In my constant quest to find sites that help me find new stuff, I am always finding sites that promise “music discovery,” but most music discovery services are disappointing. The Sixty One is not disappointing at all, and has become my new favorite music site. It could be the “I was into that band before they went mainstream” guy in my head, but I love using the sixty one to find new music and artists I’ve never heard of.

What’s The Sixty One?

Rather than simply recommending new music to listeners based on their expressed or implied behavior, The Sixty One takes a new approach. They are:

an experimental game that transforms listening to new music into a fun, massively multiplayer adventure.

Despite the incredible wave of creativity that’s happening in music, most people have a difficult time overcoming their underlying “musical inertia” — why bother with the typical tediousness of music discovery when you can fall back into the comfortable familiarity of your iTunes collection?

Tired of seeing great music fade into obscurity, we wondered if we could harness our experience designing video games to make something that could challenge music geeks and attract average people to the exciting frontiers of new music.

We’re on a quest to help people fall in love with something new while giving deserving musicians an efficient channel for finding their audiences. To learn how thesixtyone works, please see our FAQ.

Here’s how it looks:

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Here’s how it works. You sign up for an account, and you’re given some points. You then listen to music and “bump” the songs you like. Bumping a song is like wagering points on the popularity of that song. Say I like a song and really think it will be popular. If I bump it, it costs 5 points, which is subtracted from my score. But if other people start bumping the song and it reaches the top of the charts, I’ll be rewarded with more points.

In doing this, users are basically virtual record company executives, listening to new music and predicting whether the public will like the bands.

Since I started using the sixty one, I have not used pandora, last.fm, XM online, or any other music service. I haven’t accumulated very many points yet, but I am absolutely loving the service. Check it out and let me know what you think. I’ve found some great stuff here I’d never have found otherwise.