Digital-Tunes now with added User-Generated special sauce! will Feb. 19
The importance of user generated content (UGC) dawned on me a while back when looking at some sales stats from the store. Even though only about 8.6% of all tracks on the store come from labels using our admin interface, and uploading content themselves, they account for about 49% of all items purchased. In other words about half of our sales come from content uploaded directly to the store, even though they represent less than 10% of all the tracks available for purchase. Of course some of the reason is because a couple of distros fling us fairly random crap, that none of our customers will touch with a stick, whereas all content uploaded by our labels is moderated. But nevertheless, this underlines how important it is to to make it easy for labels to get there stuff on the store directly: how important it is to let users (in this case usually labels, or artists) contribute to the store by giving them the right tools to generate content.
After learning this lesson I've been working hard to try and and some more UGC special sauce to the public store, so that also our regular users can have a chance to contribute. This morning with the latest roll out of features we've got a few nice tools for users to use.
First up is the UGC news section. The idea is that anyone on the web can submit a news article to the site, and if we think it's relevant and interesting it will go up (yep there's a moderation process here to weed out the bollocks). Of course as an added bonus the Digital-Tunes staff can also use the system to highlight key releases, launch competitions, and other funky shit. That's the cool thing when you open up your tools to everyone: for pretty much the same effort as coding a system to be used internally to post news to the site, we've got a system that can be used by anyone, including ourselves of course. Our labels also have a nice little tool in the admin system, whereby they can export a release as a news article. This sets up the picture and audio clips for the article automatically, so all the label has to do is write a few paragraphs and they are done (assuming they get past our nazi moderation ha ha!).
Next on the list is our UGC chart section. Our old chart system has been pensioned off in favour of the new system which allows anyone to add charts to the site. Now this aint nothing new, and we've been a bit slow knocking this baby up, but hopefully the bit of AJAX love that went into it makes it a pretty nice experience compared to some of the others out there.
Finally, not a new feature really, but our user profiles now make a bit more sense, now that users can start actually doing shit: creating news, adding charts, smoking crack etc ... We'll be adding a bit more love juice to the profiles in the coming months as well, to take advantage of the new features.
Bit of geek talk now, for those still interested. All the new features understand textile markup, and a little monkey told me that the profiles can also use it, just we forgot to document it as of now ahem. So this means you can do all kinds of crazy markup in your articles and charts, how super groovy. Just dont expect your news article to be accepted if it's in font size 90, all-caps and yellow :P.
So get your self over to digital-tunes.net and do your thang.
Cheers to Duarte from Byclosure for the ninja coding efforts in the new chart section.
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