Introducing Weekly.fm

Music shared to your inbox every Monday

tl;dr: Weekly.fm is a new way to share music links within private and public groups, in the style of a weekly email newsletter. Sign up here.

One Monday a friend of mine (whom I used to be in a band with) sent a group email to myself and a few other ex-band members with music recommendations in the form of Spotify links.

It was a brilliant way to kick Monday off — I hate Mondays — and I immediately thought: Why doesn’t this happen every week? Thus the idea for Weekly.fm was born.

I had also spent years thinking about how content sharing and recommendations aren’t entirely satisfactory, including those geared towards music.

Algorithms do a decent job some of the time, as do humans. But most sharing mechanisms in general create too much noise and not enough signal, largely because sharing of content has increased exponentially and happens in near real-time.

This not only means that some of the best content is drowned out or simply gets missed, but also negates the sense of anticipation and delayed gratification that is inherent in the way non-digital content is often shared. Think traditional magazine subscriptions or more recently subscription-based e-commerce.

What is Weekly.fm?

Weekly.fm is a new way to share music links (Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud etc.) within private and public groups, but with a twist.

New content added throughout the week to groups you are a member of or subscribe to is unlocked and delivered to your in-box each Monday.

Or as one of my journalist colleagues recently put it: “a p2p music newsletter”.

Aside from the weekly email newsletter style delivery (something that seems to be back in vogue right now), the other aspect of Weekly.fm that makes it different from many existing ways of sharing music links is that groups can have multiple contributors.

In fact, Weekly.fm comes into its own when multiple curators contribute to a group, creating a natural element of competition (or dare I say gamification).

Not only is it fun to see what others have shared when it finally unlocks and is delivered to your in-box each Monday (technically, your activity stream), but it also means you think harder about your own music recommendations.

In addition, each group has an in-built target audience, whether it be the genere or rules that have been defined by the group’s owner or — especially in the case of private groups — who the group’s members are.

We have tried to make the user journey as simple as it can be: Create a group, invite members (contributors), and begin adding music each week by copying and pasting Spotify, YouTube and SoundCloud links into the ‘Add music’ drawer which can be accessed from all pages of the site.

There’s also the option to subscribe to public groups if you simply want to receive other people’s music links each Monday.

Sign up to Weekly.fm and give it a try… and tweet me @sohear if you have questions or feedback.