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Newsletter #19 - September, 2016
Happy Working Parents Day – love you mom!
Really exciting news alert.. You’ve been posting in the Music Library for a while now, and visitors and members alike have been able to listen and enjoy your collaborations. But now, you’ll be able to make those tracks available for download to your fans, friends, family, and anyone else who might want to get their hands on your music!
Last week we made the free downloads option live, allowing you to select a Creative Commons license and allow free downloads of your tracks from the Music Library.
In the coming days, we will be launching the paid download options too. That’s right, you will be able to sell and profit from your music directly on ProCollabs!
With paid downloads, you’ll be able to promote your own profile and allow fans to purchase and download music right from your portfolio. Visitors will also be able to browse the Music Library to find and download your tracks.
Even your ‘free’ tracks can be purchased. Buyers will have the option to donate a payment even for a free song that you’ve released under a Creative Commons license. Or pay more for any of the tracks that you have on sale.
We’re certainly stoked about this new feature and hope that everyone will help us to get the word out and to help grow interest amongst music lovers about a great new place to find and download music from independent artists.
That said, and before you ask, the next thing on our agenda will be the redesign of the Music Library so that music can be more easily searched and found.
We’ll be sending out a detailed mail on this very subject in the next couple of days, so keep an eye on your inbox, and do pm us if you have any questions or suggestions about all of this.
In the meantime, to set your songs up to allow for downloading, go to your datasheet publishing settings and choose the 'download' option. You’ll then need to set the appropriate distribution license. Check out the Music Library Publishing, Distribution, and Sales tutorial for more details!
Just a quick note here to let you know that ‘work-for-hire’ projects are now being prominently displayed and promoted in the lounge area at the top of the page.
If you are looking for talent on your project and prefer to pay for work rather than share ownership in your song, then you can start a project and set the work for hire option and let everyone know that you are looking. In the ‘talents needed’ section you can also add specific budgets for each talent listed.
This is a great option for songwriters who want to have their song demos recorded and produced, and who want to retain ownership of the master recording for themselves. Or for production studios and producers who need specific talents for a client project.
This is a new feature on the site and, with your help, we hope to see it grow in the coming months and years that follow.
You can read more about how this all works in the Work for Hire tutorial.
So we’ve tallied up the votes and compiled a list of all the songs that got voted for inclusion on the very first ProCollabs compilation album and we’ll soon be sending out notifications to all the members whose songs are on that list.
Once we get the initial feedback, we’ll then post the final list in the forum for all to see and get to work on distributing your collaborations to online stores such as iTunes and Amazon.
Well done to all who have music published into the Music Library. It was a close call for many, and we wish the compilation album could include all of your songs!
For those of you who have been around for a while, you’ll know that we started running our monthly community challenges last year, our first being for Halloween, which is once again just around the corner. And since introducing the ‘Funds’ feature, challenges have also become a great way for members to earn free keep on the site by winning ProCollabs ‘credits’ which can be used to pay for membership and add-ons on the site.
Sadly though, we’ve decided to put a hold on these challenges for the time being due to a general lack of competitive and team spirit. That being said, if the petition gets big enough, we may consider restarting them at a later time, if and when there is enough interest. In the meantime, you are more than welcome to challenge yourselves!
Many thanks for those who did participate and put in the work. We have some amazing tracks in the Music Library thanks to your efforts.
Given that you will soon be selling your songs to the general public, we figured it was high time that we implement a way to be able to make changes to songs that have been published into the Music Library.
Two new features have been added – the ‘Upload New Mastered Track’ option, and the ‘Edit Metadata’ option. Both can be accessed by the song administrator by going to the datasheet page.
The ‘Upload New Mastered Track’ option will allow you to replace the existing master sound recording file for your song. The purpose of this is to allow you to easily update your song with a better master, if and when you make any improvements. This will be particularly important if you intended to sell or license your songs, as only high-quality wav files will be accepted. This is not a license to fundamentally change anything though! Please read the information on the upload page carefully before uploading a new master.
The ‘Edit Metadata’ section will allow you to make changes to the text that describes your music, such as the description, mood, genre, and lyrics. Again, the purpose is not to change your lyrics, but we have noticed that some projects are being published without lyrics included. So you can add them here. The metadata information on your song will be used for searches in the Music Library.
