





Musebin wants music reviewers to cut to the chase, big-time. Never mind that girl you made a mix for in high school. Other music fans want to know what you think, and they want it now. In 140 characters or less.

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Musebin is a response to technology-related shifts in music criticism. Like Twitter, it limits each album review to a single, 140-character line. And like Reddit, it allows users to rate those reviews up or down using Yea or Nay buttons. The result: a fresh and compelling way to share opinions and be entertained while discovering music.

"It’s a reaction to the wordy, wordy MP3 blogs and people craving really concise content," explained Musebin COO Adam Varga.

"Blogs have kind of killed the editor," added Musebin CEO Greg Galant. "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 democratization of music reviews allows for a far wider range ofopinion and coverage than existed when magazines likeRolling Stone held a near-monopoly on pop-music criticism. But whenyou’re trying to find a quickconsensus about a particular album, the sheer volume of wordy reviews make it near-impossible. Musebin attempts to solve thatproblem. If brevity is the soul of wit, its reviews are the funniestever written.

The other aspect of the site — the Reddit-style rating — should helpensure that the system is not gamed. "We have a couple of PR peopletesting it out who are writing rave reviews about small bands thatmaybe don’t deserve those rave reviews," said Varga. However, he added,

"anyone has the same amount of space to say what they want to say, andthe rest of the community can vote those things up and down. If a PR

person writes something really poignant and relevant, it can rise tothe top. If they don’t, it can fall to the bottom." Fair enough.

In addition to one-liners, users can post micro-reviews extracted from traditional reviews. "If you find a great one-line pull quote, you can take from a review in Billboard, Rolling Stone, the New York Times or some other blog, you can clip that one 140-character-or-less quote and put it into our system with attribution," explained Galant. This could give outside music publications incentive to add one-liners from their own reviews as another way of attracting new readers — assuming the Musebin concept takes off. And it’s hard to see how it wouldn’t at least be moderately successful, given the solidity of its conceptual foundation, the preponderance of music opinion and our increasing jones for lightening-fast information.

Musebin is currently in private beta with around 200 users who have posted about a thousand reviews. The first 100 Wired.com readers who e-mail this address will be given invitations to join.

SawhorseMedia plans to add Facebook integration, full-featured profile pages, the ability to subscribe to reviewers a la Twitter, and a bookmarklet that lets you add clippings from reviews anywhere on the web easily, using your browser’s toolbar. The company also hopes to syndicate the top-rated, user-vetted review for each album to sites like Amazon.

Here’s a tour through the process of adding a new review to the invite-only Musebin. The front page surfaces the best reviews as rated by the community, or you can check out the newest reviews:

Clicking the "Add a music review" link brings up a small pop-up window:

As I fill in the artist name, a panel at the bottom surfaces a list of artists that might include the one I’m talking about. Unfortunately, The Fall is a hard band to find in databases:

However, when I fill in the album name, the list shortens considerably, and I am able to locate the album. If it weren’t already in the database, I would have clicked the "Add custom album art and details" link to add an image, label, genre and release date myself:

I write my 140-character-maximum review. Note the mechanism for adding a clip and URL from another publication. There’s also a little menu that lets you categorize your review. Options include "hated," "wasn’t crazy about," "liked" and "loved." I loved this album:

After I submit the review, it shows up on Musebin’s album page. This is the only review of The Fall’s Levitate in its system so far:

The page for Radiohead’s In Rainbows provides a better demonstration of the ratings system in action:

It’s only fitting that I should try to apply the Musebin lesson to this post, so here’s my 140-character take on the site: If writing about music islike dancing about architecture, Musebin is like ranked dance photosthat explain the building at a single glance.

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