Since my last update a couple months back, we’ve had some exciting developments that I’d like to share with you.

Bigger Partnerships: As you may have read in the press, we’ve recently  partnered with MTV on a number of interesting initiatives—all involving very cool opportunities for top-ranked artists. Beginning this Fall and continuing into next year, we’ll be expanding this partnership to include even bigger and better opportunities for OurStage artists. Some of the possibilities we’re discussing include using music from top OurStage artists in MTV TV shows, asking top-ranked OurStage artists to play live at major awards shows and other events, running custom channels on OurStage to choose artists participants for artist-focused TV and reality shows and much more. Naturally, after the preliminary logistics are nailed down, we’ll make formal press releases. But the bottom line is we expect to have an even greater number of cool career-altering opportunities for top OurStage artists in the coming year as a result of this partnership.

In addition to the expanded MTV partnership, we are working on 3 other giant/national prospects, all of which will include major radio and/or TV promotion. Look for details in my next update.

We also have updates regarding the site its self…

Site Improvements

We are continually seeking your feedback on ways we can evolve and improve the site to make it easier to use, and to make it the best new-music discovery experience available. As a result, we are releasing a number of cool new features throughout September. Here are just a few:

Cleaner Design – We’ve been striving to develop our brand into the best new music and new artist discovery site on earth, not just a “contest” site. As a result, the new site design focuses more on the music-streaming/discovery aspect of what we do, rather than the contest aspect. Our new layout, page designs and features are all designed to highlight this goal. We hope you like them.

Permanent Player – You may have noticed the new permanent player in the bottom margin of every page, which allows you to continue to surf and explore the site without shutting off the song you are currently listening to. This has been on our to-do list for a while and it’s finally live on the site.

New Profile Pages – In the next few days you will notice a change in your profile pages layout. The set-up will be simplified, the tab structure will be easier to navigate, and the pages will render much more quickly. Also, artists will notice they have the ability to highlight URLs linking to other sites where they may have additional info and profiles. We strongly encourage artists to fill out these URLs for both fans and an expected increase in the number of industry eyes visiting the site. We want to make sure they can easily learn about your music.

More Fan-Centric Activities – Ultimately OurStage is only useful to artists if large volumes of fans are  exposed to their music. We are constantly adding features to attract more fans and then engage with the site on a long term basis. One of these new activities will be competition designed to discover and reward (handsomely) fans who have the “best ears” when judging and picking great artists. We even plan to create a widget so that fans can compete with each other both on OurStage as well as on their favorite social-networking sites. Our hope is that this type of fun, engaging, potentially-viral fan activity will help take OurStage—and expose our artists—to a whole new level.

Facebook Connect and MySpace ID – I’m sure you all know what these are. Integrating with these two industry standards will allow users of these sites to log onto OurStage with their Facebook or MySpace credentials. It will also allow for a certain types of information to be passed back to one’s Facebook or MySpace account to be displayed. We expect these integrations to help artists by limiting the number of times and places that they have to re-enter the same data. And we also hope that fans will be able to share the new music they’ve found on OurStage much more easily with their friends throughout their favorite social networks. Look for this functionality to go live by the end of September.

“Best of the Best” Update

As mentioned in an earlier newsletter, we are continuing to develop a key new feature to the site designed to showcase the very best OurStage Artists. Right now the monthly competitions show top-ranked artists based on that month’s song entry in any one of a few dozen categories. However, there is real value to artists, fans and the industry folk to know which artists are consistently pulling  high ranks on OurStage month after month. This Fall, we will begin tabulating this new type of rank across the four largest genres of music (rock, pop, hip hop and country) twice a year (using 2 six-month seasons). Over time, we hope to start including data from other sources outside of Ourstage as well, and eventually make these artist rankings an industry standard.  Keep this on your radar and look for more on “Best of the Best” in our next newsletter.

That’s the latest update from here. I hope you all find the information flow valuable.
And thanks to all of you who take the time to be part of the OurStage community, and who take the time to support worthy artists everywhere.

Best regards,

Ben