Following Your Favorite Band: Seenth.is vs. Rouse
With musicians' web presence scattered all over the place and few offering a way to keep up with things unless one subscribes to a variety of social media accounts and blogs, one would think that a site that centralizes their feeds for easy access would be of interest to fans. At least two sites launched this year, Seenth.is and Rouse, to make it easier to keep up with big stars. Seenth.is wins in the design category but neither app truly satisfies largely due to lack of depth in their artist listings.
The big pitch for both Seenth.is and Rouse is that they combine musicians' social media streams and make it easy to keep up with what artists are doing. And, though I don't know of any sites that have succeeded with this approach, the growth of mobile gives the concept a fresh rationale with devices well-designed for such feeds.
Since many musicians do a poor job of making their official site a place where all their web activity comes together, there's certainly a logic to such offerings. But whether or not they'll be taken up by music fans is another question entirely.
Seenth.is – Everything Is Happening All the Time
Seenth.is is the better designed of the two and also felt a bit more intuitive to navigate.
The iOS app focuses strongly on feeds and ways to discover things and add them to your feeds. The app didn't have any glitches that I found in my brief exploration.
Rouse has a similar approach but didn't lead me in quite as clearly to the process. Small glitches also marred the workings of the iOS app.
I was a bit disappointed with both these apps when looking for various artists who might not be topping the charts but are reasonably well known.
Seenth.is addresses that issue by offering you the option of submitting the artist for possible addition. Rouse just comes up with no results.
Not having encyclopedic depth is understandable but the problem is that in the age of YouTube and Spotify such depth is taken for granted. Given that fact, having some way to add an artist to your list, even if not represented in the app's database, is really a must. For example, being able to identify and add specific feeds would address the lack of depth.
That said, Seenth.is is attempting to address the issue and overall seems to be building a well-integrated product. At this point it looks like Rouse needs to work more on pulling the product together and making the basics work consistently.
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/Facebook) is building a writing hub at Flux Research. To suggest topics about music tech, DIY music biz or music marketing for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
