Musebin: Twitter-style Music Reviews

“It’s a reaction to the wordy, wordy MP3 blogs and people craving really concise content.”

I love the word reaction. I’ve always thought that a successful entrepreneur should actively fight to have themselves thought of as a reactionary, as it implies an energetic, single-minded response to the status quo, which should be at the heart of any great entrepreneurial idea. Keeping this in mind, I would like to take some time to talk to you about Musebin, a company that specializes in single line music news and reviews.

Borrowing its concept from Twitter (which we love here at Artists House), Musebin forces its users to review albums in just 140 characters, rather than in endless, pitchfork-ian rants filled with all manner of unrelated minutia that have become de rigeur in today’s blogosphere. As Musebin’s CEO Greg Galant explained in WIRED:

“Blogs have kind of killed the editor. It used to be that anything that got written would be edited by people who read [the style guide] Strunk & White…. Blogs came along with no limit, and anyone could write anything. I think music reviews — which were already kind of long-winded — maybe got a little bit worse. You’re going to talk about some experience that happened to you in high school, and this and that. [We want to] capture the essence of an album so someone knows whether or not they should listen to it.”

The brevity of the reviews allows for a much greater variety of opinions to be absorbed more rapidly, thus giving the reader a much broader insight into how the record was received across a range of listeners in a shorter amount of time than it would take to read a group of traditional articles. In other words, less means more.

To prevent “gaming” of the system by PR representatives, the site employs a Reddit-style rating system, where Musebin users vote the opinion up or down depending on its validity. This use of crowdsourcing for the purposes of policing content ensures that the opinions on display stay honest without restricting the user experience. Another benefit of the “yay” or “nay” scoring system is that it completely eschews more complicated rating systems employed by other review sites, which in many cases force the user to be able to discern the difference between what makes a record an 8.3 instead of a 9.2.

Musebin is a perfect example of applying a proven idea to a new area in order to effect change. Their concept isn’t new, but the way it is being utilized is. Why re-invent the wheel just because you’re building a truck instead of a car? When reactionaries see an existing problem with something they care about enough to fix they do it, even if it means doing precisely the opposite of what the pack is doing.

Musebin is currently in Beta, but signing up for an invite yields you a membership within 24 hours. I’m in love with it. Let us know what you think.