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'We Are Haunted' Fantastic New Way to Find Hot Music

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A new, playable music chart is like a Billboard chart for the P2P generation -- and you can play anything on it with a single click.

It would take an army of listeners to keep tabs on all the music being recorded and posted to MySpace, YouTube, BitTorrent and the like. How to filter it all?

We Are Hunted, a clean and simple music chart cuts to the chase. It tracks the most-favored music on P2P and social networks, Twitter, web forums and blogs. It then presents the 99 hottest tracks (according to its calculations) through an intuitive Brady Bunch-style interface. Best of all, it slaps a play button on each track. Clicking the play button starts the song playing right there on the page, using links to YouTube audio tracks, record label sites and other internet locations that the site's automated system finds online.

Wired.com got a sneak preview, and after an hour or so of testing, it's clear that We Are Hunted is a fantastic and simple way to hear full versions of the latest, hottest tracks. It's as if this chart is trying to tap into our brains to assemble a playable list of the songs we're thinking about the most. If you bookmark it (or sign up for the e-mail list), you'll probably have a better chance of knowing what the kids are talking about at the next party you attend.

“In the physical world, charts are built on shipped albums," reads the site's description. “Online, traditionally, they have been a count of digital downloads. We Are Hunted is different, in that it tracks sentiment, expression and advocacy."

BigChampagne, Elbo.ws, Hype Machine and other sites track similar information, but We Are Hunted is far simpler for consumers to use, with big play buttons in the middle of album covers that scroll past in batches of nine from right to left. It's a preposterously easy way to hear the most talked about songs and artists of the current day, week, month or year.

“So many websites are too complex, too wordy, too long," said Native Digital's Nick Crocker, one of the site's founders. “I wanted this site to be digestible in three seconds ... to deliver users exactly what they want amazing, new music, every day. There's lots of work to do, but I think the foundations are in place."

Not only is this site smooth and obvious in terms of how you use it, but its homegrown music popularity tracking system, based on the WotNews' news scraping technology, appears to be fairly accurate.

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