Selling songs online and letting bands keep 100%

The average big label band only keeps less than 1% of their cd sales (sometimes a lot less) To me this seems like a problem. We were trying to solve the problem by letting bands sell through stage.fm and keep 80%, but it just didn't seem to be enough. So we have decided to go out on a limb and let bands sell their songs through stage.fm and keep 100% of the cost of the song. The sites advertising revenue can cover the cost of processing credit cards. We also let bands choose the price, (which is good except everyone thinks they are worth more than they are.. hint.. hint...)
Our hope is that this will encourage more people to sell through stage.fm We are also big fans of free music, so we have made it so that only the free music shows up in the charts, so your best bet is to put up a few freebees to draw people in, then you can sell the rest. (Kind of like the radio singles/cd model) Anyway, as far as I know we are the first ones to do this. At the moment we are sell based on a credit system, however we have plans to move to a strait up purchase system like iTunes. (Also did we mention that we don't have drm.. DRM seems to be quickly going the way of the buffalo, and a lot of people buying songs don't want to have their rights limited in such a way.)

Thanks for everyone support
- Ryan

Bug Fixes and Uptime

So I got a lot of emails like the following...

I'm having trouble...
I think there is a bug in...
I can't get my pictures to...
My computer caught fire when I went to....

I am happy to say after a fairly rough launch we have most of the bugs ironed out. Thanks for bearing with us folks. The good news is that now that we have most of the bugs out of the way, we can move on to the good stuff of making new features.

Here's a few things we are working on:

• Tell a Friend feature on band pages
• Import songs and profiles from purevolume
• Uploading Videos again
• Friends options between member profiles
• Better stats (sorry for the let down)
• Eventually forms

One final note is that we had some minor server issues on Saturday. These should all be fixed and things should be running smoothly. Be sure to e-mail us if you still are experiencing bugs. Also we have had a few people say songs don't play in firefox 2.0, but I haven't been able to duplicate this, if anyone else is having this problem let me know.

Thanks,
Ryan

Stage.FM - New Name, Same Great Taste

So, for anyone who doesn't know, Stage.FM is the new name/domain for the service formerly called Audiri. Hopefully the new name should be easier to remember/type. The name, however is not all we changed. Here's a quick list.

• The Look - New and blue, the green needs some work, so be patient, we are still working out the kinks. Expect to see the look continuing to change
• Member Profiles - Now everyone has a page, members can see what other members favorite bands are, and what other members are listening to. It's a great way to discover music, find someone who has similar tastes in music, and then listen to what they listen to.
• Genres/Types of Music - No more hierarky, we now have what is called a tag cloud. Under music, click on a genre. That will take you to a page with songs that rank high in that genre. At the top it will also list related genres.
• Search - We implemented a new search, so expect better results. The new engine has a better ability to match words based on proximinty, so expect a search for "green day" to return things with "green day" first, and things with "green is my favorite color, the other day I went fishing" to come up later.
• Pictures - Every member can upload a picutre
• Status - See when other people are online and what they are listening to
• Player Fixed in Safari and Opera
• Stats - See how often songs get played over time

So we also have a lot of new features coming up once the migration stuff settles down. Here's the rundown:

• Multiple Playlists - (didn't make it into the first relase, but it's close)
• Better stats
  

Also note that the video upload is removed for a few weeks, it should be up pretty soon (seriously)