Music

Free Chinese music to your desktop

Posted by Adam J. Schokora, March 11, 2008 10:00 PM

Chinese innovation: NEXT

Neocha.com is a networking website for Chinese musicians, designers, photographers, artists and filmmakers, etc. They have just launched a new feature called NEXT.

NEXT plays songs from Neocha.com's library of user-uploaded music, from within a web browser, or from a downloadable widget. All of the songs are 100% original works from Chinese independent musicians, in genres spanning garage rock, electronica, hip-hop, shoe-gazing, indie-pop, art rock, folk, ambient, dance, metal, post-rock, etc. The widget is fully bilingual (unlike Neocha's Web site which only has Chinese), so it addresses the "where to find Chinese indie music when you don't know where to start" question for non-Chinese readers.

Neocha founder Sean Leow says that NEXT is a "way of giving its musician users a broader platform for exposure to not only different Chinese audiences, but also audiences all over the world... we want to give our users the chance to be discovered "next," that's part of the inspiration behind the name." The widget has essentially only one button that takes you to the "next" song; it's extremely simple to use.

Neocha is rapidly adding users, especially musicians, so expect NEXT to be tapping an ever-expanding library of original independent Chinese music.

Click here to download NEXT or give the web pop-out player a spin.

Click here to check out the music section on Neocha's site.

For any questions related to Neocha or NEXT, feel free to leave a comment, Sean will be popping in to reply. He can also be reached directly at sean@neocha.com (Chinese or English)

For more on Neocha, check out this recent Danwei TV episode of The Shanghai Beat interviewing site co-founders Sean Leow and B6.

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There are currently 10 Comments for Free Chinese music to your desktop.

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Comments on Free Chinese music to your desktop

NEXT is a sweet little app. The design is so simple yet effective. And best of all being in the States, the buffering is surprisingly quick. I love it, and the independent music is AMAZING. I will be sure to pass this on to my friends. Thanks Sean!!

Posted by: Mike Amenti | March 12, 2008 10:22 AM

The Web-based pop-out player is also embeddable...forgot to mention that above.

AjS

Posted by: Adam Schokora | March 12, 2008 11:02 AM

Could you add an option to start it in the "pause" state? I embed it, but it autoplays when I surf to the page it's embedded on. That's annoying.

Posted by: Micah Sittig | March 12, 2008 1:23 PM

Awesome. Awesome. The speed is incredible, as is the music.

Any plans to create a Firefox add-on? :)

Posted by: Vance Wagner | March 12, 2008 1:27 PM

Thanks for the support Mike! We will be moving our server next month so hopefully that will help out on any latency issues.

This is a our first version and we definitely welcome comments on how to improve it.

Posted by: Sean | March 12, 2008 1:31 PM

@Vance Thanks! FF add-on is a great idea. We're thinking about which other versions would be good: Apple Dashboard, Facebook, Google/Yahoo widgets, FF add-on, etc. I'm still trying to figure out which ones to develop and would appreciate any input.

Sean

sean@neocha.com

Posted by: Sean | March 12, 2008 1:50 PM

totally rad...

finally got earphones so I can rock out at the office...

Posted by: Ginger Xiang | March 13, 2008 9:27 AM

Apologies to anyone trying access Neocha or NEXT today. It's a long story, but our IDC took down our server and didn't tell us after finding out that we were not going to renew our contract with them next month.

We will be back up tomorrow afternoon at a new, faster and hopefully more professional IDC.

Thanks for everyone's patience.

Sean

sean@neocha.com

Posted by: Sean | March 13, 2008 3:38 PM

@everyone, everything is back to normal on Neocha. The above-mentioned server issue has been resolved.

AjS

Posted by: Adam Schokora | March 14, 2008 2:16 PM

Hi Sean!

This is so GREAT to explore Chinese Indie!!

We'ld like to provide it embedded on our site as well next to offering your popup window for constant enjoyment. ;-)

Hope to have the prevent-autoplay feature soon so we can embed it.