I'm a fan of sparse myself. That's not the problem.

The information is poorly organized and lacks a logical makeup. The name of a song is only slightly bigger than the information line, and it's all a single line so right now I'm seeing one artist name broken up into two lines, which is ugly. The list of "trendsetters" list people who haven't made much money, which discourages me if I'm going to sign up.

That gradient is awful - it's both imprecise and bland, and serves no purpose. (With gradients, there's got to be a very specific purpose to including one. If you're doing it just to decorate your background, keeping it tight and not leaking it onto the content is essential.)

The color scheme of "red, white, and gray" doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. That dark red looks poor for links, and it makes it look like link color was selected just to so that the default color couldn't be blue. (I prefer blue links to that bland state of red.) The underline style is just an underline, which is also unexciting. These things are all design choices! With every single aspect of the site you're making you've got a choice to make something that's exciting and appealing, or you can choose to follow status quo, but if you do that's bad design.

When I visit a web site that sells music and the first thing it says to me is "Buy a song, get paid every time it sells again," the message is that I should buy music not for the joy of music but for the sake of making money. That's the big scheme here. From the customer point of view, that's the model, and that's shit. Compare that to Amie Street: "The best place to discover new music." Still not perfect - I have a lot of complaints about Amie Street as well - but at least it sets up the idea that music should be special.

The "Trendsetters" system enforces this. THe best users are the ones who have made the most money from picking popular bands. From the user perspective this makes sense. From the artist perspective, I'm going to tell the person who thought this was a good place for me to sell my pride and joy to shove it. Next to that, the "recent events" showing reveals one users, "lalas1", giving a lot of albums 5 stars and telling them all "i pre oredered your new album! love your music, im a big fan!". My initial reactions are: "That's a silly username," "This person's a mindless groupie," and "This place chooses to highlight spam and senseless communication," all of which are things that turn me away.

The thing that bewilders me is that Popcuts has a good visual point of reference: every album has album art. This has been done before, with Coverflow and with the iTunes store and with the iTunes screensaver on the Mac (which looks gorgeous). When you're asking yourself how to design a music site, you've got three basic elements to choose from: you can try and create a music-driven layout, like Muxtape's (where every line plays a band's song); you can use a graphical approach, which looks inviting; or you can go the text-only approach, which is cluttered and conveys no emotion whatsoever unless you focus hard on typography - dark red helvetica in this case does not appeal to my sensibilities at all.

There's nothing unique on the page. I keep having to skip back over to it because I can't keep the design in mind past one or two critique points. The top bar looks generic. The search bar stands out, but only because it is too small. The fieldsets are used twice a page, which means they're no longer outlining anything interesting and eyecatching and look essentially like tables. The bottom line of links looks essentially the same as every other site. The color scheme is forgettable, there is no grid in place, things don't align.

If I were a musician worth anything at all, and it's my goal to be worth something one day, I would require a web site that respects itself enough to look good. There's a difference between minimalism and bland.

The music must speak for its self eventually... why not immediately?

Because here, the music DOESN'T speak for itself. The web site's design does. It says "I'm ugly and plan, and I'm not organized, and I use a generic free flash player for my music, and the second-biggest number on the page tells people how much money they'll make back after buying my CD. That's the information the site I've chosen to express myself has deemed most important."

There's a difference between a site being ugly and a site getting out of the way. The best site for art is one that you don't notice. Then the music does speak for itself. In this case, the web site speaks first, and it has an irritating voice.