Here’s a Digg-like site that actually sounds interesting for a change. It’s a music repository; a place where lesser known musicians can upload their songs for everyone to hear (or buy; all songs are DRM-free). But, instead of being just a directory of music like the good old MP3.com was back in the day, Sixtyone has a Digg-like voting system; users can vote on their favorite songs, and songs with the most votes show up on the front page.

Sixtyone is different from most read-submit-vote-comment sites because it has an elaborate point system; a feature I find very interesting. When you sign up, you get points; each time you vote up a song, you spend 5 points, but if others vote for the song and it gets popular, you earn your points back. Furthermore, you can earn free points by listening to The Rack, which consists of music that hasn’t hit the front page yet. As you earn more points, you go up in ranks; a feature that Digg has long abandoned (and I’m still not sure it was a good decision).

There are four main channels which aggregate music on Sixtyone: new, hot, all-time and the aforementioned rack. Music is further divided into genres, such as alternative, blues, jazz, metal etc. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to listen to a channel or a subchannel; you need to go song by song. A Last.FM style radio channels would definitely help matters here, as music listeners like to lay back and enjoy the melodies, instead of switching to a new song every couple of minutes. Another problem I’ve noticed is slowness; sometimes you have to wait a full minute before a song starts to play.

Still, Sixtyone is one of those sites that deserve to succeed. It’s a good idea, wrapped in a nice design (you can even change the colors at the botom), and listening to music in this way is a fun experience for people interested in hearing something new. It may never reach mainstream success because not that many people are enthusiastic about new music (most people would rather listen to Billboard’s top 40, something I consider to be an elaborate form of torture), but if I had to pick one Digg clone (out of thousands) that I really like, this would be it.