The most overlooked part of the site, the compare feature (link beneath recent rankers on artist page), is about to receive a considerable makeover. Last.fm’s music compatibility and their sociomap features allow you to immediately find those you want to share music with and those maybe not so much. This is great for finding out which artists you relate to, but what about your favorite songs on an individual level. How could your #1 only be their #15!! Some ideas being tossed around:

1) Instead of simply highlighting which songs you both ranked, we’re devising a genius algorithm that computes your music compatibility by percentage and description (awkward morning after to perfect harmony?)

2) Showing which artists you have both ranked on the compare page

3) A video playlist for the songs not listed (we’re all about music discovery right?)

4) Ability to comment on how you both stack up

5) Have speech bubbles coming out of playlists instead of lining rankings up side by side (debate and controversy galore)

Hit us up with any other interesting ideas and remember your faves are always better than their faves. Let’s duke it out!!

If I were the ox, I'd be petrified

We felt like shaking things up a bit at GoRankem HQ and have unleashed the bold, in your face F$#% Button, replacing the tried and true GoRankem Button. Sure we we’re initially concerned with protecting our image and not offending anyone, but then we realized, why the f not? Other changes coming down the pipe:

-New and improved badges: (Our awesome graphic designer Kenny is scheming as we speak)

-Amping up the recommendation system: (Don’t you want to give props to your fellow rankers?)

-Hilarious uh-oh pages: (Partial nudity and kittens may be  involved)

-The ultra top secret ranking interface: (Guaranteed to blow your mind)

In short we at GoRankem are committed to enhancing your user experience and throwing a nasty curve ball at whatever you think we might be up to next.

This kid wasn't too thrilled about your Backstreet Boys rankings

A historic day for digital music took place yesterday with the announcement of the Pandora IPO. Probably the biggest winner was Walden Venture Firm director Larry Marcus, who pocketed $455.5 million (other big winners here). Traders pushed the stock to $26/share before it closed at $17, only one dollar above its initial offering. Not bad for a company that hasn’t turned anything resembling sustainable profits. Here’s some red flags raised already:

1) Ad-based business model not sustainable: All ad revenue goes toward paying royalties for the music. Only 10% of users have premium subsciptions

2)Increased Competition: Slacker, Spotify (just signed a licensing deal with Universal), MOG, etc.

3) Inadequate form of music discovery: This where GoRankem comes in. If you read Bob Lefsetz‘s blog post you will see just how turned off listeners are with their one directional, casual structure. GoRankem should be the vertical to Pandora’s horizontal. You hear an obscure artist for the first time and want to see what their top 10 songs are. You just click on the artist icon and bam there they are. Simple and effective, right? As impressive as Pandora’s music discovery algorithm is, it would be vastly enhanced by what we bring to the table: tapping into fan sentiment. Any money raised from this colossal IPO should be invested in enhancing their product, not gold parachutes and marketing.

Hey, look our company is worth $2.6 billion now!

Hello all, my name is Patrick McGinn and when I’m not buried face deep in my graduate studies, I am either writing about music or more recently ranking music. I’ll be posting to the blog for the next few months and just wanted to run through my first impressions of GoRankem as a first time user and now frequent contributor:

1) Probably the most rewarding part of the ranking experience is that it automatically compiles a video playlist for you once you submit your rankings. I thought I had seen nearly every Wilco related video on YouTube, but thanks to this feature I’ve bookmarked a couple of new favorites.

2) Just recently discovered the compare feature, which allows you to see how your rankings stack up with another user. Most of the time I’m satisfied with my fellow compatriots but sometimes my face twists in horror!

3) Posting your rankings to Facebook, which I’ve done numerous times has generated a nice comment stream of things like “Really?” and “What were you thinking?”

4) Finally, GoRankem has a wiki ethos that makes you feel like you are part of something much bigger than yourself. One day you can tell your grandkids about how you were the first person to rank Sigur Ros, Deertick, or thanks to our social media coordiantor Jamie Lewis, Mandy Moore!

Back in her "Candy" days

We’ve spoken to a number of artists about the benefits of Rank ‘em. Even when we’re not trying to sell them anything, many of them remain skeptical of working with us because of the large amount of inquiries they get.

In general, we think the Rank ‘em resource can function as their best friend. While they’re not doing any work, we’re allowing the prospective fans to lean on the knowledge of the existing fanbase.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we already get a good bit of traffic from fans who seemingly rely on Google to help embrace a new artist.

In terms of our actual collaboration with artists, we think there’s four easy steps necessary, and only one minor step falls on the artists:

1. Artist mailing list [and Facebook & Twitter followings] encouraged to check out the existing fan favorites on Rank ‘em.
2. Fans disagree with the existing list so they want to rank their own.
3. Fans share their rankings across the social networks.
4. Potential fans see these lists and check ‘em out (everybody loves lists!).
5. Potential fans become new fans and repeat steps #2 & #3.

More than anything, this cycle is especially effective when artists have nothing new to share. How can they keep the fanbase engaged when they’re not (e.g.) releasing a new album or announcing a new tour?

For the artists, we’re trying to keep their name in the public consciousness, and minimize the troughs that come with the downtime. Rank ‘em gives fans an outlet to interact with the content in a unique way.

If you’re an artist and you dig what I’m describing, I’d love to talk and help make you leverage your fanbase to your advantage.

When you want to embrace a new artist, where do you usually go?

You could totally lean on iTunes’ popularity charts. That’s what I did for the longest time — but the inaccuracy of that list is essentially why we wanted to create Rank ‘em in the first place. Who knows each artist better than their own fans?

We already get a good bit of random traffic for queries like “best STS9 songs” or “best Widespread Panic songs.” You can just sense that there’s all these fans out there that would love to dive into the catalogs, but don’t have a fucking clue where to begin.

It’s one of our internal goals to show up in the top 5 search results for every one of these queries: “best [artist’s name] songs.” Just look at the weak results that turn up for an artist like Phish. Same goes for replacing “best” with “top.” As described above, we’re already seeing that traffic coming our way, and it should only grow with time as the website becomes further established.

Forget about the common Silicon Valley startup mentality of a quick flip. We aspire to build a resource that can remain beneficial when we’re all long gone. That’s why we’ve put so much time & energy to date behind this project. We love to hear stories about helping fans find their new favorite song, especially if it was a hidden gem!

This post is two weeks overdue, but finally had a chance to put it in writing. Had a great time at SXSW this year, but I walk away with the same taste as last year: it’s just a little too overwhelming.

Seemingly every up-and-coming band and their mother converges on Austin. Whether they received an invite to play officially sponsored SXSW parties or picked up a last minute gig off 6^th street, you’ll never be short on options if you want to catch some live music.

Here’s the problem: there’s too many options to choose from. I remember last year when I opened the paper, and I was presented with more than 1,000 options for shows around town. Each listing contained two really helpful tips: the band name and their home city. Well, then! I know exactly where I should go…

At least they could’ve given me the genre – oh, but you’re short on space? Then don’t bring that many bands to town!

I personally don’t like to see artists blindly. I want to have an idea of what I can expect to hear – maybe that’s just another reason I wanted to create the Rank ‘em resource.

I view each artist page as if it was the hardcore fan of the band that you wish you could ask about the best songs. Fortunately, you don’t have to bother anybody, and you can get a good feel for the band in no time to figure out if they’re worth your time.

Maybe next year we’ll just have to get involved to make everybody’s experience a lil’ easier…

IPOs saw a resurgence last year after a couple years of minimal activity. This year is lining up to be a memorable one for the consumer web space. There’s a bunch of recognizable names that will likely go public by the end of 2011 including: Groupon, LinkedIn, Skype, Zynga, Pandora, and of course, Facebook.

Don’t be surprised if many, if not all of the ones listed above, try to beat Facebook to an IPO since Facebook is likely to steal the show when their IPO day inevitably comes. Perhaps most surprising of all, TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy reported that Pandora has their eye on a mid-2011 IPO. Being in the music business,I think it’s pretty wild how long (and how recently) they were burning through cash (primarily royalty payments), but then they finally reached a profit in 2009, and as Mashable reported, they could have topped $100 million last year.

If Zuckerberg had his way, Facebook wouldn’t go public this year…but when you have $836 million in outside funding and a $50 billion valuation, there’s only so much he can do. I think it’ll be interesting to see Zuck change . I’m not sure he’s cut out to have shareholders as his top priority, especially when money has never been a driving factor for him.

Will he remain with Facebook forever? I think it’s his baby, and he’d have a tough time parting with it (even though one of his right hand guys left early 2010 to start Quora, which will be 2011′s breakout startup). He also hasmassive plans for how Facebook can be tied into almost everything through the social graph.

We’re specifically establishing a growing resource instead of a passing social network at Rank ‘em, but as an entrepreneur with a consumer startup, I still have serious doubts about the sustainability of many of the B2C companies. Still, they might as well capitalize on their valuations. It’ll be a fun year to watch the activity, and it’ll be very interesting to see how many people with little familiarity of the stock market invest their money because of their passions for these companies.