AltSounds: The Music Video Channel, Reborn

The product

AltSoundsA music video channel you can leave on

The library

17,000+ videosEvery one chosen by a person

The range

1957 to nowEvery year its own channel

Speed

Under a secondWarm page loads, edge-cached

Our part

All of itBrand, product, code, search

Live at

altsounds.tvFree to watch, forever

We designed AltSounds, built it, and keep it running. Brand, product, engine, code, speed, search. All of it, ours.

AltSounds started as a simple, slightly radical idea. Remember when you could turn on a music video channel and just leave it? Then those channels disappeared and music videos got buried in search boxes and grids of thumbnails. AltSounds brings that ritual back: press play once and it keeps going, every video picked by a person, the running order chosen by an engine that learns what you like. We built it from the first sketch to the last line of code, and we still tune it every week. (Up top: Gravity by Bleed Electric, a RIOT film.)

A brand that plays itself

The identity had one job: get out of the way of the video, then be unmistakable when it shows up. The mark is a wireframe triangle, part play button, part prism, drawn as clean geometry so it holds up from a 16-pixel browser tab to a stage screen. On the site it glows in AltSounds lime over near-black; in print and press it goes one colour.

The mark also tells you where you stand. Visitors see it as a wireframe. Create a free account and it fills in, solid lime, in the corner of every screen. A small, quiet welcome: you belong here now.

Eras get colours too. Every decade has its own fixed shade, so 90s grunge always arrives in olive and the 2020s always glow violet, wherever they turn up across the product.

Recipes, our ready-made stations, mix the colours of their ingredients. Every genre and decade in the recipe adds its own colour to the gradient, so you can see what it’s made of before a single video plays.

Do nothing, or do everything

Most products make you choose: sit back, or dig in. AltSounds refuses to choose. The default is zero effort, a stream we call the Flow that keeps the room going for an hour or a whole day. Underneath sits a full control layer we call the Mothership, where you can steer without ever stopping the music: see the artist’s whole story, jump to related videos, step sideways into a genre, or line up exactly what plays next.

Artist

Related

Genre

Mix

Recipes

New Noize

Every click is taken at its word. Play an artist and you get that artist. Pick a song and you get its world. Choose a director and you watch through their eyes; pick a record label and you get its roster. It sounds obvious. It took a lot of careful product design to make it feel that way.

An early version of the autoplay served a perfect run of heavy music, then lurched straight into pop. It didn’t understand what it was playing. So we built a taste engine that does. Every video is scored against its genuine neighbours, with rare genres weighted far more than broad ones, so a match on math rock counts for more than a match on “alternative”, which half the catalogue shares. Play something through and it becomes the seed: the stream drifts naturally from metal into hard rock into alt, instead of snapping.

It learns both ways. Hearts and shares lean the stream towards what you love; hiding a song, an artist or a whole genre steers it away. No ads, and nobody selling your attention.

A different animal on a phone

On a phone, AltSounds behaves like a feed you actually want. A muted video starts the moment you arrive, one tap brings the sound, and from then on it simply keeps going. Phones are designed to stop the next video playing by itself; getting the one after that, and the one after that, to start without a touch was a small war. We won it.

Press play. It plays.

Speed is part of the design. No spinner, no stutter. Warm pages load in under a second from the edge, the player is built to start before the rest of the page has finished thinking, and we keep it that way week after week, including the weeks when unwanted traffic comes knocking. Visitors should only ever see the video, already running.

Homepage

0.17sWarm response from the edge

Artist profile

0.26sDiscography, tours and all

Video page

0.43sPlayer included

Search

100Lighthouse SEO, every page we tested

Built for discovery

A channel nobody can find isn’t a channel. Every artist on AltSounds gets one of the deepest profiles on the open web: discography with the videos attached, tour dates sorted by what’s near you, related artists, influences, headlines, and a decade of the original AltSounds journalism brought back from the archive. Underneath, each profile tells Google the band, its members, every video, the albums, the tour and the FAQ as one connected record, and directors, genres, decades and record labels each get their own clean, crawlable home.

Our design team, for every band

Not every band has a designer, so we lent them ours. The share studio turns any video on AltSounds into a finished, post-ready image in seconds, with the artist, the song and its genres already set. Three formats, four designs (Duotone, Editorial, Tour and News), and a stack of the colours and effects our designers reach for on real campaigns.

Building a web product?

AltSounds showcases everything we do at RIOT in one place: naming the idea, designing the brand, shaping the experience, writing the code, making it fast and making it findable. The whole story is on the AltSounds canon, and the channel itself is live at altsounds.tv. If you have a product that deserves the same care, say hi.

ServicesProduct Design·UX & UI·Web Development·Brand Identity·SEO·Strategy