mobivangelist

Since we’ve come back from our Christmas break, the Boom.fm dev team has been busy. So we’ve just gone live with another update.

This wasn’t a particularly big one in terms of “what users get to see”; it was meant more to set the stage for our upcoming music shop by improving the way artists manage their purchasable music, and squashing bothersome issues.

Some highlights from this release:

• We now extract album art embedded in MP3 files, so if artists upload albums that already contain the album art, they don’t need to explicitly set the album art.
• If artists set or change the album art, the album art will now be embedded in MP3s that are downloaded or purchased.
• Artists can easily replace the existing version of a track with a higher quality file. (This is important, because although files can be uploaded in any quality, tracks that are made available for purchase need to be uploaded with a bitrate of at least 256 kbps.)
• Made it a lot easier for artists to manage the pricing of their albums and tracks. Currently the pricing tiers are in South African Rand (for South African users) and US Dollars (for all other users).
• We’ve removed the “user picks price” purchase option. (Although I really like the idea, we do need to put some more thought into this.) Tracks that were previously set to “user picks price” have been migrated to the R7 / $0.99 pricing tier.
• We’ve improved the music recommendations in radio mode for logged in users quite a bit.
• We’ve increased the length of previews from 30 seconds to 90 seconds, and grab the preview from mid-way through the track instead of right at the beginning.
• We now indicate when a track is only available for preview.
• There’s a little flag in the top-right hand corner where users can set or change their country. (For now, this only impacts which currency is displayed for purchasable tracks, but will later be used for full localisation.)
• Album covers now display like a CD-case insert. (We’ve done this to better highlight the fact that an album is a “unit” of music.)
• We’ve removed the “tracks” tab on dashboard that gave a list of recommended tracks. We felt it didn’t add real value since we’re already recommending artists and make it easy to play their most popular track. Plus, the artist recommendations look way cooler.
• Loads of bug and rendering fixes

Now we’re getting to work on integrating shopping and check-out functionality into Boom.fm. That’ll be coming within the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

With this update done and dusted, I’d strongly advise all artists on the site to give their profiles another whirl and to upload or set their music for sale. The better your artist profile is, the more we can feature it, and the more music you offer for sale and streaming, the more you can sell.

PS: We’re aware of some remaining issues with various Internet Explorer versions. (Sigh. It’s always IE that does things differently, innit?) We’re busy rolling a mini-update to fix those. In the meantime, I can highly recommend using a modern, standards-compliant web browser like Chrome, Firefox or Safari.