Here at Waycooljnr, we love simple, elegant web design. No shit - our founding editor, Nick Crocker, started We Are Hunted. We love music blogs, too, but they tend to be giant, hulking beasts that require mouse-scrolling en masse. Sigh.
Exception: The Perfect Five, a simple, elegant, beautifully-designed piece of work. Its goal is simple: ‘a music blog for people who don’t have time for music blogs’.
Each week, its editor, Sophie Hirst [pictured right], picks songs to populate five categories: hyped, covered, classic, remixed, and loved. She writes a small blurb below each track outlining why it made the cut this week… and that’s it. The songs stream using an on-site player, and are grouped within an auto-playing playlist. Its simplicity is brilliant. We’ve been fans since it debuted in March 2010.
Sophie Hirst is a digital media strategist. She is currently the Marketing Manager at MySpace AU/NZ, and works on The Perfect Five as a side project. Her past clients include Nylon Magazine, Sydney Festival and Parklife. Put simply; when it comes to the online music space, she knows her shit. Her music taste is generally impeccable, too. (Sidenote: Thanks, Sophie, for putting me onto the Big Boi album.)
We asked her some questions.
Andrew: Why did you start The Perfect Five, Sophie? Was it a matter of creating something that you couldn’t find anywhere else?
Sophie: Definitely a bit of that. I have about 50 music blogs in my Google Reader that I skim regularly each week but it’s a pretty laborious process. I’d find myself getting into work in the morning and just wanting some good new music to listen to without having to search for it. That’s where I came up with the line ‘A music blog for people who don’t have time for music blogs’. I was also a bit bored of reading the same kinds of things, blogs just reposting each other’s news posts. I wanted to do something that took a different approach. It’s a bit like my online music scrapbook of what I’m into that week.
Which sites/blogs inspired you to start TPF? Had you been involved with any music blogs previously?
My friend and I started this blog (PDA Police) a few years back, but decided taking photos of people ‘getting it on’ in public was not only mean, but really time consuming.
Inspiration for TPF came from a lot of places – One of my favourite websites is The World’s Best Ever and they have a section called Sound Advice which is a weekly curated mixtape by a new person each week. I was really inspired by someone sharing a lifetime’s worth of their most loved songs. I was always creating weekly playlists on MySpace and wanted a blog to work off that. Some weeks the selections for TPF will come to me really easily, other weeks I spend (too many) hours looking for the right tracks. I really want to deliver something special each week, something that’s worth the reader’s time.
Aesthetically I love simple blogs like Famous Sounding Words and What I Heard Today.
Who was responsible for the design and tech side of things?
I have a great designer friend who helped me build it – I love the strong, simple layout he created. Hampus would agree it’s been a difficult and time consuming process. If he was charging me , I’d owe him a lot of money by now… It’s still a work-in-progress and we’re making improvements. At the start I intended to keep it pretty quiet until I was 100% happy with it, but I learned once you put something on the internet people will find it, even if you don’t want them to.
I like that you blend current music with some old faves; it’s a kind of musical history, as well as a weekly mixtape. How did you decide on the five criteria?
I’ve always listened to a lot of older music, and am a sucker for a good cover song so really wanted to include those. The ‘Hyped’ section was to make sure it was still relevant and for better SEO – I recently got TPF added to Hype machine, and the ‘Hyped’ track will get around 800-900 ‘favourites’, whereas the other sections will be a lot less.
I notice there’s no comments or interactivity on the site. Any particular reason for this?
I used to have Facebook ‘like’/Tweet buttons under each post and comments enabled, but it really messed with the aesthetic, to the point where it just didn’t feel right. I sort of like that it is what it is. I don’t really mind if it doesn’t grow – I’d still post even if it was just those core readers. I get a handful of really positive emails from people each week which makes it worthwhile. I’m still working to add some better functionality for readers to share what they’re listening to, or what they’ve discovered from the recommendations (like with you and Big Boi!).
What kind of traffic are you getting at the moment?
It’s still pretty small – for the last month Google Analytics shows 8,576 Visits, 11,960 Pageviews and growth of 205.76% but to be fair I think it’s a bit skewed – this one Metafile post alone created a pretty big spike with about 5000 PVs in 2 days. I had to upgrade the hosting package. The top referring traffic sources are direct, Facebook, Google and other blogs that have posted features on it, like this and this.
What are your goals for The Perfect Five? How big do you see it becoming?
At the moment my goals are focused on improving the site functionality, increasing the discover/share/inspire element and really just delivering quality content. I’m not really focused on growing the traffic that much at this stage and I don’t plan to put ads on it. I’m working on an special edition 100-track summer mixtape download, so keep an eye out for that!
Thanks, Sophie.
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You’d best visit (and subscribe to) The Perfect Five immediately. Sign up for their newsletter on-site, and/or follow them on Twitter. Sophie’s on Twitter, too, and MySpace (natch).
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