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Freq, short for "Frequency"

When a music listener wants to hear new music, how do they discover it? Some rely on algorithmic recommendations built into music streaming services or social media platforms. Some listeners find small corners of the internet, where they talk about their favorite genres or artists, like subreddits, Facebook groups, or Discord servers. Listeners can find music this way, but it’s not organic. Others have developed highly specialized skill sets to navigate vast marketplaces like Discogs and Bandcamp.

What’s missing is a purpose-built place to talk about, listen to, and spread knowledge about music with the people you would already call your community. Those might be your fellow DJs at your college radio station, your group of friends who goes to dance parties together, or the people in your town you run into at shows all the time.

A lot of natural and incredible music discovery comes from the sharing of music within small communities and social groups, and Freq works to provide that small community structure on a platform-wide scale. Music communities are among the most vibrant groups across the world, and we provide a community-focused structure on our platform. 

How Freq works

Right now, there are three things you can do on Freq.

1. You can post about what you’re currently listening to, and people can like that post or comment on it.

2. You can create and read collections of albums, organized by some guiding theme. For example, you can make a public collection of all of the metal bands that have come from your hometown, or you can make a private collection of albums you want to listen to.

3. You can follow other users and you can follow collections to get updates about them.

Community guidelines

Freq’s primary goals are to empower music lovers, grow music communities, and preserve music history. Like any healthy community, there are certain guidelines members must follow to maintain a productive environment. Please consider the following guidelines when using Freq and interacting with other users.

Don’t do this stuff. You might get banned. 

  • Start trouble for the sake of it.
  • Harass, abuse, or bully other users. 
  • Post hate speech, dog whistles, or illegal content. 
  • Promote violent, hostile, or antisocial viewpoints and content. 
  • Post spam.

Remember:

  • Music is made by real people. 
  • Users on this platform are real people. 
  • Sharing music is an act of love and personal expression.
  • Taste is subjective. Everyone is allowed to like what they like and dislike what they don’t.
When in doubt, PLUR.

Our intentions

There are two primary goals for Freq. The first is to invigorate grassroots music culture. The second, per the imperatives of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, where this is being developed, is to model small social media built for the civic good.

Freq offers the chance to find music you love through a community of people you enjoy. We want passionate listeners to be able to archive their collections and share them with a larger community, which promotes organic music discovery. 

One reason this moment in the Internet is so strange is because there are not any communities that exist online for the sake of music enjoyment alone, whereas the history of the Internet can easily be told as a history of the ways people gathered around music virtually. The most powerful and popular places purpose-built for music discovery online today are marketplaces, but music lovers online deserve healthy alternatives built and maintained for the love of music, not money.

And while it’s wonderful that there are many social spaces online that cater to a community of their users, we believe that social media has a rich, unmet potential to cater to already existing communities offline. The nice thing about music is there are music communities all over the place, and Freq hopes to provide a toolset that’s relevant to their needs and, hopefully in some ways, their thriving.

Our team

Freq is being developed as an open source project at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst. Michael Sugarman designed the site based on ongoing ethographic and historical research and is developing the software. Lucas Ruud wrote this documentation. Bocoup provided visual design for the site. The development has been guided by ethnographic research such as historical interviews and user testing with the student DJs from the UMass Amherst student-run radio station, WMUA. Gil Cuevas and Noah Pring have worked as research assistants on this project.

Roadmap

The following features are intended for this software. Some will come after the release of the 1.0. These are listed in rough order of priority:

  • Improved metadata mapping for Now Playing posts and collections including but no limited to:
    • scripts to get metadata from Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, and YouTube links
    • scripts to submit metadata from those links as well as manually added metadata to MusicBrainz
    • richer interaction with radio show archives and DJ mixes
  • A spotlight page for high quality Collections
  • Search
  • Granular filtering for the Feed and Collections
  • GOBO compatibility
  • Groups and relevant moderation tools
  • Local scene pages that will display flyers for upcoming events
  • Various fun ListenBrainz integrations

Since the point of this software is music community, we will be working in the coming months to conduct experiments with offline music communuities, such as college and community radio stations. The goal of these experiments is to co-design features that are relevant them and the communities they serve.

Should Freq prove relevant to enough users, and should the project continue past the summer of 2025, we will be implementing a responsible, transparent revenue model intended to pay fairly for the labor it takes to build and operate this website and improve the user experience.

Known Bugs

  • Not all submit buttons freeze while data is loading or in middle of submitting, but they should.
  • It is not always possible to change the order of items in a collection
  • Single character usernames are illegal. Not a bug but there should be a warning.
  • Old avatar image persists in some places after updating your avatar
  • “Save” feature does not probably display collection item was saved to if item is save from ‘/feed’ page
  • There are probably typos. Please report those.

Notice other bugs? Fill out this easy Google Form.

Our Data

Freq is powered by MusicBrainz, an open source music encyclopedia. This database is the most comprehensive open source music library, containing music data that may not be present on major streaming services. 

We use their MusicBrainz Identifiers (MBIDs) to populate our platform with music data. Every song, artist, album, or other piece of music data has a unique identifier that acts as a bookmark in MusicBrainz’s encyclopedia. 

While extensive, there may be music that isn’t currently tagged in MusicBrainz’s database. Please follow this guide to upload new music data to MusicBrainz. 

Our cover art is obtained from the Cover Art Archive, a collaboration between the Internet Archive and MusicBrainz, as well as Last.fm. 

Please consider donating some time or money to MusicBrainz and checking out ListenBrainz, a public listen history and music recommendation platform.

By using Freq, you consent to any data you submit in the form of profile information, posts, collections, and so forth being stored in Freq’s database in perperuity.

For the purposes of moderation, a complete record of your speech and activity on the site is maintained. This applies even to old versions of items you’ve edited as well as deleted items. Your fellow users’ safety and the overall health of the Freq community depends on these records of your activity. This is standard practice for social media sites, although right now may be the first time you’ve been told as much in plain English.

There is no data tracked by Freq except what you explicitly submit. Be aware that we have made no attempt to disable third party tracking in the YouTube and Soundcloud embeds you post, but some browsers afford the ability to block those on all sites you vist.

Data you submit to Freq will not be sold. It may be used in the future for minimally intrusive, non-surveillant advertising ideally following the “forgetful advertising” model.

Metadata you submit to Freq will likely be donated to MusicBrainz. In the future, other data of yours may be submitted to MusicBrainz’s sister project ListenBrainz project, but only with your express consent. We will ask you directly for that consent and it will be clear what we are specifically asking for.

If there are any changes to the above data standards, you will be given candid, plain English notice and the opportunity to disable your account if you do not agree to those new standards.