Are you still relying on the stale old music charts to find new tunes to enjoy? With the wide variety of original music now available because of the web, the record industry just isn’t the same anymore. Why settle for packaged pop stalwarts when you can discover a treasure trove of goodness?
We Are Hunted is a new music aggregator, currently in beta, that looks to replace the standard Top 40 charts. Instead of measuring radio airplay and iTunes sales, it scours the deep recesses of the web to find music that people are actually consuming.
The chart reportedly ranks numbers from many diverse sources, including Last.fm user playlists, music blogs,Twitter rolls, torrent search engines (pirating is still consuming), YouTube views and dozens of other sources. According to We Are Hunted, their site tracks “sentiment, expression and advocacy,” in whatever way they have devised to quantify those qualities.
Everyday, the site publishes a list of the top 99 songs from their rankings. You can dig into the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly archives to discover other tunes that made the list. Simplicity seems to be the order of the day for the site, which lists nine songs per page on a grid (with an image related to the track), starting from the highest-ranking ditty down to the 99th spot. Clicking on the cell plays the song. Apart from that, only two other functions are available – commenting on the song via Facebook Connect and buying it from iTunes.
Personally, I think it’s a cool way to discover new songs and artists that are making an impact on other people’s playlists – certainly better than having to wade through a ton of Myspace pages.