digital-tunes shopkeepers blog

Autumn sales now on!

will — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:29:00 +0300

Summer’s over for most of us, and the world economy is still down the crapper, but hey we’re still thinking of ya! We thought we’d cheer you all up with our Autumn sales: over 80,000 tracks on sale at only 1 euro a track in the European Union or only 82 cents for rest of the world! So thats 80,000 tracks in mp3, flac or wav at crazy low prices (don't forget on Digital-Tunes its one price for all formats)!

You can browse all sale items at http://www.digital-tunes.net/releases/sale or you can browse the sale items for each genre from the genres menu. Some quick links to popular genres here:

Dubstep sale:

http://www.digital-tunes.net/genres/dubstep_grime/sale

Drum & Bass sale:

http://www.digital-tunes.net/genres/drum_and_bass/sale

Minimal/Tech House sale:

http://www.digital-tunes.net/genres/minimal_tech_house/sal

The sale will last until November 8th 2009 so don’t miss out!

Getting screwed for being the little guy

will — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:59:00 +0300

We've got softly bottom-raped by our credit card provider this month, the lovely Finnish Luottokunta. The great thing about Luottokunta is that the rates are incredibly reasonable, so much so that even if they regularly roger us we will probably stick by them, just because when you are dealing with lots of small payments as we do, its great when there is no minimum transaction fee, like most of the credit card processing companies out there. The problem with Luottokunta is that they are a big lumbering quasi-monopoly (they had a monopoly on credit card processing in Finland until recently) and so sometimes aren't exactly the most agile guys in the world.

Up until now Luottokunta has let us use our own payment form to submit credit card details to their servers, but as of the end of this month we are forced to use their rather crappy html payment form instead. They attribute it to increased security concerns, which is of course a legitimate worry, but we feel a bit hard done by especially as their own form is a bit lacking. The localization for one is a mess, when you land on the page it will be in English if we tell it to be, but then when you go on the the Verified by Visa step it reverts back to Finnish, great for the 90% or so English speaking customers we have. On top of that there is virtually no scope for customisation with our own logo etc, and even getting the order description formatted nicely seems to be impossible. Also redirecting after successful payment doesnt even seem to be automatic, so you have to click the 'Back to merchant' button, jesus how 1980s guys! I can imagine a load of irrate customers who managed to make the payment but didn't manage to click the button :( So that kinda sucks.

We could of course get our payment form PCI certified, but thats gonna cost us an arm and a leg, and we would have to do it annually, and as a small company its way out of our budget, so basically we are screwed for being the little guy. Its kinda ironic actually because as a small company our security is probably better than most lumbering giants that can afford PCI certification: our production servers can only be accessed by one person (me!), from specific IPs, and all sensitive data is encrypted to PCI standards. Ok I understand that they need to be accountable, and even with certified ssl certificates, and proper use of technology, they still need some kind of certification to point to when the shit hits the fan. But it would have been nicer if they could just have reviewed the little stores payments forms once a year for a small fee, I mean its just an html form its not rocket science.

But anyway long story short, when you use your credit card on Digital-Tunes from now on you will be re-directed to Luottokunta's payment form, so apologies for that but at least you can feel safe and cosy in a big lumbering quasi-monopolys bosom.

New player in the works!

will — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:20:00 +0300

Our current "Instant Preview" was designed so you could quickly work your way through tunes you were interested in, without the hassle of clicking and waiting for the clip to load somewhere. I came up with it because when I was a vinyl addict I knew how important it is to quickly get an impression of a tune: lets face it most people are picky motherfuckers (I know I am) and over 90% of what you stumble upon you can decide if you are gonna like it or not after a few seconds of listening. Now in this respect the instant preview player was nice, you could fast as fuck go through all the latest releases. The problem is, when you do hit upon something that sounds like it might be interesting, you have to do some mouse hovering gymnastics in order to listen to the whole clip: if you move the mouse pointer away you'll have to start all over again. This is kind of a pain in the arse, and you can't jump to the middle of the tune.

So for the new player two things were top priority: it has to be fast as fuck, with the absolute minimum of waiting required (if you are on a modem still then you are screwed anyway of course...), and you should be able to skip into any part of the clip you want. With the skipping feature, I thought it would be really nice to be able to visualize the waveform you are listening to. For a lot of electronic styles in particular it's usually pretty easy to spot the "drop": where the intro ends and the main tune kicks in. So with these requirements in mind I set to work on the new player, with a browseable waveform. The current dev version looks like this:

This is a screenshot from a release page, which is pretty much finished. The list views still have to be done, which should take a week or two if I pull my finger out :D The waveforms have been added right into the page, so you can just click on any part you are interested in right away : no waiting for popups to load. Also the player will start playing the following clip automatically, so if you click to listen to the first clip you can go and write an email if you like while the thing plays. The release page has also had a bit of a make-over: the cover art is larger, and the details have been re-arranged so all the geeky metadata is all in one place. Also the Similar releases/ Similar artist / Fans boxes now fit down the right hand side if your screen resolution is 1024 x 768, which last time i looked was pretty much everyone. Haven't quite decided where to stick the banners yet, probably insert it under the breadcrumb trail (home // releases // from_sunflowers_and_papayas )

Digital-Tunes goes on a diet and lets people talk shit

will — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:49:00 +0300

(For those of you politically correct types who don't like a bit of a joke and a giggle, substitute 'crap' below for "beautiful music that doesn't sell"! And don't worry, everything is just great with us, we're just focusing on what we're good at!)

Unlike skanky models, who can both shed pounds and induce reams of crap to stream out of their mouths with just a bit of white powder snorted up the nose, here at Digital-Tunes losing weight and getting people to talk about us involves just a teeny bit more effort.

Our dieting method is pretty extreme: we've decided to surgically remove all the bollocks that either doesn't sell or we don't like. Case in point: Trance. Me and Glenn decided about a year ago to dabble our toes into Trance. Now this wasnt because we fell into a bottomless vat of MDMA which fried our brain into actually liking this crap, we just figured that since our home territory was Finland, home to thousands of trance-heads, we might as well give it a shot. And basically it didn't work out, not surprising really when our big thing is Dubstep and D&B. So now we are dropping Trance and a load of other crap that has been stinking the shelves out, in order to make us as lean and mean as an anorexic teenage crack whore. We are going to focus on what we are good at, proper underground electronic music, music that we know and love even better than our own girlfriends.

And when it comes to talking shit, what better channel for blathering bullshit than Twitter. We decided to make it so easy to tweet about stuff on Digital-Tunes that even your dieing grandma could give it a go. Added to all sections are new Twitter buttons, which take you to Twitter with a handy pre-filled status update. So if you are on a release page and you fancy telling your nerd friends about this dirty new track you found, just click the twitter link and - bobs yer uncle - instant tweet spam! We also re-vamped the FaceFuck "share" button thingy. Now when you share releases from Digital-Tunes on Facebook you'll get a clip for the first tune from the release show up in the feed, so your mates can actually listen to the shit, which probably makes sense when we are trying to flog them some tunes!

Digital-Tunes now with added User-Generated special sauce!

will — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:24:00 +0200

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.

Super Shiny Beta API!!

will — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 23:20:00 +0200

Last summer the idea of getting a nice API knocked up grabbed my attention again after reading Wikinomics, and I realised that if we could get one out fairly quickly we would be the first electronic download store to have such a thing. I scribbled down all the calls I wanted, and a rough outline of the architecture whilst lounging in the sun in northern France, and figured we could probably knock up a beta fairly quickly after summer.

It took a little longer to get around to than I'd hoped, but yesterday we deployed a really nice new API for the store, one that should be really usable. It feels totally the right kind of thing for us to do right now, as it helps us to be even more open and transparent with the community, which is what we are all about. I'm kinda surprised we were the first store of our kind to do this, but I think that just shows how most stores really don't understand what the web is all about.

Anyhow let's have a bit of a play with the API. First of all we need to register an application at http://www.digital-tunes.net/affiliates/new. Then we can use the key generated for us to make calls, it's as simple as that.

So, being a scatalogical fellow, lets try and find some real shit from the store with the following call:

http://api.digital-tunes.net/releases/search/shit%20music?key=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

This finds a suitably pooey release, some dodgy italian rap one of our distributors dumped on us: http://www.digital-tunes.net/releases/rapper_italiano

Im also a fan of animals so lets search for some animal tracks:

http://api.digital-tunes.net/tracks/search/zebra?key=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Aha, Mr Zebra by Men in Slippers, that sounds interesting! Actually a nice little minimal number, sweet !

Anyhow enough of my stupid examples, check out the documentation at http://code.google.com/p/digitaltunesapi/ and have a play!

News section in Alpha / Public profile Beta

will — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:50:00 +0200

Just unfurled the latest update to the store, the major treats in store are the new profile page for users, and the first version of the news section. Perhaps nothing that would give santa a boner (if he can get it up these days), but definitely worth a look in for anyone using the store :D

The news section is up in Alpha stealth mode, currently you won't find any links to it on the public interface, but our chums and labels have been posted the secret urls to get fiddling with. The idea of the news section is to provide a nice and simple way for our users/labels/artists/monkey friends to get the latest news about the music scenes we represent up on the store. So it's a user-generated-content lovefest, as anyone with a Digital-Tunes login can start sending us news for the store. Just like our releases however, we are moderating this to get rid of the spam and other crap. As well as the more obvious release reviews for upcoming reviews, people can post event reviews with embedded YouTube movies, or mix tapes with embedded mp3 mixes, or basically anything as long as we think it will be interesting to our users.

The public profile is a shiny little addition, for example my profile is at http://www.digital-tunes.net/user_profile/william_coates. For those paranoid folk its easy to turn it off, but by default you can see the users basic info as well as their favourite Artists, Labels and the latest purchases made, so it's a nice way to show people what you are into at the moment. In future we hope to add a feature to browse similar users, in a similar manner to eMusic (but much cooler, obviously).

Digital-Tunes ♥ Soundcloud

will — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:27:00 +0200

So finally today after much beavering from ourselves and the groovy chaps from Soundcloud we are pleased to announce that the Soundcloud integration support for our labels is here! To check out what it's all about head over to the Soundcloud blog and check out the super cool screencast they made about it.

What does this mean for all our furry friends out there, why should you get your panties wet about this? Well if you are a label already signed with Digital-Tunes, this means you can choose to upload new releases to Soundcloud first, fart around with them in the cloud, share them with your peers, and then with a few clicks of the mouse in the Digital-Tunes admin system import them into Digital-Tunes (check the screencast for the how-to). This is cool because Soundcloud is great for uploading your tunes, simply and easily, whatever browser, operating system or shoe size you have.

If you aren't already signed up as a label on Digital-Tunes though, its dead easy to get set up online. Then you will be able to pull over your Soundcloud sets and have them for sale on Digital-Tunes, after your release is approved by a moderator. And no, there are no costs involved with signing up to Digital-Tunes, or adding releases to the system, and never will be. So its a pain free way of getting your shit for sale.

Don't forget to check the Soundcloud blog at http://blog.soundcloud.com.

tunecards hitting the streets: part 1

will — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:52:00 +0200

Made some tweaks to our tunecard design, and fingers crossed they should be looking pretty great when they come out of the moo.com robot's arse. Was a bit painful sending out large batches via the API thanks to some serious beta limitations, and the pain was amplified when paying for it all by the buggy and slow poo-monster we know as Paypal. But the first orders are out in the post for the following:

Komodo Dubs night: regular Dubstep party in Montreal , Canada
Listen Up! night: soulful drum&bass party in St Petersberg, Russia
Beatniks night: regular drum&bass parties in Helsinki, Finland
Venom Inc Recordings: free tune inside every vinyl of upcoming release

post ADE

will — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:05:00 +0200

So back home from Amsterdam, and pretty much recovered from all those free drinks, heh heh. Apart from our crack-den hotel room, all in all was a great time, and probably have to do it all over again in years time I reckon!

My panel on the Stimulation of Digital Revenues went well, the room was packed and a couple of interesting points were brought up. The focus however was a bit different from what I was hoping for: Jack the moderator seemed to equate growing revenues with increased commercialisation, which was a bit too "Music 1.0" for my liking. Sure the standard way of growing revenues is to appeal to the mass market, but I was more interested in how we can exploit the long tail, how to grow revenues from niche markets. I really believe that the niche has a long way to go, whereas the "hits" are going to take quite a battering as people are able to access any music they want at the click of the button. At a conference for dance music it also seemed a bit out of place: a lot of dance music genres have never broken into the mainstream, and maybe never will, but this isn't to say there aren't decent revenue streams which can be built around them.

The conference had a really relaxed feel to it, and the numerous bars on every floor also helped. The two venues were really nicely set up with lots of space for meetings, or to chill out with a drink for a few minutes. The only minor gripe was with the wireless internet, which after connecting to required a minutes wait before you could actually browse anything, and with my iPhone was pretty much useless. Could have been a bit faster too. But anyhow a big hello to everyone I met, it's always good to put faces to names.