Idea: We Rate the Raters

[Chris Allen]

At first this may sound familiar but read it through, it really is unlike anything out there. Okay so here’s my idea. We make a social site where independent artist upload their songs. The community members rank these new songs as they come in. The highest ranked songs then advance to a weekly evaluation competition. Community members register in the genres they wish to participate in. They then listen to the top 10 songs in that genre and enter a score for each song. At the end of the week we take all of the scores and now we know the sequential ranking of the songs.

Nothing new there but what we do next changes everything. Next we use my algorithm to rank the entire participating audience in sequential order. The algorithm can scale to accommodate any size audience whether it’s one hundred or one hundred million. This creates an entirely new form of social event where not just the content creators compete to win but now the audience ALSO competes for prizes and recognition based on their ability to evaluate good music. Let’s just say it works a little like American Idol only it also ranks the entire audience that’s evaluating the singers. We’ll award points in these weekly competitions with a grand prize winner at the end of the season.

The process is content agnostic so it can work on any form of content that can be evaluated over the internet. This particular form of the process basically turns music listening into a brand new competitive sport. Besides the all the other forms of online content it could also be used offline to evaluate the audience’s ability to rank live performances at music festivals or barbeque at barbeque festivals and the list can go on and on. I don’t think you need to go to Stanford to put together more than a few rock solid revenue models for this critter.

Hey and for you football fans out there here’s a different twist for it. Do you think anyone would be interested in a competition that could rank in sequential order the entire television viewing audience of the super bowl commercials? It would take some serious horsepower but I think the TV network hosting the super bowl might shine to the idea of people being glued to the TV & the Internet in order to play this game? Maybe the #1 Ad Evaluator could win tickets to the next year’s super bowl along with a hundred grand or maybe something even better. It shouldn’t be to terribly hard to find sponsors for this one. But that’s way down the road.

Now I realize some of you folks really hate the idea of software patents but I think serious investors like to see that you have the ability to defend your idea so I have applied for the utility patent on this process. It is patent pending. It’s one of those boxes on their check list you know.

There’s a whole lot more I could say about this but I don’t want to bore you with all the details.

So what do you think? Will this Dog hunt?

Anybody interested?

[Nathan Ketsdever]

There is a certain American Idol appeal (if you want to go in that direction) as well as a Threadless model of sorts. The artists would also generate part of the traffic for the site.

If this works out--it seems like the perfect time to collaborate with other music promotion sites in the social media space. For instance, Noise Trade or band tour sites. (Although not sure what the exact tie in with the later would be at the moment)

You would need an interface but there is open source code for a digg-clone (for a temporate rating system). I think Pligg is the go to in that space, but Mashable has several other options: http://mashable.com/2008/03/28/create-digg-clone/.

[Jake Robinson]

I like it... what if you could go to record companies to rate potential line ups for a new album from a band... they have 15 songs to choose but will only record 12 for the CD... let the best of the best (top 100,000 raters) help rate the top 12 winners... it would be a 'limited' release to that group but would be invaluable to a record company.. can you say 'part of residuals, please'?

[J Tod Fetherling]

Check out the the ratings guy. Similar but different concept. Like the concept, not sure of rev model.

[Chris Allen]

Yes the artist would generate a good portion of the traffic but I’ve got some viral loops that should drive traffic much farther.
Yes again, it should definitely appeal to the music promotion folks in not only the social arenas but also radio, television and any other way you could draw an audience.
Now about that interface, it appears the programmers up here in Kentucky are all pardon the expression fat, dumb & happy doing what their doing. Then again none I’ve spoken with really have the experience to put something of this scale together. I am looking for some folks who have the experience but are still hungry to do better… Know anyone?

Take care,
CA

Nathan Ketsdever said:

There is a certain American Idol appeal (if you want to go in that direction) as well as a Threadless model of sorts. The artists would also generate part of the traffic for the site.

If this works out--it seems like the perfect time to collaborate with other music promotion sites in the social media space. For instance, Noise Trade or band tour sites. (Although not sure what the exact tie in with the later would be at the moment)

You would need an interface but there is open source code for a digg-clone (for a temporate rating system). I think Pligg is the go to in that space, but Mashable has several other options: http://mashable.com/2008/03/28/create-digg-clone/.

[Chris Allen]

Hey Jake, it sounds like you’ve been following me… Yes, I’ve met with a couple of prominent contemporary Christian producers in Franklin who know a lot of people who were thinking right down those lines. There’s nothing like having feedback from real people who are highly in tune with the collective intelligence of your target market is there. And about those residuals – Like I said earlier have you been following me, cause Oh yes they can.

Later.
CA

Jake Robinson said:

I like it... what if you could go to record companies to rate potential line ups for a new album from a band... they have 15 songs to choose but will only record 12 for the CD... let the best of the best (top 100,000 raters) help rate the top 12 winners... it would be a 'limited' release to that group but would be invaluable to a record company.. can you say 'part of residuals, please'?

[Chris Allen]

There are tons of services out there that rate content which look similar on the surface. But when you look for something that rates the audience’s ability to evaluate that content and award the best for their skill in knowing which are the best is where you’ll see the distinction. This is the only one that engages the audience members to compete against each other to see who the best are at evaluating new music. With hundreds of millions of people out there competing over the most bizarre things you can imagine I think turning music listening into a brand new competitive sport will find traction somewhere. You know I drive by FLW Outdoors’ home office every day and if they can turn Bass Fishing competitions into a multi billion dollar business then how much harder could it be to create a successful business around Music Evaluation Competitions. Then again this is only using the application for online music; there are many other forms of content it will work on equally well. I’m starting with music because it has the ability to gain the largest audience the quickest.

Thanks for the post.

Take care,
CA


J Tod Fetherling said:

Check out the the ratings guy. Similar but different concept. Like the concept, not sure of rev model.