Site Updates From OurStage Ceo, Ben Campbell
posted in: Music News • OurStage Updates
Dear 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