Create playlists for events democratically using SongVote

No, it's not another RSS mix-up. The reason you're seeing an Ellen-related screenshot is because that happens to be the playlist vote that I stumbled onto in SongVote.

It's all quite straightforward, really; SongVote lets you create a topic or an event ("Shloime's Bar Mitzvah") and then have people vote on what music they'd like to hear at the event. You can either vote for one of the songs already nominated or offer a new song up for voting.

When offering a new song, selection is completely open, and they have a "quick search" feature that pulls music information from some database. I rummaged around their sources a little bit but couldn't figure out which service they use as a back-end. You're welcome to help me out in the comments.

Anyway, this feature means you only have to enter the name of a performer, and it pulls up their most popular music. In fact, judging by the results, I would not be surprised to learn that it's powered by Last.fm.

You can clearly see what songs are at the top of the playlist; in fact, the site's whole visual style is very clear and to the point. Each songs has a "Buy MP3" link next to it, which leads to Amazon, and I think it has SongVote's affiliate information embedded into it. That's a nice and simple business model, at least in my opinion. I did not see any other form of advertising on the site.

Tags: democracy, music, playlist, social, vote, web2.0