Billboard making sweet music online

The recording industry bible, Billboard Magazine, has recently launched an entirely overhauled website with Billboard.com that sports a fresh new look and loaded with social media goodness. For example, they’ve added the ability to join via facebook connect which means you can share your musical taste with your friends on Facebook. Their twitter name is @billboarddotcom. Also important to note is the vastly improved performance of the site as every webpage seems to load much faster than before.

Can You Feel The Music?

You’ll also notice that you’ll be able to share your thoughts and opinions on just about anything  on the site via the little heart for adding to your favorites list, the say something chat icon for posting a comment and the share icon for sharing it on several popular networks such as twitter, Facebook, MySpace and more. This makes the experience more personal and hopefully more viral for Billboard.

Number One with a Bullet

The heart and soul of Billboard will always be its music charts, of course. The great news is that they no longer limit you to seeing only half of the chart for free! So, instead of seeing only the top 50 of the hot 100, you can now see the entire 100 hottest songs in the country. The same with the Top 200 albums in the land and many other charts. You can checkout the quickest rising songs and those that are cooling off the fastest.

Another Sweet new feature is the ability to play entire songs, instead of just 30 second samples. You also have the option to purchase the song if you so desire.

The new music player appears on the left side of the site at all times in a collapsible window along with the visualization lancher located just beneath it.

The Visualizer is a slick way to checkout the entire history of your favorite artists in a visual manner with a timeline and chart statistics for each release. The visualizer can also track the history of a particular album or even a song itself, displaying its peak position and longevity on the charts.

As an example, here’s the visualization of the career of the boss

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know

One of the things I enjoy most about Billboard is the amount of information they provide for all of your favorite artists. In addition to the cool visualization tool, you can get more details about an artist, song or album by clicking on their name or the title of the song or album. Here’s the artist page for the red hot Black Eyed Peas.

Notice the plethora of info available. It starts with the basics page which shows the latest news regarding that artist, then there’s the incredible chart history area that shows every detail of all charted songs and albums. The biography section gives an excellent Wikipedia style wrap up of their history. The Albums, compilations and Songs areas list all of their charted works with the option to play just about any of them. There’s also a discussion board to communicate with other fans of your favorite artist as well as a video section where you can watch their music videos.

Hot Music News

The other fun and important section will be the now expanded NEWS section which will share the latest information in the industry as well as cool music chart trivia. There’s also a New Releases section for tracking the absolute latest new music.

There’s also a live section for live streams of music events going on all around the world. You’ll be able to view a calendar of events and schedule it or search for any artist that you like to see where and when they will be performing.

Fun and Games

There’s a fun Chart Game where you play music exec and try to predict which five artists will be the most popular. You earn points and get ranked on a chart yourself with other players. Winners receive cool prizes like free songs from lala.com.
 
 
Another new feature that will surely be a “hit” (pardon the pun) is the “Soundtrack of My Life” which lets you create a playlist of number one songs for important moments of your life such as your birthday, your first kiss, your graduation day, the day you m
et your spouse/partnder, etc. When it’s all done you can then quickly and easily share the playlist with friends on many social networks.

CODA

I think all of these changes along with the availability of the API to developers makes Billboard.com much more relevant today, not just for music industry professionals and artists but now for music fans as well.