Amid a constantly growing assortment of social media uses, the social music discovery website Splash.FM seeks to provide users with a chance to find new and enjoyable tunes while promoting the content they like, meeting others with similar tastes and discovering great new music.
The site launched in private beta in January and offered The Daily Reveille a chance to tour its features.
Like other social networking sites, Splash.FM allows users to set up an account with a picture and profile information. Users can upload personal music files from their own libraries, follow other users who post music, stream any of these songs, download user-uploaded content, buy songs from the iTunes library and “splash” music they enjoy.
The Splash feature is a key component of the website, allowing users to click a water droplet symbol next to tracks they like, adding a track to “My Splashes” on their pages and increasing the splash number next to the song. This number denotes how many users have splashed the song.
User profiles display an activity page, which works similarly to a Facebook wall. This section shows a user’s recent actions, like their comments on other people’s music, who they follow and who follows them.
Members also have access to a “home” board, which details their personal recent activity, content from users they follow, those members’ activity, posts by the entire community and a list of suggested splashes. Another section features a “Splashboard,” which displays top-rated tracks by friends and others, as well as the top splashers of the site.
A website representative said in a news release that the page hopes to spread music that users will enjoy through “who you know” mechanics — following friends with trustworthy musical opinions, users will pick up tracks they will most likely enjoy.
As somewhat of an incentive to better communicate and spread good music, each user receives a “Splash Score” — a rank from zero to 99. This demonstrates the participant’s activity on the site. A member betters this score by splashing music, receiving other followers with high splash Scores and by having their posted content re-splashed by other users.
Being able to find great music through friends while gaining respect for content personally posted or splashed seems like a concept that has the potential to appeal to a wide audience — that is, if the site manages to successfully promote these features. The ability to stream tracks also allows users to find specific tracks and artists, as they do when using iTunes, Spotify or even YouTube.
As with many services in beta testing, some of these features exhibit some fallbacks. Several features seem like great ideas in theory, but sometimes fail to deliver.
Searching tracks, artists or albums can prove a mess. The site fails to categorize properly, leaving users to sift through random tracks that may or may not be by the artist they’re looking for. Searching through all results pulls up a list of track names with appropriate artists, but no other information on the songs.
In addition, users can find highly-splashed songs, but it’s difficult to trace whose page they originally appeared on, unless the song is found on another user’s page. In short, the site can be difficult to navigate.
The beta version of Splash.FM presents some potentially great ideas, but the company could better flesh out those features before the site’s official release. If the site manages to better organize its library, search engine and splash system, it can bloom into an interesting community of music lovers. University students interested in testing the site for themselves can go to splash.fm and use the access code “RIPPLE” to check it out.
____
Contact Austen Krantz at [email protected]