure the recommendations do that much for me – perhaps I need to do more rating than downloading. I’ll play around and see if I can improve things.
Couple of comments – as the guy/gal above said, it should really filter out stuff that isnt available for me to download (in the UK). It’s kind of annoying seeing new stuff I’d be interested in only to find I can’t download it.
For the future, I’d like a way to have saved search type features on the homepage for example, every time a new track with “Prins Thomas” in the title gets added I want to know – currently I have to plough through the search looking for ones I’ve not got yet.
Also – an option to sort by date added in search and to filter out stuff I already have would be really helpful – even a flag to say “already downloaded by this account” or similar would be good.
A little off topic, but is there any plan to step up the social networking aspect of emusic? I’ve connected to various friends, but other than being able to see what they’ve downloaded, there’s not much point to this feature. I’d love an easy way to be able to tell them that a certain album is awesome, for instance…
I too would like to see something more done with the Friends feature.
Really like the new front page, and I love the fact that there’s a save for later button right there. If I had any suggestion it would be to add sfl buttons to hubs, dozens and user lists, so you can save without having to leave the list and come back to it.
Mike, as I mentioned in the post, we are very much looking for the best ways to discover music, and I can see social networking in the sense that you mentioned — connecting with friends, recommending them stuff, etc — makes sense. But it would have to be music-based in the end.
I totally agree on the music-based part. But it doesn’t seem like that would be too difficult, given that the site is music based… I think it could be a great feature, because friends recommendations have always been one of the best ways to find new music — you know them and trust their taste. It’d also be great to be able to keep track of what they’ve downloaded, so you could ask them what they think of the new Of Montreal album. I do like the new recommendation features, btw… Already turned me on to a new group I’m going to dl…
The things I’ve done on eMusic suggest that I’d enjoy the String Quartet Tribute to AC/DC? That’s truly horrifying.
On a note that’s related other thoughts, I don’t ever rate albums either, and I rated what I believe to be my first album today, since Okkervil River’s new one was on the front page. I might be motivated to do so if I thought it would help the site recommend music for me. Netflix always asks after I turn something back what I thought of it, perhaps eMusic could do something similar?
Like, last month, you downloaded x/y/z, what did you think?
Also, I hope freebies are being ignored, when it comes to recomendations, since I’ll take pretty much anything that’s free, and it therefore has little to do with the music I like.
Thanks for the improvements, and the great service!
Love the new design and the recommendations are much better. As a web developer I’m sure it will take time to get it perfect. I love the service so I’m excited to stick around and see what happens next. Keep up the good work!
Definitely looks like an improvement, if overwhelming me with more music I would like than I could possibly choose from is an improvement (I’m still on the fence).
Really, though, the improvement to recommendations is greatly appreciated. It seemed before that only random downloads (of one track even sometimes) overrode entire catalogs I’d picked up, so this is nice.
The site has evolved radically over the last year; I feel spoiled for joining in that span.
I agree with the posters above about social networking. One of the primary ways I hear about new music is from my friends, and I try to let friends know when I hear something I think they would enjoy. Better recommendation software is fantastic (and I do like the new features a lot), but being able to connect with my friends, recommend music to them (and they can recommend stuff to me), see what music they are enjoying, maybe compare how similar our tastes are, and other similar features are an excellent example of how music and social networking can fit together nicely, and add to the experience on eMusic. Right now, I don’t even know how I would go about finding one of my friends on eMusic and connecting with them there. Please make finding friends easier, and add more music-based social networking options to the site.
Woot!!
I like the Reccomended, and the new layout. Will Neighbors be based on the new engine too?? (I hope so
)
Now if I can just get them to fix the RSS Feeds
(http://www.emusic.com/messageboard/viewTopic.html?topicId=131110
)
Great updates. Are there any plans to implement a system that allows me to track labels / or artists that I return to regularly. A simple rss feed for a label would be really helpful in finding releases that don’t automatically show up here in 17dots or in the recommendations for new music.
I would love to be able to add labels to my rss or receive email updates when obscure yet amazing labels like touch, smalltownsupersound, kitsune, sterns, type, etc. post stuff to the sight – as I download them almost unconditionally. I would like to be able to use some discovery tool of the speculation from algorithms in combination with stuff that I know I would be interested in.
Regarding social networking – it would also be great to be notified if a friend has downloaded an album on say a facebook app. Just a thought – but the way you all are implementing the explore more on the artists integrating existing web content from other venues seems like a better way to go than trying to force another social app on some one.
Regarding editorial content – please don’t let up her in the interest of automation either.
For my taste it is some of the best and insightful music journalism available and the compilations from staff are outstanding.
Maybe all of this is already available – and I don’t know about it yet.
Thanks for all of your efforts – I cannot live with out my emusic.
ethos, that’s an incredible post from start to finish. and absolutely agreed on all suggestions. we have the same line of thinking.
I hope that all here will go to cNet and comment their thoughts on the new face of eMusic
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13526_3-10118252-27.html?tag=mncol;title
ethos I agree very good post
for RSS here’s a stopgap
go to your label (in this example I’ll use Fantasy
Go to all albums
Change the Drop down to “most recent additions
in your address bar you will see:
http://www.emusic.com/browse/l/b/-n/a/0-0/1400089463/0.html
in the second to last part before the HTML (where it says 0-0) change it so it says 0-100
this will put the 100 most recent ablums for the label at the top (but you won’t see the old ones after you’ve deleted them)
(your address bar will now look as such:
http://www.emusic.com/browse/l/b/-n/a/0-100/1400089463/0.html)
This should create a discoverable feed if not just replace the word “browse” in the address bar with “rss” and copy the result into your Reader
Hope this works for you as well as it does me; I do it with new releases by genre (e.g. http://www.emusic.com/rss/n/b/-n/a/0-100/65 68 1200000284/0.html for “alt/punk”)
(NOT as simple as we’d all like but it works)
p.s. the spaces in my rss feed above are supposed to be plus symbols
Good changes! ALL digital music suffers from a lack of details. I mean, as a Jazz and Fusion enthusiest I ALWAYS want liner notes and musician lineups! Need it and cannot live without it. Especially YEAR recorder/released NOT year ripped to Emusic.
Also, searching for artists with limited or no details is diffcult. This may be simply that the artists do not provide liner notes and lineup details but it would be awesome to read which adds to a growing relationship with artists!!!
I LOVE EMUSIC (the ANTI I-Tunes!)
mike