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

[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.