Tag Archive for 'Ben Campbell'

Lilith Tour Announces Partnership With OurStage

Published by KB@OS on November 10, 2009 in Contest Announcements, Fine Tunings, In the News, News, OurStage Partners and OurStage Updates. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Lilith Local Talent SearchToday, the Lilith Tour announced a new partnership with OurStage.com, the music discovery destination dedicated to new artist and music discovery. Lilith and OurStage will run the “Lilith Local Talent Search,” an exciting contest to find the next best emerging female musicians across North America.

A winner will be chosen in each North American city that the tour visits. That winner will have the opportunity to perform a full set with other emerging artists on the “Village Stage,” the same stage that featured artists like Christina Aguilera, Nelly Furtado and Tegan and Sara ten years ago. 

“We are thrilled to partner with the such an important and prestigious tour as Lilith and to help deserving female artists earn regional and national exposure,” shares OurStage CEO Ben Campbell. “OurStage is in the business of delivering life-altering opportunities for worthy artists so this is really exciting for OurStage and our whole community.”

Lilith co-founder Terry McBride adds, “We are really excited to be partnering with OurStage.com. It was extremely important to us to choose a partner that was artist friendly, had a strong platform for discovering regional talent, and had the ability to enable the fans to sort through the best music in a scalable and fair manner. Together, we provide an exceptional platform for discovering and promoting the best emerging female artists.”

At this time, 17 North American cities are tapped for the Lilith 2010 tour, with more cities to be announced soon. Artists should only enter the talent search if they live in or near one of the Lilith tour stops. Further details, rules and regulations will be announced at a later date. Interested female musicians should visit www.ourstage.com/go/lilith to enter the contest and create a profile.

Stay tuned for more information, including artist announcements and more cities!

Site Updates From OurStage Ceo, Ben Campbell

Published by KB@OS on November 10, 2009 in OurStage Updates. 0 Comments Tags: , .

bencampbell_03Dear Friends,

As you may have noticed, we recently made a few changes to the site. Thanks to all of the folks who took the time to write in with positive feedback regarding these changes. We appreciate those of you who cared enough to let us know your thoughts, even if you didn’t like some of the changes we made.

Operating a growing website like OurStage poses many challenges, like knowing when it’s time to improve functions and when it’s time to leave things alone. No one likes getting used to one experience and then waking up the next day to find everything has changed — forcing one to relearn how things work all over again. By the same token, we feel obligated to make the experience on our site the best it can be. And so we periodically make changes in an effort to improve the overall music discovery experience. Thank you in advance for bearing with us when we make these changes, and for understanding that we only make take these steps in an effort to improve your experience. If, and when, we miss the mark we really do appreciate users pointing it out to us. We try very hard to listen to our community in order to make the site as valuable as possible for each of you.

One of the new additions coming soon to OurStage is a section called “Best Of.” Unlike our monthly competitions which track fans favorites by genre, “Best Of ” will track those artists who are consistently performing at the top of the charts over a period of time. The analytics that drive the “Best Of ” charts will include how well artists perform on OurStage over an extended period (across a variety of metrics) as well as how much buzz the artists are getting out in the general marketplace on other sites too. Right now we expect to maintain “Best Of ” charts on the big four macro-level genre:  rock, pop, hip hop and country. This means that rather than have “Best Of” rankings for all 30-40 granular genres, we’ll be rolling up all of the artists whose genre roughly fits in one of these four, larger categories and displaying the ranks for each on a regular basis. Important players across the music industry, from a broad variety of sources, advised us that this approach will make it easier for great OurStage artists to get discovered by fans and industry professionals alike.

Another change that we are considering is the concept of a Premium Channel each month. OurStage has been steadily gaining more and more traction in the industry. We are now at a point where many mainstream industry players are working with us. The good news is that this gives us the chance to offer prizes and opportunities well beyond what we’ve been able to historically offer. The bad news is that some of these opportunities are also very expensive for us to offer. In the past, when OurStage has offered great opportunities for top-ranked artists, we’ve been forced to pay substantial fees in order to secure the prizing. As you all know the site has always been free to submit to and free to use. We have never passed these fees onto you. Nothing about this is going to change. However, in the future when we have the opportunity to offer a truly career-altering prize (that costs OurStage significant expense to obtain) we will ask the artists entering into that particular “Premium Channel” to help offset costs with a modest entry fee.

We are well aware that our community, and the music world in general, is very sensitive to asking people to pay for anything. Given the long history of big companies taking advantage of artists and consumers this hesitancy is understandable — which is why we’ve never done it. So before considering this concept we asked you all what you thought. Two months ago we ran a detailed survey of our artist community and we were pleased that fully 73% of you said that you’d be willing to pay a modest entry fee for a competition that had a substantial, potentially career-changing opportunity for the winner, especially if the entry fee was only to be used to offset the cost of operating the competition and/or paying for the prizing. We think this is a positive thing because it effectively means we’ll be working together with our community to uncover and create even better opportunities for top- ranked artists than ever before. Please be on the look out for this “Premium Channel” idea to launch sometime in December or January.

In closing, I’d ask that everyone who has not done so to Opt-In for the OurStage newsletter. We take our communications to and from the community very seriously, and this is one of the best ways to stay abreast of all the cool happenings and potential changes to the site before they happen.

Thanks again to each of you for being part of the democratic revolution in the music industry, and for being part of OurStage. Working together, we really are changing the way the world discovers the best new music and the best new artists.

Warm regards,

Ben

COMMUNITY UPDATES FROM OURSTAGE’S CEO

Published by KB@OS on September 8, 2009 in OurStage Updates. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , .

bencampbell_03Dear Friends and Fans of OurStage,

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

UPDATES FROM OURSTAGE CEO, BEN CAMPBELL

Published by KB@OS on August 5, 2009 in Editorial. 12 Comments Tags: , .

bencampbell_03Dear OurStage Community,

I’d like to start by thanking you all for your continued support and extraordinary passion for OurStage and the forum we provide. Last fall, when the global markets collapsed, we had no idea what the future would hold for us in terms of fan and artist activity on the site. We were all pleased to see that the economic troubles did not adversely effect your enthusiasm for OurStage, as evidenced by a substantial growth in site usage over the past few quarters. This time last year we were getting about 2 million unique visitors per month: now there are over 3.5 million per month. At the same time, we only had about 50,000 artists and 300,000 registered users on the site. We now have over 100,000 artists on the site and over a million registered users. Given the small amount we spend to market the site, this increase tells us one thing loud and clear—more and more folks believe in the forum and the opportunities OurStage is providing and are talking about it to their friends.

However, I’d like to assure everyone that our recent success has not gone to our heads. On the contrary—it has renewed our passion to make the site even better. We appreciate the feedback that you, the community, are giving us every day and we know that there are improvements we need to make. Here are just a few changes that we’re currently working on that you should expect to see rolling out in the coming weeks:

1. The ability for artists to remove songs from their profile.
2. Greater focus, exposure, and awards for fans who carefully judge  and accurately predict the wisdom of the crowd each month.
3. A biannual “Best of the Best” competition that narrows the few hundred quality artists that the fans choose each month down to a Top 10 superstar-caliber few who consistently rank high over multiple months.
4. More partnerships with major industry players who will offer more life-changing opportunities for great OurStage artists, as well as for fans, than ever before.
5. A broader array of music and entertainment on the site with which fans can engage, share, and enjoy.
6. Closer integration with the major social networks so that fans can more easily share media and information between their OurStage pages and their primary social networks on which they hang out.

OurStage is continually evolving into the best NEW-music discovery site in the industry. We know that lots of people still see us as just a contest site: we hope that this view changes as we grow. The competition aspect is key to how we (YOU) pinpoint the best music and best artists from the millions of aspiring musicians out there. This is just the engine in the background, the mechanism— if you will—for filtering greatness. Our ultimate long-term goal  is to be the central platform for the future of new music discovery and for all types of music-centric promotion. So over time there will be less focus on how the sorting takes place and more attention on opportunities and exposure for great artists and dedicated fans alike.

With this in mind, please continue to give us constructive feedback—we really do want to hear from you.  Knowing what our community wants is critical to being able to build the best music discovery site available. At the same time, I’ll also ask for your patience in terms of how quickly we can build or change features. We have 18 employees in total, with only 9 being engineers. Every one of us cares as passionately about music, enhancing the site and improving the industry as much as we know you do. So I ask you to please give everyone the benefit of the doubt when giving us or another artist feedback.

This is a brief update. I’ll try to send news every couple of months in order to keep you all posted on the latest goings-on from inside OurStage. Historically, I know I haven’t been very good at this (its one of the things you all have made me aware of), so I promise to do better.

Thanks again for playing a part in what we hope will become a true global movement that helps shape a better music industry for all.

Best Regards,

Ben