idiomag

Over the last week or so, we have released a whole load of improvements which have been in development for months. Most of the improvements were suggested or requested by you, and all of them were only built after a testing group of users gave them the thumbs up. I’d like to compare this release to a mullet. Smart at the front, but a real party happening at the back.

Smart at the front:

So, most obviously we have a completely new version of the interface. We’ve transformed every article into a single page spread, with funky new styling and video playlists. The cover page has also been transformed into a “dashboard” so you can get an immediate fix of the articles and videos selected just for you.

To make navigation easier, we’ve added new ways of finding content. Now, as well as idiomag choosing articles based on your taste, you can search through our complete index of articles. In addition, each article has links to external information and other related artists – so you can now explore to your heart’s content!

So we hope you agree that all makes things more usable and engaging.

Party at the back:

Although we love the sexy new interface, the real fun has happened on the back-end. With this release, we have quadrupled our content volume, to around 11,000 articles a month. This includes a whole range of great blogs, and larger partners like Rollingstone.com. So this means you should now get more of the stuff you really like.

And we haven’t just stopped at content quantity, we have (and are continuing to) implement measures to ensure content is ranked by quality, so that we can give you the best we have at any given time. To this end, we have worked hard on our article processing system, to better categorize the articles, especially ones about small independent artists.

Let us know what you think

If you would like to spread the idiomag lurve by writing a blog post or writing an article, you can find the official press release here, and screenshots and other assets here.

Record labels and performance-rights groups have spent the last few years going bezerk about “lost revenue” due to illicit sharing and performance of copyrighted works. They’ve been blaming everyone from P2P networks to Girl Scouts for the steady decline in their profits (which probably has more to do with the ever-growing market for music downloads á la iTunes). It’s funny, then, amidst all these panicking businesspeople, that BMI, one of the USA’s largest performance-rights organisations, has announced a record turnover for the 2008 financial year.

Their press release says they made $901 million this year, and will dispense $786 million in royalties to copyright holders. Imagine that, a global recession looming and your business’ profits only increase 7.2% this year! Time to tighten the belts, maybe?

As I mentioned in the last post, we recently conducted a large-scale user survey (approx 1000 respondents), and the results are proving very interesting. Here are some snippets…

idiomag users are very active on the major social networks

The vast majority of you liked the “page-turn” magazine format.

The proposed new features (search bar, related article links, video playlists etc) were very well received (and as a result they will be released shortly).

It was interesting to find that very few of you use other music news and reviews sites. What was more interesting is that amongst those that do, there are no clear favourites. With the other music site types (social networks, playlist sites, mp3 stores, etc) there were very established leaders, but the “news and reviews” audience seems fragmented across many sites.

Male respondents focused their product suggestions on performance, content volume, and technical issues, whereas female respondents requested interface improvements, better social networks features, and better quality content.

Most interestingly, the data seems to suggest that idiomag has two types of user. The majority of you value the breadth of content, and come to browse idiomag on a (usually) weekly basis to get their music fix about the artists you like and recommendations idiomag has made. And then there is also a smaller, but very active, group of you who use idiomag as a newsfeed. Instead of coming on a regular basis, you value the daily updates and only check in when there is an article about a band in which you are specifically interested. We will obviously bear these two groups in mind as we continue development.

There ya go. Hope you enjoy the new version of idiomag which will be out soonish…

Over the last two weeks you will have likely seen an insert in your idiomag, asking you to complete a survey about our current service and what we can improve. We have had over 1000 responses, with loads of very detailed and interesting suggestions.

We will be sharing the results of the survey over the next week or so, but some interesting trends are already emerging…

The personalised music playlists, our last sizable feature addition, has become a fundamental part of your experience, with almost 60% of you listing it as one of the main reasons why you come to idiomag (news and reviews are still the focus, with 76%).

We are going to revise the frequency of the updates, with many people saying they would prefer a weekly magazine. We aim to put the decision in your hands, so that you can choose how often it updates.

From the responses, it seems that there is no single site where most people read music news and reviews. There are several music listening sites, like last.fm or Project Playlist, which are very popular with our audience, but for news and reviews, it seems that no leading service has emerged. Which is clearly where we fit in…

Also, our proposed new features have received a great response. You can see some of the new features here, and provide your feedback right on the page.

That’s enough for now, but thanks for proving once again that you are a passionate and intelligent section of society. Much appreciated!

We have now launched what has been one of the most-requested features for idiomag - a personalised mp3 player to accompany the magazine. You will now receive a playlist of suggested tracks, based on the selection of articles that you are reading.

Previously, relevant music was targeted to each article, but there were few playback controls. This independent player now allows you to have complete control whilst reading the magazine, with integrated click-to-buy links, and optional intelligent-skip functionality: to fast forward the playlist to the relevant track when the page is turned.

Hope you like it as much as we do. Please let us know how we can improve it - and it goes without saying that we will be increasing coverage of artists and improving the quality of selected tracks over the next month or so.

A month or two ago, I found myself on stage at Oxford’s Carling Academy, giving away an award in the Top of the Ox awards gig. It was a great evening, with 4 support acts, three main acts, and an awards ceremony thrown in. The artists were very diverse, encompassing slightly random, but likeable, electronica, all the way through piano pop, funk rock, and metal. It was also great to see a range of experience on show, with some bands clearly having a very well-worked set, and others (most remarkably, Sarah Warne, who won the competition) having hardly never performed live before! My personal favourites during the evening were Stornaway, Dan Hammersley, and Helium Soul. And everyone seemed to enjoy our idiomag balloons. Or was it just the helium they were enjoying…

Many thanks to the Top of the Ox team for getting us involved. Within idiomag, there are several reviews of bands who competed in the last battle of the bands competition - so in case you haven’t seen them, here are some links:

Sarah Warne
Helium Soul
John Miller
Daniel Hammersley

Just a quick post for now…

We have signed up loads of new contributors over the past week. These include the (self-proclaimed) “world’s premier music publication” - Billboard.com. Well, perhaps we are the “universe’s premier music publication”… ha.