Way back in October of last year, we started up a Music of the Day series to help out the swarms of musicians who weren't being posted here on Equestria Daily. The goal was to give them at least a small bit of traffic, and hopefully help motivate them to keep on improving over time. It has largely been successful in it's goals, and we saw a large amount of new music entries because of it.
But instead of that, we thought of a neat idea in August about a site that lets you, the community, decide on what music is awesome via an alternative to Music of the Day, with the secondary goal of displaying all the new pony music as it came in. After a call over to our coder buddy Hypermark who wanted a new project to bash his head against, EQD Music was born!
Head on down below the break for a full FAQ, or just go experiment with it yourself!
Note for those that don't read the FAQ: We are expecting a bit of a flood at the start in music submissions, expect stabilization either tomorrow or later this week! :p
Update: Until we are done being flooded, Music of the Day will remain, expect it for about another few days to a week!
What does it do?
It's easy! You can upload any pony track you wish from Youtube, label it from a selection of genres with Acoustic and Electronic being the primaries, and then send it in for moderation. Once it is accepted (no quality control outside of greater than 1:00 length and it having to actually be a pony track), it will display on the front page to be voted on by the community. Top lists will be generated daily, with weekly and yearly following shortly after.
What about my Youtube Traffic?
This site is supposed to be Google level simple, and focused on retaining the musicians Youtube traffic as opposed to moving it off site. Because of this, we wanted to avoid accounts altogether, linking instead to the actual Youtube song page for the usual comments/subscriptions/ect. This aspect is experimental, and we may end up integrating an account system and community features later on down the line, but we would prefer to keep the beam focused on Youtube's already massive musician army and their swarms of subscribers.
How will this effect music on EQD?
Outside of Music of the Day migrating over there, spotlight music posts will be business as usual. You are free to submit to both the EQD submit box, and EQD Music. For now, these sections are not shared, so be sure to send it to both if you want your music on both.
As time goes on and things stabilize (and the site hopefully doesn't explode too bad), we will most likely start using it as an extra source of input for the spotlight music posts here on EQD.
Will new music be lost in the flood?
As with sites like Derpibooru, there will most likely be a pretty large amount of older pony music invading the site initially. We have two and a half years to cover after all! EQD gets anywhere from 15-30 new tracks a day, so once EQD Music catches up, we will hopefully avoid too much of a flood from there on. Use it to catch up on stuff you may have missed! We were originally going to limit it to music from 2013 onward, but decided against it.
How can I help?
The top lists on the site are pretty much moderated by you guys. The best thing you can do to help out, is submit music and vote on stuff you like. Tell your buddies to go vote on your track, and submit pony music you run into on Youtube.
What kind of features are you planning to add?
For now, we want to make sure everything is stable as is before we really start piling on the features. We hope to include a search function, and a much larger categories section to sort by votes/time/ect. There will also be album support later on, though we wanted to focus on the Youtube links to begin with.
If this ends up working out, we will probably clone it and set up a video site as well for PMV's, Source Film Maker movies, and everything else that falls into those categories. One step at a time though!
If you would like to recommend something, or report a bug, hit up the EQD submit box and title your email with EQDMUSIC.
Have fun! We are taking bets on how long it takes for the site to explode from the usual EQD tsunami. Hopefully it's all stable after that though!
