I met Adam Wexler at a music conference a little over a year ago and he came up to me with this crazy idea to build a ranking platform, where fans could essentially build their own charts and rank their favorite artists.
A few months later came an email with a wireframe and the basic outline of the site. A few weeks later a Private Alpha invite and then a Private Beta.
Today I am happy to announce that Adam and his team are releasing Rank ‘em to the public and the timing couldn’t be better. It’s the end of the decade and people are building out “best of” lists like they were going out of style. Rank ‘em wants to be your source for putting together the music portion of those lists.
From Adam, CEO and Founder of Rank ‘em:
As the end of the year (and decade) comes and everybody is organizing their ‘best of’ lists, there could not be a better time to let everybody find out about Rank ‘em.
The core essentials of Rank ‘em is to rank the best songs from your favorite artists. When multiple users do this over time, you start to see what songs are really popular from a particular band. This is extremely helpful in music discovery when you want to listen to a new band or artist, but don’t know where to start.
With the public release of Rank ‘em comes a slew of updates, including a makeover of the Web site.
“We want to emphasize the fact that Rank ‘em is building the ultimate resource for accelerating music discovery,†says Wexler, “while still adding that shine that the site was lacking in its private stages.†The makeover includes an improved home and search page, as well as an expansion of the leaderboard to recognize the top-tier contributing rankers to the Rank ‘em community.
Rank ‘em will also implement a recommendation system, where fellow users can recognize and/or give “props†to other members’ taste in music or quality of rankings.
Rank ‘em will also be creating widgets for artists to display their most popular songs as “ranked” by their fans (see image below). Look for this to be released soon (and Gen-Y Rock Star subscribers may get an invite much sooner).
Have fun ranking your favorite music at the end of this decade. Go back and hear some classic music from 2000 all the way up to today and have a good time doing it. That’s what Adam envisioned way back when he had the concept.
Become a member now, the first 20 people to use the code “PB2” will get unlimited access.
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-Greg Rollett
4 Comments
Adam Wexler
on 30th Dec, 09 12:12pm
awesome stuff greg! it’s always great to reminisce, esp when you follow through
you got just about everything dead-on…just wanted to make two minor clarifications:
1) we want you (the fans) to rank your FAVORITE songs from your favorite artists. we thoroughly debated the wording of the statement, and “best” or “top” are just too subjetive. everybody has their own favorites though, and everybody is entitled to express them….on http://GoRankEm.com
2) the site is not exactly public just yet. until today, only members could view anything other than the splash page. now, we’ve opened up our search & artist pages that will hopefully provide a great resource to all fans alike…because it’s straight from the fans as it is
if anybody wants to reach out, i’m more than happy to talk adam[at]gorankem[dot]com & always up for some collaboration discussions
-adam
Michael
on 30th Dec, 09 07:12pm
dude, ranking music is so last decade!
Adam Wexler
on 31st Dec, 09 10:12am
michael-
i think everybody will always fawn over lists. there is no easier way to break down the best from the worst & digest the information.
we’re trying to build a crowdsourced resource (a la wikipedia…) that just about anybody can rely on when they want to dig deeper into an artist’s catalog or start from square one.
i fully expect the overwhelming amount of our visitors to look (not touch). yet, if we can get that small portion to rank & enjoy expressing their own opinions, sky is the limit as the rankings should only improve with a larger sample
-adam
mark
on 31st Dec, 09 03:12pm
Modern skirts are awesome! Love that you guys have them on the site — hopefully there will be a way to spot light indie acts and not just the ‘most popular’ on the site…over all, great work and I’m glad to be on GoRank ‘em!