Xaltlee's Journal: Web-Based Alternative to the RIAA

Goal: Music review site - allow reviewers to rate good non-RIAA music. Prevent musicians from artificially altering their ratings by making reviewers the stars of the site, not musicians.

1. Each reviewer must apply to become one.
        a) Administrator approves reviewers.
        b) Reviewer is required to submit a sample review of an established and popular work.

2. Each reviewer will have the following bits of data:
        a) Personal data. (Name, blurb about self, blurb about music tastes, etc. Optional.) 1k at most.
        b) Reviews, past, present, and future. 1-64k each.
                - This makes crosslinking reviews and music possible.

3. Each reviewer can review any music they want, within reason. (I want to make the exception for use of this software: NO RIAA music reviewing. None. That's not why I'm building this program. I realize I probably won't be able to enforce this, but... well, I can hope. Or I can just run a site myself.)
        a) The reviewer gets, say, 5 five-star ratings they can hand out per month. Prevents overzealous adoration of everything in sight.
        b) The reviewer gets, say, 1 one-star rating (or no-star rating) per month. Limits the REALLY bad reviews - if a piece of music gets that, it's probably accurately bad. The point is to get people to look at GOOD music, not bad.

4. If a reviewer is caught cheating, or giving biased reviews, he will most likely be booted - or worse yet, have his reviews nuked. That should be scary enough to keep the honest man honest.

5. If we do a 'what people are listening to' we do it the Neilson Group way - that is, find a few hundred real users every once in a while, and follow 'em around anonymously on the site. This will be automated.

6. Listeners can rate reviews.
        a) We could do like Slashdot moderation.
                - Give moderation abilities only to those reviewers who have been around for a certain amount of time.
                - Make sure they aren't rabid 'refresh the page and see if I got mods' types.
                - Make sure they're real people, not bots.
                - Make sure if they have bad karma they get no power.
        b) We could allow ANYONE to rate a review.
                - Bots could get involved.
                - Dissed musicians could get trigger-happy.
        c) We could pick random people to rate reviews.
                - Just once in a while, a user might get the chance to rate a review.
                - We could weed out the bots.
                - Cheaters would be less likely to get a chance to review.
                - The same person could be asked to review more than once.
                - This will take more thought.
        d) We could do like Slashdot metamoderation.
                - Pick 1 star reviewer review and 5-10 listener reviews which can be rated per day by a particular metamodder. Make the picks random.
                - Everyone capable of moderating gets to metamod, but not to choose what to metamod.

7. Listeners can make comments on reviews - community reviews.
        a) They don't get used for anything.
        b) They're small - 255 chars.

8. We have ancillary sections.
        a) Contract review.
        b) Hosting review.

Input?

Funding

[Lando]

How do you envision funding this? What licensing are you going to draw up with the various bands?

Re:Funding

[Xaltlee]

Funding. Well, lessee.

1. I'm a coder - I don't know jack about being an editor or a reviewer. Chris Johnson does, though, and will happily help out. (We're working on this together.) I will, however, be doing the actual /code/ stuff in my spare time, which I have plenty of. I've already started. I just need a PHP & MySQL enabled machine to stick this stuff on.

2. I don't have to pay the reviewers - these will be community reviews. There are some very good writers out there who just need somewhere to express themselves.

3. I can afford some cheap hosting type stuff - and I even know a cool site which doesn't charge for bandwidth, but rather charges for the space used. If nothing else, I have a friend who's into the hosting business. I don't want to do this till the site is actually complete, though.

4. Domain names are one time expenditures, and pretty damned cheap otherwise. Haven't decided what domain name to buy yet, though.

5. I can always ask the community for money.

6. I may even start a non-profit. This means, hell, I could make a living at this. Chris knows a guy who knows that stuff. And if I did that, we could easily get a lawyer on retainer to do contract review.

As for licensing, since I won't be hosting the files, only the reviews (there are lots of musician-oriented file-hosting sites out there, such as besonic and ampcast), I'm not too concerned about licensing. At the most, we'll be linking to what's already available, and writing about how cool it is. No scary licenses required - unless you mean the writers' writings, in which case, they own it, we publish it, they can do whatever they want with it. Might change this down the road if it turns into a compete thing, or if we run into trouble. I don't see any real reason to worry about it yet, but then, I'm just the coder. :)

Whatcha think? Any other holes you see?

Re:Funding

[Lando]

It's just that I don't see this taking off, but then again maybe I am thinking too small...

My major concern was just the hosting costs of all the music... If your just doing links that would greatly reduce the bandwidth you need...

So hosting costs should be pretty low. I'd definately run it a while before spending all the money on becoming a non-profit etc... Likely to take a bit of time before you become profitable...

As far as hosting goes, just make sure you get a somewhat responsive server and you should be fine. Hosting costs should run about 10-15 dollars a month.... For reliable service... I charge $20 for mine but... it's more of a value added service for my customers not a real hosting solution...

Might try www.clickithostit.com He's one of my customers, so he's got fairly reasonable reliability and he should be inexpensive...

First thing to do is to be build it of course
Second get an article posted on slash dot
Third ???
Fourth Make Money!!!

LOL, good luck.

Re:Funding

[Xaltlee]

Really, my big problem at the moment is that I want to show this to Chris, but I can't work on it unless I'm at work, and work is firewalled. Plus, right now this sucker is extremely insecure - anyone could enter anything and whammo. Bad DB. I'd like a development machine I could make public, work on from work, and protect with .htaccess. Since I don't really have that much to post right now, I just don't feel right purchasing hosting yet. It feels wasteful, you know? If I could actually work on it at work, through some sort of web-based editing facility, that'd be different, but most likely anything I found would have to be sent home via email and then uploaded via FTP. Too much of a pain in the ass... so I'll do screenshots. Wheeeeee.

As for getting an article posted on Slashdot, that should be easy once we have a few reviewers. ;) Or, if nothing else, I can just list the URL as my site and sig. That'll get visitors. And since we're not doing moderation (though they do have to be logged in) it's all good.

Random note.

[Xaltlee]

We've decided to ditch moderation. We'll just have one guy with a very large mallet capable of nuking someone's posts (255 char posts, so we're not talking about a doctorate here) but not their username. Click a button, whack-a-troll. The Mallet. Has a nice ring to it.