thinking

[ewt]

I wonder what sort of subscription service I could hang off the website.... something for £2-4-ish/month. Possibly access to higher-quality MP3 files? Possibly getting rid of some sort of download limit?

Is this a terrible, doomed idea, or a quite good one?

I don't want to bug everyone to sign up for premium service all the time, because, hey, sucks. I don't want a huge gulf between the free services and the paid-for-services - everything we sell has to be free in some format and should be easily accessible. However, as the site gains popularity, having some kind of subscription service might be an easy way to gain revenue for the artists and make sure our costs are covered.

I need to think about money transfer and how that is going to work, too. PayPal? WorldPay? Something else? Why? If we do something by subscription, will that be the same or can people use a Standing Order if they're in the UK?

Comments

[duncanneko.livejournal.com]

Advert-free service? (a la Pandora (http://www.pandora.com))

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Possibly, but if there are any adverts at all I want them to be fairly unobtrusive text ads, so I'm not sure if people would be willing to pay for that.

[liv]

I would be a lot more likely to pay for unlimited downloads than for higher quality files. On emusic I was willing to pay for the ability to do some social networking, set up a profile that would automatically record what I'd bought previously with my comments and ratings.

Things that would put me off paying:

Constant nagging to upgrade or overly severe limits on a free account

Aggressive advertising for free users

Evil payment methods that force me to give permission to the site (or their payment agency, it's just as bad either way) to help themselves to my money whenever they feel like it

Anything that makes it hard to halt my subscription if I don't want to pay any more

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Useful feedback! Thank you.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Possibly better to concentrate on actually getting a website running before you start worrying about subscription services; it's already a Mammoth Project - best not to risk turning it into an Albatross one....

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Anything that attracts more participants is going to help at this point, and I think the possibility of paying contributing artists even if their stuff is not directly sold is one worth considering.

Also, in designing the site I want to consider as many options as possible. Many times these things are easier to do from the beginning than patch in later, from a programming perspective. So if this is something I'm considering, I want to have a reasonable framework in mind even if it doesn't get used right away.

[reddragdiva]

eMusic charges about £7/month for 40 downloads, and we almost *never* get through the 40 each month. This is for commercial material.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

£7/month seems like a lot to me. Is that 40 song downloads or 40 album downloads or some other unit that I'm not thinking of?

[reddragdiva]

40 tracks. It works out pretty cheap per track, cheap enough that I can buy something just to see what it's like.

I'd suggest you start way lower if you do this. Also, take Arkady's suggestion that you should get the site working at all first.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Would definitely start way lower.

If there's going to be programming to be done I want to be able to do most of it at the beginning. If I'm going to have a subscription service then I basically need some sort of login system, which wouldn't necessarily be needed if I don't ever intend to offer subscriptions. I'm trying to figure out as much of the infrastructure and architecture as I can before starting, because taking things apart and putting them back together is often more work than just building them the right way in the first place.

That said, I'm sure once it gets going it will grow in directions I hadn't anticipated and need to be taken apart and put back together again anyway - but I want to avoid foreseeable cases of this if possible.

[duncanneko.livejournal.com]

Charge for better download speed, perhaps?

What I'd like to see for paying users

[pplfichi.livejournal.com]

No ads (some of us really don't like them =) )

Higher quality mp3 files (but still low enough that it's worth most users getting a lossless version)

A discount on things that you buy OR a set number of things for free (maybe using a credit system if somethings will be considerably more expensive and using a flat number is impossible. Eg £4 a month gives you foo credits, most items cost 1 credit but bar and baz type things cost 3 credits). Or possibly mixing the two, by giving a certain number free and then some sort of discount on anything above that.

The subscription is easy to cancel and predictable in when it takes money from you.

Whatever clever personalisation stuff you can come up with.

With profiles and subscription an option to delete one's profile (within the confines of the law) would be very nice too.

AFAIK systems such as Worldpay, the hold your money for some time (measured in months) before giving it to you to protect themselves. Something to check and consider when you get that far.

I also don't know how true the various horror stories that are around the Internet regarding Paypal are (on the other hand they are a convenient backup source as they are well recognised and deal with a good number of payment methods...)

Project

[(Anonymous)]

Have you thought about contacting Lauri Matiation and your other horn teacher or Tom Staples in Lethbridge, once you have a more formal plan? It is probably a good idea to have a time-line; do you know a project manager who could help with the overall organization of the project and your ideas.
Mum

[qadira.livejournal.com]

short on time today so haven't read any other comments. perhaps a paid subscription could include "x" number of printed-on-nice-paper score/actual CDs a month.

(as a matter of personal preferences, I like the pay-per-item services better, rather than the ones that have a monthly subscription fee. If you go with the monthly fee, it would be worth considering to allow someone's unused credits from each month roll over to the following months. The lack of that roll-over feature is why I don't subscribe to emusic.com )

Husband was asking me how your project is different from the existing creative commons site; and I attempted to explain to a computer guy how your project is for *musicians* and not in general the end *music-consumer*. At least, that's how I am understanding Mammoth Project? That it's a resource for musicians to be able to swap beyond the usual more limited boundaries?

Anyhow, nothing was ever built without someone trying; and even if it doesn't do very well, it doesn't change the fact that you need to do a project for your coursework. But, having been a musician at one time myself, and knowing many musicians, I think you've hit on something that is doable. I would have *killed* for a site like what you're brainstorming, but in 1989 people still had very limited internet options, and it wasn't anything like it is today.

From my waaaaay outside perspective, it looks like you're getting loads and loads of the brainstorming phase/input-feedback done, which is good. More than good. Funding type phases take more physical running-about to accomplish, but it's this first stage of dream-analysis-PLN that is imho the freakin' nightmare part.

[ewtikins.livejournal.com]

Existing creative commons site provides a sample legal framework and appropriate documents, but doesn't really provide one place for people to distribute their music and listen to music. It links to some CC projects but not all of them. For many musicians, maintaining a website with their current work is a bit much, and even for those who do this easily, just having a website doesn't really get your name out there or get people listening to your music.

Credit rollover is a very good point and I will think about how this might be implemented.

[nslm.livejournal.com]

The simple thing is to look at it this way, what you're going to have to charge for is what is going to cost you money... Bandwidth, diskspace and hardcopy.

Hardcopy is alway going to cost money, but maybe you use the preminum service as a garauntee of income so lower the hardcopy cost for premium customers.

Erms and I can provide a certain amount of bandwidth and diskspace, because we're already paying for a base line and not using all of it. A premium ad-free version of the site sounds a nice way to cover the bandwidth costs, possibly with hardcopy thrown in for good measure... I don't quite know how much bandwidth you're likely to need, but I will be able to measure usage. I can get ~£7 per month for 1Mbit/sec, ~160G of downloads per month, and 10Gig of diskspace, I can easily add more to this if required. I don't know Erm's costs. Oh and a org/com domain will cost just under £10 per year.

As for payment, I would strongly advise against something like standing orders, it exposes account details which should be kept safe. Outsource it to someone who knows what they're doing like paypal, only consider something more complex like direct cc payments once you are established.