Show HN: Digs.fm – For passionate music explorers (like Goodreads but for music)

Hello everyone!

As someone who's constantly on the look for new music to discover and being very deliberate about the things I'm listening, I needed a better way to organize the albums I want to listen to, listened and liked. And also I would like to see the discoveries of other folks who I know I like.

So I started creating the tool I wish I had in the first place. In Digs, the basic idea is that:

- you can add music releases (albums, EPs, singles, mixes) in three lists: Want to Listen, Listened, Digged. You can also use tags and notes to better organize these lists.

- you get a public profile where your activity is visible (i.e. what you added to your lists). Example profile: https://digs.fm/alskn.

- you can add other people as friends. Then you'll see their activity in your home feed.

- you can either like or add a comment to any activity of your friends (or yours)

- you can explicitly recommend a release to one of your friends

You can think of it like Goodreads, but for music. I would assume it's mostly targeted to people that like to listen whole albums and would like to keep track of what albums/mixes they want to listen to, sometime in the future.

This is very early yet and there are a lot of rough edges.

You can find a few screenshots of the basic functionality in the homepage, from where you can also create an account - https://digs.fm.

I'd appreciate any feedback, thanks in advance!

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EDIT: I figured it's worth expanding a bit on some highlights:

- In the search box, apart from searching, you can copy/paste any release URL from Discogs/Spotify/Bandcamp/Mixcloud/MusicBrainz and it will basically fetch the release and then you can add it to your lists.

- There are browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome, so that when you're on some of the aforementioned sites, and you stumbled upon an interesting album, you can click the extension icon and the item will be added to your "Want to Listen" list.

- For certain releases, you'll notice there's an embedded web player, for convenience.

Show HN: Digs.fm – For passionate music explorers (like Goodreads but for music)
digs.fm

Selfish, but possibly not alone in the following request…

I was a passionate, early user of last.fm. On its face, your service is similar in its goals. How does it differ? How do you think it’s better?

A good question to ask myself: why did I stop using last.fm? My quick response is life (becoming a father, the pandemic and a lack of live music) and possibly something to do with migrating from an ipod to Spotify. Also, I still use my account a bit to see historically what I’ve been listening to and what the ear’s of some friends have discovered. That is, I’m still scrobbling!

Just using up-to-date Chrome. I see the network request where I get redirected to "https://digs.fm/users/auth/spotify/callback" with a code and state. It returns a `Set-Cookie`, but I see my next request to the digs.fm homepage has another `Set-Cookie`. Unsure if you are just re-generating session IDs on every request or if the session data from the callback is being overwritten when I hit the homepage again.

Music (discovery) on the Web, i.e off-device, and not integrated seems DOA to me for various reasons.

A few people mentioned that this has some Last.fm vibes. While that's true, here's my thoughts on how they differ and what prompted me to create Digs:

Last.fm mostly answers the question: "What I've been listening to mostly, this month?" whereas Digs.fm aims to answer the question: "Which album I discovered (i.e. listened for the first time) AND liked last month?".

This essentially comes down to the fact that Last.fm tracks "listens" of an album/track/artist, no matter if its the first time you're listening to it or the 1000th, where in Digs.fm _you_ (manually) track the _first listen of a release_.

Likewise, Digs aims to answer: "which album did my friend discovered and liked?" or "what album does my friend wants to listen to?". The premise is that, the fact that a certain person (which I know) found this interesting, is a good signal that I might be interested to that as well.

So, I'd say that, while they do share similarities, they're different tools that aim to tackle different needs. I myself was using Last.fm around 2008, then forgot about it until last year. I activated it, but I haven't looked at it ever since. I'd say it's a good tool to look at the yearly reports once or twice a year, but to me that was about it.

In contrast, I use Digs daily (I'm biased :P) to see what my friends discovered, add new albums to listen to my lists or pick something to listen from my "Want to Listen". Also, I love discussing about something that I listened or someone else listened (this is done by commenting on activity items).

Ultimately, I wanted a way to track and organize music discoveries (not listens), and make it so that I can easily share them with friends, and perhaps spark a discussion around those.

In fact, a few people asked for an integration with Last.fm, in which you could import the albums/artists from Last.fm in Digs, and add then manually add those that you want to a list.