A few words of explanation regarding the cute little application that’s recently cropped up on the far right of our homepage: It’s Neocha’s NEXT player, an easy way to sample Neocha’s large library of Chinese underground music.
How it works: Think of it as a randomly shuffled playlist of songs you’ve never heard before, from electronica to garage rock to metal. The tracks on NEXT are all from Neocha’s catalogue of user-uploaded music. You can skip from one song to the next by clicking the round “NEXT” icon. The play/pause button is just to the left, and the “O” in “Neocha” is also the volume control button (click and then use arrow up/down to adjust volume). Down below, you’ll see the artist’s name and song title. Clicking on either of these will send you to the artist’s Neocha profile page.
NEXT is one of many innovative widgets from Neocha, a social-networking site for Chinese artists. Launched in 2007, the site is an aggregator of all things creative in China, with over 10,000 registered users including musicians, comic-book artists, film makers and more.
Neocha is Chinese-only, but you can check out these English interviews with founders Sean Leow and B6 here (written) and here (video).
Happy shuffling!