It’s tough to walk away from stereo fame if you get hooked.

Sterofame has a concept of “labels.” Any listener can be a label, and they can sign anyone they wish.

This site has a thing called “the game.” In “the game” you can accumulate points and then bid on various items. This is the strength, and weakness of the site. The reason being is all the labels will gravitate towards the top artists, and in some cases it’s horrid music. Anyone that covets that PS3 is going to select the #1 artists for their label no matter how bad of music it is, because they want the points. This is great for the labels because they can turn down the volume on the player, and just thumbs up whoever they want.

The one thing I like about stereofame is also the one thing I hate the most. The player at the top. In particular the songs it picks.

At first it was great listening to the top artists, but after a while you being to realize that the entire site is just full of point whores, or at the very least the top artists/labels. Overall I’d say the quality of music is just like any other music site. You have 1 good song for every 10 bad songs, and the good stuff isn’t always at the top.

It goes without saying that some artists at the top of the list are talented. However others I’d be happy if I never knew about their existence. I believe their success on the charts is equivalent to the amount of time spent on the site posting on someone’s wall “Thumbs up for ya.” or adding every person in site as a friend. Thus maybe they will listen to their music in return. I honestly wonder if some of those people aren’t listening to your music for 30 seconds, and then giving you a thumbs up, or worse just letting it play for a couple of seconds and moving on. On every artist’s page there is a list of who’s listened to that artist, and what song they played. It doesn’t show who gave thumbs up/down, and I hope the paid version doesn’t show you that, but it will show you how many people have gave an artist thumbs up/down, just not who.

Stereofame loves to blast you over and over with the same artists. Even though you’ve heard them over and over again. Most likely the top artists, and any artist that pays $5 a month will get played more often. There are over 36,000 songs by 14,000 artists.

One bug I’ve discovered is even if you create a favorites playlist, not all the songs will get played in that playlist.

Stereofame is a fun and frustrating site. Some really good music is at the bottom of the charts.

The most frustrating part of the site is anyone can be your friend, and you in return are their friend. So once again all the top artists will be displayed on your page as your friend like you’re giving them some sort of endorsement, when in reality you could really care less about their music, and you dislike it soo much that you click next. You can’t wait for 30 seconds to pass just to thumbs down it.

Stereofame is the perfect site for a greasmonkey script. You could do a lot of stuff with a greasemonkey script on there to game “the game.” Honest uses I can see right off the bat is to have your own thumbs down button that would mute the song until 30 seconds had passed thumbs down it, and then restore the volume. Another cool thing you could do with a grease monkey script is tell you how you rated the song last time, but that would require some database work, and ajax calls. I read the terms of service and I agreed not to do things like that, so I don’t. I’m just saying it’d be a useful feature to have.

A couple of dishonest things you could do with a grease monkey script is to have it auto rate songs, as well as auto-visit the artist’s profile page, then auto post to the wall. All of which you get points for.

From a web design aspect I’ve got to say sterefame has a really neat feature that allows you to browse the site without loading a new page. It’s all done using ajax calls, and inserting the content into the page. This is pretty dang cool, and my hats off to the person who designed it.

Take for instance http://stereofame.com/theerm and http://stereofame.com/#/theerm both are the exact same site. The difference is http://sterofame.com get’s loaded first, on the /#/theerm site, and then javascript does a XMLHttpRequest and loads the content into a <div> on the page. Very cool idea.