The co-founder and developer of popular music discovery website We Are Hunted has launched a new music project called Wonder.fm, reports Billboard.
Stephen Phillips's new website is a data-driven service much like his We Are Hunted, which Twitter acquired in late 2012 and turned into the social networking site's music app simply called #music. It was axed a year later due to its unpopularity with Twitter users.
"It struggled due to lack of licensed music and limited integration with the core Twitter experience. It needed music and tweets!" Phillips said of the app's problems.
Leaving Twitter in July after helming its small music team, Phillips started working on the new website.
"I just couldn't help myself. I'm an obsessive music hacker," he told Giga Om.
Wonder.fm uses songs uploaded to music streaming service SoundCloud. It builds a playlist of 99 popular tracks, each represented by the artists' respective images, and laid out across a single web page.
Users listen to the tracks by simply clicking on the images, and they can also stream the whole selection. The songs can be filtered by genre, time period and other categories.
The website has an integrated web player and also features a detailed playlist view that reflects the number of times the featured songs have been played in the last 24 hours, week or month.
Among Phillips's aims with the website is to introduce to listeners songs that are outside the mainstream.
"My hope is that music fans seeking cool sounds outside the top 40 might find it a really fun app," he told Giga Om. The founder is also planning to build Wonder.fm apps for Android and iOS.
Currently, the website has eight genres listed, but Phillips said the service's image grid will soon include hip hop, electronic dance music (EDM) and Asian pop, according to Hypebot.