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

[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.