How can we make the site better?

ok my biggest criticism is that this site is fantastic for musicians but not so great yet for fans. to compete with the big dogs i think the fan pages need to be much more customizable and set up so that fans feel like they can make an identity for themselves- otherwise it’ll be just saturated with bands competing for the same small amount of fans. i started a fan page myself- and granted, im no expert, but i can’t really customize the profile to tell anything about me except what’s on the music questionnaire…i like the playlists that you can create and i can’t believe im saying this but, bigger international and national act participation in the site would bring more fans over here. if RN started campaigning for that it could be a good thing. as a fan, if i could make my ultimate playlist, it would include a mixture of major label, indie and unsigned bands. those bigger bands might edge a lot of us out of the top rankings, but myspace manages to keep top lists in categories for unsigned, indie and major label bands so it kind of works out. ok there’s my two cents;-)-xtine

Thanks solare_xtine, We agree with your asessment (been a bit busy building the musician tools). Look for some improvements to the fan experience in the near future. Probably will happen in several steps so we expect some awesome feedback from users like yourself as we go. Thanks for the ideas!

I can’t seem to reorganized my main “Library List” once the songs have been added. Also, I was wondering if it is possible to add songs from artists that don’t have profiles on here yet?

One think I think this site needs, is a tutorial. An area where new users can go, and read about every single feature the site offers, what it does, and how to use it… There’s a lot of guess work here, and I didn’t find the FAQ particulary useful.

One think I think this site needs, is a tutorial. An area where new users can go, and read about every single feature the site offers, what it does, and how to use it… There’s a lot of guess work here, and I didn’t find the FAQ particulary useful.

hi I just got here pretty cool place

Sassy, We are working on a tutorial, and beefing up the FAQs. Thanks for the suggestion. As for your library re-ordering, we currently dont have that, but you can organize your library into playlists. Once the songs are in a playlist, they can be reordered with drag ‘n drop. You cannot add songs from artists not yet on the site (we are a user-generated content site), but we encourage you to tell the artists you want to see here about the site. We’d love to have them signup! Feel free to send them links, etc.

I think an “on line now” indicaters would be cool ! and “last login” would help ,so that messages would’t be sent in vein. How do you feel about these suggestions. THANKS !

i’d like to be able to move my favorites around… or maybe even categorize them by genre or by “favorites” and “new finds” and “to check out later”. not sure how possible that is and probably not priority, but would be sweet as i like to dedicate time checking out new artists and dont always have the time right when first notice them. maybe tag them somehow or leave our own note to self type deal. hmmm… perhaps this is already possible and i havent found out yet :P regardless, i’d be sweet to display my most favorite favorites in my main profile page (kinda like myspace top 8 or whatev.) cheers, rawr.

PAULEON and RAWRLY

Great suggestions from both of you! These will definetley be implemented into the road map of features for further discussion and building. I love ‘em!

Thanks for using the site and throwing these our ways!

I know I’m probably dreaming here but what I think would really make the site take off is adding more fan generated content as far as suggesting bands go. Let fans “tag” songs and artists saying they sound like Radiohead, Coldplay whatever and then make a search option that loads up bands that have been most commonly tagged with those bands. In turn fans should be able to recommend songs to each other and find each other based on similar musical interests in order to make those connections and add a lot more fan community as opposed to band community. See iLike.com for some ideas on this.

This is a great site, but there are a ton of indie music promotion sites out there… what seperates the really popular ones from the rest is having a large music loving fan base even if the features are lacking (see myspace). The band content is awesome so far, now we just need the traffic and by doing the SXSW contest I’m sure you will get a lot… you just have to make sure you have the fan content to keep them here. Just my two cents.

-Tim

P.S. Check out Melochromatic (http://www.reverbnation.com/melochromatic)!</plug>

Melo, Great observations. We agree with you whole heartedly, and have been building some things similar to what you describe. Look for them to be released over the next couple of months. Thanks always for the ideas.

maybe in the forums we could have like subtopics and divide it up by regions or states too. this could help unite local scenes as well as help bands get ideas of where to hit when going to a new area on tour

thehandmedowns!

Great idea. We now have a main forum on the start page for Local/Regional Music Discussion. You may create a subtopic in here of a city or region and find other bands or do what you were describing. Great idea!

wow that was quick. thanks!

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www.reverbnation.com/evoleno

One thing that I’d like to see…....for the “local shows” have an adjustable “distance from” feature. Being in Chicago there’s no chance I’d drive 10 miles for a show, let alone 50, so I would only use the feature if it wasn’t littered with random shows in the suburbs. On the flipside, someone in a more rural area may be glad to go to a show 50 miles away. The ability to customize that, via a dropdown menu or something, would be key.

SKYBOX

Excellent suggestion. A temporary solution for you that is very easy would be using the search function. You can search for shows within any mile specification that you choose from any zip code. Try it out!

Since artists can categorize themselves in three different genres how about allowing us to flag which of our tunes we would like to be the sample for a given genre?

Thanks for the site.

Rick

I’m not really into the Web Buzz feature. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great idea, but it’s not really my thing. I’d really like the ability to turn it off – or, at the very least, have it default to the ‘Artist Blog’ radio button instead of the ‘Web Buzz’ one when clicking on the BLOG/BUZZ tab.

i think when listing a gig there should be a section for who you’ll be playing with

MISTER Z

You can take all of the buzz off and default to your artist blog already. All you have to do is click the Blog/Buzz tab when signed in and then click BLOG PREFERENCES.

ADMIN

TOMMY

Something like this is already in the works, thanks for the suggestion!

ADMIN

I must agree that the fan side of RN could do with improvements, and more fans should be encouraged to join. A suggestion on how to get more fans to join RN would be to only include fans with profiles in the relevance rankings. I am suggesting this as after checking the ratings just now I noticed a band had who had recently joined the site leap-frogged up the listings with almost 100 fans. On checking their profile I found that only 2 of these fans actually had profiles, this prompted me to look at the some of the other profiles, and it seems this is a growing trend among some of the bands on RN. I am a street-teamer for a couple of artists who have worked to create a genuine fan base on RN and have brought quite a few fans to the site, and must admit to being annoyed that bands can shoot up the rankings without actual giving anything back to RN, which incidentally is a great site. If the rankings were based on fans with profiles and excluded fans on e-mail lists then bands would have to encourage their fans to join the RN and would therefore significantly increase fan numbers on the site. Perhaps song plays and site visits should also be given more relevance in the rankings as it seems to be based solely on fan numbers. Just out of interest, on doing a 60km check of my area the artists for which I am a street teamer for are ranked 8th & 9th but only 1 artist above them has more fans with profiles, song plays or site visits. I seems to me that some bands are just using the site as an easy way to message their fans without actually putting anything back into RN