Pony.fm is more than just a place for artists to dump their music for download hosting. It is a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fan site, and as such, poni is baked right into the core design of the site's functionality.

Today, I'll take you through some of Pony.fm's taxonomies. As pony fan music is the only kind of music allowed on Pony.fm, cataloguing and organizing it all for easy retrieval and discovery is a unique and interesting challenge. In a more generic music site like SoundCloud, an open-ended tagging system is often the sanest way to deal with the crazy explosion of genres, styles, and categorizations the world's musicians have created.

But unlike generic music sites, Pony.fm is designed to serve an extremely specific niche of the musical community: brony musicians, and bronies interested in finding pony music to listen to. This opens a unique opportunity to tackle the issue with a curated approach.

Let's begin with the one-stop discovery tool available from every page on Pony.fm, located prominently in the nav bar: the Browse button.

Hovering over the Browse button opens a large flyout menu that gives you, at a glance, a little bit of everything on Pony.fm:

In addition to a few meta links, the flyout gives you instant access to many of the taxonomies on Pony.fm. With a single click, you can reach listings by genre, type of track (more on this in a bit), publication date, popularity, and even a totally random assortment. While this doesn't encompass the full range of data Pony.fm has on every track, it is pretty nice to have available on every page, at all times.

But what if you have something more specific in mind? Or you want to string multiple search criteria together to create your own selection of tunes? That's where the Track Browser comes in...

Feld, the buck were you thinking? Did your 31-hour sleeping schedule lead you to the wrong cider barrel? I can get a search box at YouTube/Google/SoundCloud/[insert random website here]!

This ain't your daddy's search box. As a matter of fact, you can't type anything into it. Honest question time: how often, when searching for new music, do you know exactly what you're looking for, to the point where you know the exact names and artists to query for?

Unless you're some kind of supernatural oracle capable of predicting your own future (in which case, what are you doing here?), probably not very often.

So, how does a search box you cannot type into actually work?

Clicking it drops down a deluxe-size flyout that contains tags for Pony.fm's taxonomies. They are as follows:

Track Types

With the choices of "Original Song", "Official Song Remix", "Fan Song Remix", and "Ponified Song", these choices should be fairly straightforward, but they are nonetheless a powerful taxonomy you simply won't find anywhere outside of a fan site.

Genres

Music comes in all sorts of genres, but brony music can be narrowed down to a few key ones. To make searching as easy as possible for listeners, I've compiled a curated list of brony music genres with the help of my alpha testers (special thanks in particular to Freewave, who has done extensive research on the brony music scene for his site, Brony Musician Directory - go check it out ). Artists can choose one, and only one, genre to represent their song when publishing it. While this was a controversial design choice with a few artists, the consensus was that avoiding...

[2013-03-17 11:41:29 PM] Zoop: Everything from Christian Gangster Rap to Orchestral Deathmetal Bluegrass

...would ultimately be for the better in the long term.

Show Songs

At this time, this one's only relevant to remixes of official show songs. However, if you're looking for show remixes, this taxonomy will probably be one of the best things to ever happen to you. With a complete record of the official show's songs in its database, Pony.fm is able to organize tracks by the songs they are a remix of.

This is but a simple taxonomy right now, but I have future plans for a much larger community feature revolving around the show songs.

By combining these taxonomies, and any future ones I add, my hope is that Pony.fm will become the home of the most powerful pony music search engine on the 'net.

Feel like listening to metal, rock, and house remixes of Winter Wrap Up, Babs Seed, and Becoming Popular?

Done.